May 2010 Ongoing Discussion Announcement, with Ian Bradbury

Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne's Enterprise Thinking Network welcomes (pictured below) to lead our fifth Ongoing Discussion of 2010 on May 25th and 26th (and our 125th session since we began in 2000).

For his Thought Piece, Ian has selected the topic of his recent presentation at last week's U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) "Partnering With Industry" conference in Bethesda, Maryland, which was jointly sponsored by the University of Rhode Island's College of Pharmacy. Link here for an article on the event, in a conference that addressed the ever timely issue of "Quality by Design." Appropriatley, Ian's presentation was titled "Design and Control of Quality." His presentation, including speaking notes, is also the title for his Thought Piece, which can be downloaded at

this link.

Please join your Ongoing Discussion colleagues from across the country and around the world for refreshing look at a comparison between "Quality Assurance" guided by the traditional (goal post thinking) "conformance to requirements" and that guided by Genichi Taguchi's (continuum thinking) "Quality Loss Function". In a presentation that began with "there are two types of people in the world (per Peter Scholtes)," Ian's presentation was designed to show the stark contrast between the prevailing view points on Quality Control, as guided by the contextual-free standards of acceptance sampling and the "Process Quality" proposal of Dr. Deming, including the role of taking action on the cause system with contextual awareness. Ian's presentation provides an invaluable reminder for the original use of "control" in the naming of the American Society for Quality Control.

As noted by Ian, "The aim of the conference was to share knowledge in the area of Process Analytical Technology (PAT)." He added,

"The FDA had been trying to encourage the pharmaceutical industry to improve quality assurance by PAT (methods to improve process capability) as well as QbD (Quality by Design). The audience was a mix of FDA personnel, people from the pharmaceutical industry and some technology suppliers.....It is clear that a lot of Deming's ideas were in the thinking of folks at FDA involved in developing some of the related standards and guidance. "FDA-Partnering with Industry" is one of the phrases used to market the conference."

Biographical information

Ian is currently President & CEO of Peaker Services Incorporated, an employee owned company providing unique prime mover and control system solutions through remanufacture, field service, distribution and system integration to industrial customers. Ian acted as trustee for a leveraged transaction establishing the ESOP in 1999.

He was previously Senior Statistician for Product Engineering in General Motors Powertrain Group, where he jointly led the Powertrain Statistical Network. Prior to that, he was an Assistant Professor of Statistics at Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan and visiting Assistant Professor of Statistics at the University of Texas, Dallas. Ian accompanied Dr. W. Edwards Deming on many consulting visits to General Motors and has attended, co-facilitated or facilitated numerous Deming 4-day seminars. He is an active member of the W. Edwards Deming Institute and serves currently on its Advisory Board. He has served as Vice President of the Board of Directors for the Indiana Quality and Productivity Improvement Council and on the Advisory Boards for Kettering University's Department of Mathematical Sciences and Michigan Technological University's Applied
Mathematics Department.

Ian has a B.Sc. in Mathematics from the University of East Anglia, Norwich, England, an MBA from The University of Michigan and a Ph.D. in Statistics from The University of Birmingham, Birmingham, England. He has been admitted to the status of Chartered Statistician with the Royal Statistical Society.

Contact Ian by e-mail at isb@peaker.com with any questions you would like to share with him in preparation for his OD session with us.