A CEO Panel on Why the Traditional QMS Is Not Enough

A leadership conversation moderated by Dr. Joe DeFeo, with Aroop Zutshi, Frost & Sullivan, and Prashanth Rajendran, ComplianceQuest

Frost & Sullivan’s Global President Aroop Zutshi, ComplianceQuest CEO Prashanth Rajendran, and past Juran CEO and quality authority Dr. Joe DeFeo discuss how to drive business performance with your QMS. This expert panel will discuss the next generation of quality management called QRC: Quality, Risk and Compliance. QRC is a unified, connected operating model.

Key takeaways from the session include learning from the latest Frost & Sullivan research, benchmarking your organization against the QRC maturity model, and understanding best-practice criteria for choosing a connected digital platform that can truly deliver results.

Quality failures rarely start as headlines. They start as small issues nobody catches in time, until a recall, a warranty claim, an audit finding, or a lost customer makes it impossible to ignore. Dr. Joseph Juran demonstrated that this cost of poor quality is extensive, but most of it never shows up in the P&L.

Pressure to prevent this is growing. Most global quality standards, like ISO 9001:2026, FDA’s QMSR, and industry standards such as IATF 16949 and AS9100, require risk-based thinking in the QMS. Customers cannot tolerate poor quality and increasingly expect the same, whether regulation requires it or not. Yet for most manufacturers, quality and risk data are still scattered across CRM, PLM, QMS, MES, LMS, and ERP, with context lost at every handoff. The challenge is no longer digitization. It is connectivity.

In this moderated conversation,

• Prashanth Rajendran, CEO of ComplianceQuest, explains what it takes to make that model real, from one connected data model to agentic AI, and where quality management is heading next.
• Aroop Zutshi, Global President of Frost & Sullivan, shares findings from the firm’s new whitepaper, From QMS to QRC: Redefining the Next Generation of Quality Management, including how Frost & Sullivan defines QRC: a connected operating model in which quality processes and risk decisions share governed data and workflows across the enterprise, so compliance evidence is generated through execution, not reconstructed after the fact.
• Quality thought leader Dr. Joe DeFeo, Dr. Juran’s successor and editor-in-chief of Juran’s Quality Handbook, will facilitate this panel by asking the questions business leaders are asking.

What you’ll learn

• Why Frost & Sullivan sees QRC as the next generation of quality management
• How connected quality is now a growth driver
• Where your organization sits on the QRC maturity model, from fragmented and digitized to connected and AI-assisted
• Why AI’s value in quality depends on the data it can reach, and what governed, AI-assisted work looks like today
• What questions executives should ask vendors, and which vendor Frost & Sullivan found most closely aligned with both the vision and execution of QRC
• What is a practical first step in assessing your QRC readiness