Award

Recognition Awards (General Assembly 2022)

By J.P. Amiel, ASQ Senior, CQA ret., Web committee Chair

Had you attended our General Assembly this past October 26, 2022, you would have had the opportunity to finally congratulate the 2021 ASQ Canada Conference committee led by Chantale Simard. An ASQ Member Leader Excellence Award was given by Puneet Manchada, our Regional Director last year for the committee’s work but because of the Covid pandemic, the actual physical award was only made available recently. We were finally able to do the group photo of the team with the award.

In the picture on the left, the team was composed of Sam Weissfelner, Veronica Marquez, CSSBB, Marcel A. Charbonneau, Eric Hosking, David Tozer, Chantale Simard, Jean-Pierre Amiel, ASQ Senior and CQA ret. and absent from the souvenir photo, Mauricio Figueroa, Ruth Stanley, MPA (Ottawa Section) and Michel Guenette (Hamilton Section).

Congratulations to the team for all the hard work to make this bilingual event a success.

In a similar fashion, there was a delay in giving a physical award to Veronica Marquez, CSSBB for all her work in bringing the Montreal Section into the realm of social media. In the souvenir photo at right, Veronica (left) receives the Award from Chantale Simard, Montreal Section Chair 2020 (right).

Amongst those efforts, as our Social Media Chair, Veronica launched our own Twitter account, helped set-up and manage our ASQ Montreal Quality Network – Réseau Qualité ASQ Montréal and ASQ Montreal Student Outreach LinkedIn accounts, as well as an Evenbrite account to promote and advertise our activities as well as to register participants to our various events.

Thank-you Veronica for having challenged us.

2022 Prix Denis Pronovost (Award)

Marcel Charbonneau, T.P., ASQ CQA, led the Montreal Section project to create a $500 award in honor of Denis Pronovost, who passed away in June 2015. Through his outstanding contribution to the association, his leadership and his involvement, Denis greatly participated in the promotion of quality in French in Quebec and was a frequent guest and speaker at the Section.

Denis had a career of more than thirty years of work experience mainly in teaching and consulting in the field of management, quality assurance and audits. In 1990, with Pierre Caillibot, he founded Academia Qualitas in Quebec, where they developed courses and trained quality professionals in the manufacturing, service and laboratory sectors. Denis was a member of the Canadian Advisory Committee to ISO/TC 176, particularly active in the Terminology Working Group,the Interpretations Working Group and the joint CAC/ISO/TC 176/CAC/ISO TC 207 Working Group on Auditing and the Future of the ISO 19011 Audit Standard. He was also a lead auditor of quality management systems (QMS) certified by the Registrar Accreditation Board (RAB) and a senior member of the American Society for Quality (ASQ). Denis was an active member and Chair of the ASQ Montreal Francophone Section from 2012-14.

Denis was a speaker and instructor in North America, Central America, Europe and Asia. On more than five occasions, he came to the Montreal Section to present the evolution of the ISO 9000 and ISO 14000 standards. In 2000, he authored Internal Quality Auditing, a guide to conducting more effective internal audits, published by ASQ.

(Photo : Partick Barnes and Marcel Charbonneau)

On June 8th, 2022, Marcel presented the award to Patrick Barnes, a student at the Certificat en gestion et assurance de la qualité de l’École de technologie supérieure (Management and Quality Assurance Certificate) of the École de technologie supérieure, a multidisciplinary program that provides training or development in management and quality assurance. Patrick will present a summary of his quality improvement project at the ETS.

Congratulations to Patrick !!

ASQ Montreal Achievement Awards

By Eric Hosking, Section Treasurer, Membership Chair, CQA, CQE, CSSBB

In January of last year we were pleased to acknowledge two of our leadership teams members, Jean-Pierre Amiel and Raymond Dyer for their extraordinary contributions in 2020. As much as we wanted to acknowledge the achievements of the year just gone by, we could not present the ASQ achievement award trophies because COVID restrictions prevented us from getting together for a ceremony. So this was done in a virtual format, preceding our regular monthly Webinar event. In that virtual world we could only show an image of the award trophy each of them had earned.

We also had to admit that we did not even have the trophies. ASQ headquarters staff had no access to the storage area that the trophies were kept in. They were restricted to working from home. The trophies did not become available until late summer in 2021.

As COVID restrictions eased through the late summer and fall, we planned an event for late November where we would finally be able to do justice and, in a second presentation of the award, actually hand over the trophies. This too was not to be: Omicron reared its ugly head and other personal emergencies arose that prevented our awardees from attending the event.

I ultimately decided that the awards would be put in the rightful hands, COVID and other events notwithstanding. So I made home deliveries as you can see in the photos.

The award to Ray is in recognition of all the things he did in 2020 to keep us going. In particular, the things he did to keep our monthly speaker program going with very severe COVID restrictions in place, while we were driving to make our presence fully bilingual. You all should recognize Ray as the voice and face of our monthly webinar series. He also collaborated with other ASQ Canada Sections to form a Webex training group to support ASQ Canada’s virtual needs, and he contributed to the Canada Conference hosted by Toronto in 2020. This is outside other contributions in his role as Section Secretary and as member of our Student Outreach Committee.

In 2020, J.P. took on the challenge of getting us functioning in not one, but two myASQ sites, making us the only ASQ section to have sites in two languages. He also updated our historical website to give it a more modern look. He joined the Webex training group, he contributed to the Canada Conference hosted by Toronto and he was the master control behind our webinars as we converted to the COVID imposed virtual world. This does not come close to describing all the other things he did as well.

Congratulations again to Ray and JP.
These are very well deserved awards.

(2021-12-14)

ASQ Member Leader Excellence Award

By Jean-Pierre Amiel, ASQ Senior, CQA Retired

At the General Assembly, Chantale Simard, ASQ Montreal Section Chair presented an ASQ Member Leader Excellence Award to Veronica Marquez, cssbb.
Over the past years Veronica has done some outstanding contributions as Social Media chair and to the evolution of the Student Outreach committee, the Program committee, to the Canada Quality Conference and to the ASQ Region Webinars, just to mention a few examples!
The whole team applauded Veronica for all her hard work. CONGRATULATIONS!

Also on behalf of Puneet Manchada, our Regional Director who was absent, Chantale presented the Montreal Section an ASQ Member Leader Excellence Award for their realization of the 2021 ASQ Canada Conference.

(2021-11-09)

Eric Stern Award 2020 – Winner

A tribute to Eric Stern, well remembered ASQ Montreal Section Leader and Concordia Alumni

By Dr. Farnoosh Naderkhani, ASQ Member, Assistant Professor, Concordia University,
Student Outreach Committee ChairWithout a doubt, the COVID-19 pandemic has abruptly changed the world as we knew it, at the beginning of the 2nd decade of the 21st century. On the bright side, we all have learned to continue learning, working, and socializing in a virtual environment. I wish all students a healthy, productive and prosperous 2021.

It is my great pleasure to announce that Mr. Kamyar Azar is the recipient of the ASQ Montreal Section’s 2020 Eric Stern Award. Mr. Azar is currently a full time Masters student, studying Quality System Engineering at the Concordia Institute for Information System Engineering (CIISE), Concordia University.

In summary, the intellectual merit of Kamyar’s work is in the development of advanced Machine Learning-based models (ML), coupled with Quality Control techniques to perform high accuracy predictions in the Healthcare industry. Nowadays, significant technological advancements have resulted in the availability of large multi-modal, complex and high-dimensional datasets within the Healthcare domain.

Due to the complexity of such datasets, using dimension reduction techniques is more important than ever before to increase the training speed and to provide better interpretations. In this regard, a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) control chart, a well-known quality control technique for data dimensionality reduction, is applied to analyze the Breast Cancer Wisconsin (Diagnostic) imaging dataset. Finally, multiple classification models are “trained” to predict a tumor’s malignancy. In addition to significant theoretical and technological implications of such projects, like Healthcare being a key driver of Canada’s economy, advancements in this line of research can have a significant impact on our Healthcare industry.

Congratulations Kamyar for your work. Great job.