Dedicated to Championing Quality in the St. Louis Bi-State Region

Message from the Section Chair

ASQ Members,
I feel very honored to be the next St. Louis Section Chair. Thank you for letting me serve. I look forward to making it a productive year with the skills and talents of our experienced and dynamic leadership team. We have received many new ideas for topics, venues, meeting partnerships, communication needs, and educational opportunities thanks to your voice at our December Quality Vision Quest (QVQ) meeting. We captured hundreds of ideas and have implemented many of them already. We look forward to another QVQ event this December and are excited to hear more of your needs and wants for the offerings of this Section.

I want to personally thank John O’Reilly for his phenomenal leadership in his Chair role this past year. It was a pleasure to work with him and he did a tremendous job driving excellence within our chapter for our members this past year as many of our metrics show.

It has been a great experience working with and learning from him. I look forward to continue this relationship in his past-chair support role. Thank you John!!!

This past year we had record attendance at our meetings, excellent speakers, higher levels of certifications, a spring conference, and much higher attendance at our refresher courses to prepare you for the certification exams. Data shows that your pass rate increases significantly when you take these courses. This is great news for Quality professionals as certifications are in hot demand in all industries and command higher pay with increased number of certifications.

ASQ has changed our fiscal year to start in January versus July. Therefore, they have extended the chair responsibilities to last 18 months to cover the additional six months and this term will last from July, 2011 through December, 2012. We want to make sure we are providing your top interests to enhance your career development and education. To ensure we do that, we will use the aforementioned QVQ results and we will be asking for any additional areas you have when we see each other at the monthly membership meetings. This is all about providing you with the best ASQ has to offer.

We have many great speakers and events lined up for the rest of 2011 and for 2012. We have topics on advanced quality tools and systems, innovation, strategic planning, top leadership tools and practices, and many more with many accomplished and well-known speakers. We hope you enjoy our topics, venues, and events and want to hear your other areas of interests as well. Please let us know your ideas for more activities at any of our events. We love hearing from you!

We strive for excellence in our section and are thankful for our members to help us do that. At this year’s ASQ World Conference in Pittsburgh, we were given a Silver Excellence award and Total Quality status for our section accomplishments for 2009-2010. Last year we received a Bronze award. Next year, we’d like to make Gold for you. We are very proud of these accomplishments because it means we are serving our members in many exceptional ways.

Kim Rochetti
2011-2012, Chair, ASQ-St. Louis Section