Intel’s Quality Point of View: Quality matters!

[Mohsen_Alavi]

Welcome to our new Quality Matters blog series, where we will share Intel’s point of view on a wide range of quality topics from foundational to technical.

We recently celebrated World Quality Day here at Intel -- and reflected on how technology has become essential in our lives, especially this year.   As the world builds increasingly interconnected systems for mission critical purposes, that computing needs to be safe, secure and reliable.  Quality matters more than ever!

In my role as general manager of quality at Intel, I lead the organization responding to today’s quality issues and preparing for the challenges of tomorrow.  As we advance our quality capabilities for the future, we will share best practices and what we are learning in this blog.

Today I want to start with the basics - quality as a fundamental value, quality as a management system for organizational learning, and quality as earning customers’ trust with great products and services.

Quality as a Value

Quality can be viewed and defined at many levels.  At the broadest, quality is a value, like integrity and honesty.  Valuing quality means believing in -- and choosing to act in -- a manner that delivers outcomes that our customers and partners can rely on.  Acting with a quality mindset builds trust.  Quality has a long history as one of Intel’s core values.  Supporting a quality culture and promoting a quality mindset are the most effective ways to improve quality at the source, because each person can ensure the quality of their own work faster and at lower cost than anyone else.

Quality in the way we work

Quality is also how we work and how we learn.  A Quality Management System (QMS) is more than just policies and processes for developing products to meet customer requirements.  In fact, it is the totality of an organization’s operations that deliver a quality experience to customers and stakeholders.  Organizations with a robust QMS use closed loop learning to accelerate their ability to succeed in a changing world.  This year, we strengthened our quality policy to widen the aperture on the quality of the customer experience.  As we build today’s data-centric world together, we must accelerate our learning.

Quality outcomes

Most concretely, quality is about products and services.  This is what ultimately earns customers’ trust.  As technology advances, it enables amazing experiences.  With new and complex usages come new quality challenges.

At Intel, we are upping our game to be ready for what is next.  The future of what is mission critical for quality depends on the industry, the customer, the mission profile and the technology.  For cloud service providers, data integrity and uptime in a 24x7 world are essential. For PCs it is about reducing post launch updates and stellar reliability to reduce warranty costs.  For edge devices, lifetime and programmability.  For many AI customers, ease of training and integration.  In everything, safety, security and privacy are essential.

This year we added new product quality measures to capture key parameters for our customers’ emerging needs.  We have also increased the velocity of feedback loops with our suppliers and customers to more quickly learn and resolve problems.

In the future, computing will continue to be used in increasingly innovative ways and quality will matter more than ever.  This is why every day we drive these quality fundamentals with an obsession to earn our customers’ trust with great products and services.  We look forward to sharing deeper insights in future blogs.

As a Quality Leader, it’s an exciting time to be part of Intel.