I have just returned from the World Conference on Quality and Improvement held in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The weekend before is the Community Leadership summit in which the volunteer community leaders meet to network, receive awards and learn about new programs. Also I learned about new policies and procedures which are rolled out for the new fiscal year to pass on to the next year’s team. I am proud to say that I was active during this current year as a member of the Section Affairs Council’s (SAC) Policy and Procedure team. I received the Certificate of Appreciation from the current SAC Chair David Levy who is the Region 3 Director as well as one of the elected members of the Board of Directors of ASQ for this year. During this awards ceremony I joined the rest of Region 1 Section Leaders who were there to accept their awards for Total Quality and various levels of Excellence. As I have mention prior we did achieve both Total Quality and Gold level of Excellence for last year. I was very surprised at receiving the Certificate of Appreciation from SAC and from David Levy personally. There are pictures on the Share Point site for member leaders and I have to purchase copies to post on our website. As your Section Chair I was selected to join the ASQ Quality Progress Magazine Focus Group. This was chaired by Ms. Seiche Sanders, Editor of Quality Progress for ASQ. We discussed many items of interest and we will soon see some changes that we as a team came up with. Also during the Community Leadership summit it was discussed that our Region 1 Director, Roger Keller will be stepping down after he was reelected to his third term as our Regional Director as of July 1, 2009. As we have had our election, Roger Keller’s replacement will be picked by David Levy the current SAC Chair sometime before July 1st. The current Deputy Regional Directors are all on the short list for Roger’s replacement are Regional Director, of which I am one. More on this as we get word from the current Nominating Chair and Vice Chair of SAC, Belinda Chavez, Region 14’s Director.

       Our speaker for the month of June will be someone from Sysco Food Systems and they will be talking about food safety which was also mentioned in this month’s Quality Progress. More on this as I gather information from my contacts at Sysco. Also this is our last meeting for this fiscal year which means it is time for our Annual Recognition Awards. The Awards Committee will be meeting and making their choice known soon.

      Another project I am working on is another joint event with the North East Quality Council [NEQC] on a one day seminar on the subject of Lean Six Sigma for Insurance and Service industries. Service industries are defined for this event as any company that services customers. We are using a broad brush approach while we work on putting this project together.   This will be held in the month of September. Right now NEQC is also having its annual Section leadership training event on the 18th of September. This is a no charge event that you can earn .8 RU’s towards recertification. If you have an interest in joining our section’s Executive Committee, it is recommended that you attend this event.
I will be attending this event and I have already signed up for it. All you have to do go to www.neqc.org and follow the links to sign up. If you have any issues please let me know and I will get you signed up.

 Enjoy the great spring weather,
Bob Dembkoski ASQ-CQA, CQIA
ASQ Hartford Section Chair 2007/2009
ASQ Deputy Regional Director 2008/2009