Richard E. Zultner

Bijay K. Jayaswal is the CEO of Agilenty Consulting Group, LLC. He has held senior executive positions and has consulted in quality and strategy for the last 25 years. His consulting and research interests include value engineering, process improvement, and product development. He has taught engineering and management at the University of Mauritius and California State University, Chico and has directed MBA and Advanced Management programs. He has helped introduce corporate-wide initiatives in reengineering, Six Sigma, and Design for Six Sigma and has worked with senior executive teams to implement such initiatives.

Dr. Peter C. Patton is professor of Quantitative Methods and Computer Science at the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minnesota. He also is Chairman of Agilenty Consulting Group. He has taught at the Universities of Minnesota, Paris, and Stuttgart and has held the position of Chief Information Officer at the University of Pennsylvania. He was Chief Technologist at Lawson Software from 1996 to 2002. He was Lawson's representative on the Technical Advisory Committee of IBM's SanFrancisco(TM) Java Framework project. He has been involved in computer hardware and software development since 1955.

Richard E. Zultner is an international consultant, educator, author, and speaker. Applying powerful improvement methods, such as QFD, to high-tech software-intensive products and processes has been his primary focus for over ten years. He is a founder and director of the QFD Institute--a nonprofit organization dedicated to the advancement of the theory and practice of QFD. For his pioneering work in Software QFD, he received the International Akao Prize in 1998. He is also a certified "Jonah" in the Theory of Constraints (TOC), and is a Six Sigma Master Black Belt, specializing in Design for Six Sigma.

Richard provides consulting and training in Software QFD, Design for Six Sigma, and Critical Chain Project Management. He holds a master's degree in management from the J. L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University, and has professional certifications in quality, project management, software engineering, and theory of constraints. He has taught QFD and Critical Chain project management in the graduate program at Stevens Institute of Technology as an adjunct professor.