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Science Trust, PRMA offer details on Quest ’17

From left: Mario Marazzi and Lucy Crespo.

The Puerto Rico Science, Technology and Research Trust and the Puerto Rico Manufacturers Association hosted a roundtable Wednesday to provide details on Quest 2017, an event that promotes the exchange of best practices to optimize the island’s competitiveness.

The event also serves as a platform to learn about projects of continuous improvement through different disciplines, the organizations said.

The dialogue also served as a link between the PRMA and the Institute of Statistics, which recently published the first Innovation Survey for Fiscal 2015.

“It is a pleasure for us to facilitate this meeting. It is a good time to serve as a motivation entity because innovation is a pillar of the knowledge economy. That is part of the mission at the Science, Technology and Research Trust,” said Science Trust CEO Lucy Crespo.

Quest is the ideal platform to learn about best practices and projects for continuous improvement across diverse disciplines, the groups said.

Quest 2017 will be celebrated this Friday at the Complejo Ferial in Ponce, and is open to the public and aimed to anyone interested in the economic development of Puerto Rico, manufacturing and services companies, as well as students.

This initiative, which the PRMA has carried out for more than 10 consecutive years, aims to improve the competitiveness of companies established in Puerto Rico through the exchange of knowledge and exposure to best practices.

Participants at the event will be able to see firsthand the work of various companies that have developed successful continuous improvement programs and be able to review its results and achievements.

“It is also a great opportunity for the public to ask questions to developers of these initiatives and see how these processes have improved productivity,” the groups said.

This year, the Operational Excellence Index — which evaluates the structure of the project and the tools used — will be applied in evaluations. At the event, storyboards of representative projects will be exhibited in four categories: manufacturing, service, energy and supply chain.

“We need to capitalize on the information from the Innovation Survey recently revealed by the Institute of Statistics,” said PRMA President Rodrigo Masses. “The theme of ‘innovation’ is our daily bread.”

“It is very pertinent to attach this survey to events such as Quest, where companies provide insights on how we are doing, and the goal is for all participants to learn from what other companies are doing to improve their operations,” said Masses.

Meanwhile, Mario Marazzi, executive director of the Puerto Rico Institute of Statistics explained important aspects of the first Survey of Innovation in Manufacturing Companies, conducted for Fiscal 2015.

In the Survey, Puerto Rico placed third behind Cuba and Costa Rica in the International Comparison of Innovative Companies in the manufacturing sector.

“These results serve as important assets and it is essential that they be repeated to see how the dynamics change. It is part of the Institute’s agenda,” said Marazzi.

“Innovation is the quest to turn what we have into something new every year, and it’s an attitude as well. That (attitude), we have it,” said Mario Lobato, principal investigator of the survey.

The full report of the Innovation Survey is available on the Institute’s website.

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This story was written by our staff based on a press release.
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