It is truly an honor to announce that Mr. Peter Sanderson, TQMS President and creator of CIS Software has being named Quality Magazine's 2008 Professional of the Year!

Quality Magazine Professional of the Year 2008: Through its individual awards program, Quality Magazine recognizes an individual who, during the course of his/her career, has made outstanding contributions to the quality profession. All candidates are reviewed and scored by a board of quality and manufacturing experts.

The Quality Professional of the Year will be recognized at the Quality Measurement Conference, April 28 to May 1, in Clearwater, FL. In addition, an article profiling the recipient will appear in the May 2008 issue of Quality Magazine.

Peter Sanderson's Acceptance Speech:

There is an old saying that says you should not wait for your boat to come in you should row out to meet it. I have always based my business philosophy on that saying. No matter what brilliant idea you have, no matter what wonderful product you manufacture you cannot hope to succeed unless you are hungry for business, unless you work hard for success.

Today you have awarded me the title of Quality Professional of the Year 2008. By doing so you have recognised a kindred spirit. You are saluting, in fact, someone who has been through the same traumas, the same agonising as all of you have been.

Being a successful businessperson though depends on many factors. The climate and timing has to be right for your idea. Bill Gates would have had problems with his products if computers had not yet been invented. Like any rally driver, you have to have the right back-up team. You also have to have a bit of luck.

Luck they say is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration and I won't argue with that. What I will argue with is the idea that that 99% should make you a workaholic. My belief is that if you are constantly at work you do not approach your everyday problems with a fresh mind.

You also have to have the right crew in that boat with you. Today I acknowledge the hard work that my partners and colleagues have done (Bretta Kelly, David Pfeiffer, Doug Timberlin and Grant Sharp).  I acknowledge too, their unfailing support and encouragement.

The most successful businesspersons also usually have the best back-up teams in their own families. Those family members may or may not understand the nuances of their business but they know when a man is down, they know when a man needs support. Today I wish to thank my beautiful wife, Chantal; for making this day possible.

All of us learn from our experiences and today I would say that I have made mistakes like anybody else. What I have tried to do though is to take those mistakes as challenges and to try to do something about them. In fact, I have stayed true to basic quality improvement principles and have used these quality tools to continually build and improve our business and products.

Probably the most important quality for a businessperson is determination. It is what keeps you going when you have a fire at the factory or your supplies go missing. It is what keeps you at it when your account is dangerously in the red. It keeps you going when by any reasonable standards you should have folded your tent and slipped into oblivion.

CIS Continuous Improvement Software is the result of my determination to offer a cross-platform paperless solution to manage an organization that turns implementing and managing a quality system into a fun and profitable project rather than a certificate and an expense.

 It all began in 1999 when I sent out a quality survey to my customers asking those questions about our services and their ISO 9000 system. The majority of responses were negative. The responses were not negative about our services, but they clearly indicated that the owners did not feel that ISO 9000 added any value to their organization and that it was a huge expense, a huge amount of paperwork and that if it were not a requirement passed down from their customers, they would have never implemented such a system.

Well, you can imagine how I felt when I was reviewing each customer’s response. In the middle of this process, I had to go to the dentist for a root canal. Trust me on this, a root canal is not a procedure that I wished to undertake, but it needed to be done.

It was painful, expensive and at the completion, I was able to chew food, just as I was a month before. It suddenly donned on me that I too was a dentist, but a dentist for quality. Customers would come to us when they needed ISO certification to continue working with their customers or to acquire new customers.  Well, a dentist is not what I wanted to be!  I could not feel proud about our products or receive any job satisfaction delivering such a painful and expensive product to my customers. In fact, in many instances, getting ISO procedures implemented properly was like pulling teeth.

Therefore, I decided to change our product. Change the way we do things. Create a product that was simple to use, easy and quick to implement and a product that would continually demonstrate to the owners the cost savings achieved on a monthly or weekly basis as a result from continuous improvement, training and using proven quality tools. In fact, this information is available in CIS to all users! After we implemented our first ten jobs using CIS, our feedback was so positive, that not only did my profession change from a dentist to a problem solver, but also we then decided to continue our development of CIS to include further database tools, reporting and solutions for all management systems in all organizations, including sales and accounting.

The result is CIS Version 4.1 – Continuous Improvement Software! In addition, today, the climate and timing is just right for CIS! It is not only a solution for product improvement, reducing expenses, increasing profits and increasing employee satisfaction, but it is the environmentally sound approach to electronically manage an organization and achieve guaranteed results. It is a new communication and reporting tool that breaks down the walls within our organization and between our customers and suppliers.

Finally, I want to say how much this award means to me both in the business context and personally. All of you here today know that you have to hack your way through the corporate jungles. There is no easy path. You understand what it means to work late at night, to have bitter disappointments. You too have suffered the highs and lows that make up any business. So I am deeply touched that you have recognised my struggles in this way.

If you want to know the real secret of my success; I don't mind sharing it with you. I love my work! And I especially love not being a dentist anymore!

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