The quality renaissance started in India from mid-eighties, took roots in nineties with economic deregulation and kept steady in 21st century thus far resulting in reasonable growth in GDP of India, but per capita income is not growing fast enough. This requires much higher rate of growth of GDP and that requires ability to export value added products and services to other countries.

However, rate of export of value-added products and services has not been adequate indicating a sense of lack of competitiveness. Developed countries are moving further ahead with renewed focus on Quality and the use of information and communication technologies (ICT), commonly called as Industry 4.0, thereby increasing the gap with India. Successful organizations have demonstrated providing customer value and societal value better than the competitor is the way to create corporate value and sustainable society.

Learning from these societies and organizations show the business leaders are playing key role at the national level and within the company to focus on Quality of work in all endeavours and use of digital transformation as a means for creating customer value and social value to create corporate value and sustainable society.

Top management needs to create a conducive environment and provide direction and commitment, while process owners need to learn and reengineer their processes, Quality team needs to facilitate use of new quality tools and IT team needs to provide the underlying system to integrate all of these.

While applying these new ICT approaches it is imperative that conventional TQM principles, concepts and methods are continually applied to strengthen Quality Assurance and Quality Management that forms the foundation for new technologies.

In this context the theme of the conference is kept as “Rebooting Quality for Competitive India” with the focus on the use of new technologies and integrating the same with the basic principles and concepts of TQM and Business Excellence approaches used by various organizations in India. Visible role of the top management in leading this transformation is imperative.