Lars Sörqvist is President of the International Academy for Quality (IAQ). He has been vice president and board member of IAQ since 2011. Sörqvist has, since 1995, been affiliated with Sandholm Associates as a partner and senior consultant. Sandholm Associates was founded 1971 and is one of the leading European providers of training in quality. Training courses and consult services has been provided worldwide in 48 different countries with participants from more than 100 countries. Today Sörqvist leads the business as CEO. Additionally, he also works as an associate professor at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, where he focus on research in quality management and systematic improvement work.
Sörqvist has earlier been part time professor at the Shanghai University and member of the Advisory Committee within the Shanghai Association for Quality (SAQ) and thereby involved in Chinese quality work. He is also a past board member of the US national quality organization, the American Society for Quality (ASQ), as well as the Member of ASQ’s Global Advisory Committee (GAC) and the Member of ASQ Award Board. Sörqvist is board member of SQMA (Swedish Quality Management Academy) and BES (Business Excellence Sweden).
Sörqvist holds both a Masters of Engineering and a Batcheler of Business Administration through his studies at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) and Stockholm University. He earned his Doctorate in Quality in 1998. In 2008 he became an associate professor at KTH. Sörqvist is also a qualified auditor for ISO 9001, a Six Sigma Master Black Belt and an expert in Lean, among other things, through his previous responsibility for KTH's production engineering education. He is also part of the KTH Lean Center.
As an advisor and educator, Lars Sörqvist has conducted training and management seminars in many companies and organizations in a large number of countries on most continents. As an author, he has written many articles and books on quality management and continual improvements. Some of the best-selling books in Swedish are "Lean - Process development with a focus on customer value and efficient flows" (2013), "Six Sigma" (2007), "Continuous improvements" (2004), "Customer satisfaction and customer surveys" (2000) and "Poor quality costs” (1998). In 2017, the book "Handbook for Black Belts" was published in Chinese. He is also a popular key-note speaker at conferences and seminars worldwide.
© International Academy for Quality 2021