Monthly Archives: November 2025

Volunteering at Food Bank of CENC

Volunteering at Food Bank — November 2025

Event, Volunteering

 Proud Moment for the ASQ Raleigh Section

We are thrilled to share a powerful example of what happens when quality professionals come together to serve their communities.

On Saturday, November 8, a few dedicated ASQ members rolled up their sleeves to package canned food donations for shipment to distribution centers across the region. Our efforts at the Food Bank of Central & Eastern NC contributed to packaging an incredible 48,000 pounds of food — enough to provide 40,000 meals to individuals and families in need!

This is quality in action. It’s about more than systems and standards — it’s about people, purpose, and impact.

Thank you to everyone who contributed their time and energy, looking forward to our next volunteering day together.

Please visit our Events calendar for future volunteering opportunities.

ASQ Raleigh Life Sciences SIG meeting

Life Sciences SIG — November 2025

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ASQ Raleigh held its last Life Sciences Special Interest Group (SIG) meeting of 2025 at the NC Biotech Center on the evening of November 19, 2025. We had thirteen attendees representing a range of professional backgrounds, including a recent graduate, seasoned Quality professionals, and industry consultants. Four were first-time attendees of our SIG events.

Our speaker, Nathan Blazei, is an experienced life sciences leader with a background in Quality and Regulatory Affairs. He presented his perspectives on Quality 4.0, titled “Unlocking Efficiency, Consistency, and Insight: Potential Use Cases for Artificial Intelligence in Quality Assurance.”

After a brief introduction to Quality 4.0 and associated technology, Nathan presented three potential use cases and led the discussion beyond these applications.

  • Event investigation
  • Procedure creation
  • Inspections

A common theme of the applications is automation and artificial intelligence (AI) tool’s ability to process large amounts of data. Generative AI tools can also help summarize the information from diverse data sources and answer queries quickly, saving time and improving performance.

Participants recognized that while promising, most AI systems and tools were new and in development, and few had been tested or validated in the real world. To be truly useful, the AI systems have to be integrated with the business and be trained with domain-specific data.

The fact that many AI tools are “black box” solutions was also a concern — how much can we trust the information or answers? Can we interpret it? How do we validate it? Participants seemed to agree that the tools are useful for generating the initial documents, solutions, or recommendations, which can be a time-saver, but human experts still have to fill the gaps and make the final decisions.

Despite concerns about limitations of the current technology, the participants were enthusiastic about its potential applications in Quality and Continuous Improvement, bringing up many ideas on their wish lists: pulling knowledge embedded in the organization, performing root cause analysis, creating video-based Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), integrating skills from different experts, AI-assisted procedures, etc.

We would have continued our discussion beyond the two hours if the building security didn’t ring the bell. More is to come next year, so check our events calendar often.

ASQ Raleigh SIG meeting

SIG Meeting — November 13, 2025

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A group of seven people attended the November Special Interest Group (SIG) at Frontier RTP. Two people were first-time attendees at ASQ Raleigh SIG events.

One of the benefits of small group in-person events is the opportunity to get to know each other, whether to meet new people or catch up with old friends. The two-hour event provided plenty of time for personal introductions and various discussion topics.

One attendee brought up the topic of “Living Quality” — a company initiative to drive a Quality Culture from a product lifecycle perspective. The quality culture topic has repeatedly come up in many meetings. “Quality is everyone’s responsibility” seems obvious but hard to realize in an organization — from the top management to the shop floor and across all functions.

What’s also interesting was that the company was in the middle of splitting into two entities, potentially involving mergers and acquisitions. Participants agreed that Quality cannot be separate from the process that creates value. Quality is not a shared service like Information Technology (IT).

As usual, in addition to quality culture, several participants talked about their jobs, customers, products, and processes involved. It’s always enlightening to learn about other businesses and see similar challenges.

One of the new attendees was a recent Ph.D. graduate in life sciences looking into Quality as a potential career path. Several participants shared their career journeys and answered the question “How did you get into Quality?” A common answer is “That wasn’t my plan when I started!” There are always plenty of personal stories to share.

The next monthly SIG meeting will be on December 19, 2025 (at the same time and location).