Name: Bruce Kratz
Title: VP Research & Development
What bought you to Sparta Systems?
I believe Sparta is in a very unique point in its history. Sparta is no start-up, having been in business for almost 20 years now. However, a new wave of investors and leaders are challenging the company to invent new ways to help our customers solve problems. I believe technology will have a huge impact on the future success of the company and I wanted to be a part of it! I saw a great opportunity to contribute my expertise to the existing team, and together have a significant impact on the company’s success as well as the future direction of the EQMS space.
What is the biggest problem enterprises face with quality management?
At some companies, quality management systems evolve out of pure necessity and are driven departmentally. In many cases these are not systems at all, but a series of manual steps, spreadsheet exchanges and other homegrown data stores. As these individual businesses and processes grow, it becomes an in-efficient and expensive part of business operations.
An Enterprise Quality Management System can help standardize and automate these processes across an organization. This leads to lower costs, higher efficiency and ultimately higher quality for a company’s products.
How do you see the quality management industry advancing in the next 2-5 years?
1. Expansion to non-regulated industries: With the aid of technology from leaders such as Sparta, the cost of producing high quality products will continue to drop. As this happens, the use of quality management systems will expand to include many non-regulated industries that want to benefit from a structured approach to quality.
2. Continued advances in efficiency: Companies like Sparta have a great opportunity to continue to lower the total cost of quality. With advances in technology we can ensure that quality processes are executed in the most efficient way possible. This might be accomplished by careful usability studies of how work is accomplished in order to improve the flow of data. I also expect that efficiencies that people have come to enjoy in their personal lives via their mobile devices will be applied to every business application, and enterprise quality management systems will be no exception. Lastly, there is an entire “ecosystem” of disconnected suppliers that need an efficient way to exchange quality data. I believe technology will drive the development of a quality exchange network enabling these suppliers to start automating the exchange of data.
3. Increase the value of data: While executing a quality process, companies collect a lot of data. I expect that with advances in analytics we will find interesting new ways to use that data to influence business decisions, thus extending the usefulness of the data. Companies that embrace predictive analytics and make use of Big Data feeds across their company will develop a competitive advantage over those that collect data and store it simply for regulatory compliance.
Find me: LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/brucekratz Twitter: @BruceKratz
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