Leadership

Rob Oakland

Robert works across the globe helping complex organisations to design and implement large-scale quality and operational excellence programmes to improve quality, cost and delivery of products and services.

He has worked and lived in Australia, USA, China, India, Brazil and Europe, gaining the reputation of a trusted quality and operations advisor in a range of organisations through his passion for working with people to enhance performance.

His particular experience includes:

• Global assessments of operations and support functions to understand root causes of serious, persistent quality and operational issues, inefficiencies and risk
• Design and deployment of fully integrated performance measurement frameworks, linking key operational indicators with financial impact in highly variable global businesses
• Coaching and mentoring global quality improvement projects which have contributed to breakthroughs in performance, including new product and service introduction
• Quality training and development programmes for senior leaders and quality professionals, including the launch of the CQI Leadership Masterclasses in 2016
• Design and deployment of a framework for assessing quality maturity of global operations
• Pan-European research into costs of quality failure

Robert’s early career was at the unique interface between pioneering research and industry in the development of innovative new products and the improvement of Quality in healthcare treatments with organisations such as Diageo, Unilever, P&G, Reckitt Benckiser and DePuy.

He has a first class Masters in Engineering with Business Management and a PhD in Biomechanical Engineering from the University of Leeds, where he is now a ‘Leader in Residence’ supporting students with commercial awareness, leadership, management and personal development.  He has had more than 10 peer-reviewed publications in high impact journals, is a contributing author to Quality World and has presented at more than 20 international conferences.