Bob Abbott, CQE

Bob is a quality management systems consultant, auditor and trainer, and a writer and speaker on management systems and auditing. He has audited and consulted in the USA, Canada, Mexico, United Kingdom, Turkey and Japan. He has been in private practice since retiring in 1995 from GE, where he was a quality manager in GE’s lighting, aerospace, and consumer products businesses. He is an active QMS accreditation assessor for the ANSI-ASQ National Accreditation Board (ANAB), conducting witness audits of registrars of ISO 9001 and AS 9100 quality management systems. He is certified by RAB-QSA as a QMS Lead Auditor.

Bob was elected a Fellow of the American Society for Quality in 1981, and is certified by ASQ as a quality engineer. He has recently served on the ASQ Society Examining Committee that reviews and approves nominees for Fellow status, and he is currently serving on the Freund-Marquardt Standards Medal committee. Bob served on the staff of the American Society for Quality Control, ASQ’s predecessor, from 1973 to 1981 as the Society’s first Director of Technical Services. In that role he coordinated technical activities and standards development with Society divisions and technical committees. Bob is a member and founding secretary of ANSI Accredited Standards Committee Z-1 on Quality Management and Assurance and a member of the U.S. Technical Advisory Group to ISO Technical Committee 176 on Quality Management, the developers and custodians of the ISO 9000 series standards.

Bob holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Engineering Administration from Case Institute of Technology, where he majored in statistics and quality control. He has presented numerous talks to ASQ and other professional societies and technical conferences on quality management and auditing and has had several articles published on those topics. He frequently teaches courses on understanding the ISO quality standards, internal auditing, corrective and preventive action, and root cause analysis.