Michelle: In your perspective as an ASQ fellow and long-time quality veteran and training instructor, I'm sure you've come across many different quality professionals. Is there any kind of overall theme you've seen that seems to be on the minds of quality professionals today?

Dilip: Well, one thing is there's always a change. And probably having gone through almost three generations of folks coming into quality, you see how uh the mindsets change, the perspective of quality with what it used to be traditionally 40-plus years ago versus what it is now.

And the biggest changes—when I started, quality was perceived as, basically, a manufacturing-oriented job. But it has come such a long way, where we now associate quality with everything, the services industry, besides manufacturing. And again, just within the US, we've gone through a transformation because we've kind of become more and more a service-based economy and we don't do as much manufacturing, although there is still a lot of manufacturing. This is where I am sometimes concerned about are we putting too much emphasis on quality as just a service-based task or should it be also manufacturing, which I think is very important as well.

So those are the changes you see. And it's always going to evolve like anything else, any profession, they have to evolve. Because if you don't evolve, then it's also that somewhere down, you're going to just become extinct.

Michelle: So, does it seem like people working in quality in manufacturing, are there certain common problems or challenges people talk about there?

Dilip: So, on the manufacturing side, I think what used to be traditional quality control, meaning you somehow magically put quality after you manufacture the product, that was the start a lot of times. And it was never true, but that's how it was viewed. And I remember in my early years, I worked with an organization that was primary manufacturing products. And when it came to my area, they thought I would magically make things right.

And I had to do that mindset change and say, no, it's at every state and quality starts right at the inception of an idea of a product. And it goes through the research and development, engineering, manufacture. And so that was one of the challenges always. And I think to a degree, it's always a challenge even now because whatever manufacturing, whether we do it in the United States or any other country, not everything is made at the site. Everything is kind of brought in from all over the world because we are a global economy. And then we have to put it together.

So sometimes it's more assembly, maybe part manufacturing too, and so. That makes it even more difficult because now you don't have that control you had. And if everybody didn't think the same way and followed the same practices and so on, then when you assemble a product, the product is not going to be correct. So those are like the changes and challenges I see now where we have become a global economy.

A lot of times we don't like it, politicians will say otherwise, but it is a fact and we have to deal with it. And it's not a matter of whether we like it or not. We have to deal with the challenges. And as a quality professional, that's always the case where a quality professional really has to be able to deal with those challenges.

I think of a quality professional as a diplomat in a way because you're going to deal with all the different disciplines. The R &D folks who design the product, the manufacturing folks, the engineering folks, and the assembly folks, and the final test and inspection folks.

And there's so many skills, just the numbers, statistics side, and then, of course the people side and diplomacy and all that. Yeah. That's important. And the other thing is the language of quality because you're dealing with not only different languages across the global landscape, but the, like you say, language of statistics, the language of inspection, the language of manufacturing.

And you have to be proficient in all of those as a quality professional. And I think that's very important because communication skills now become much (more) varied than just the verbal or written skills that we have, grown accustomed to, like saying, you must be proficient in verbal and communication skills, but it's much more than that.