About Denis Machoka and his role as VP of Quality at Harmonic Bionics

Denis Machoka, VP Quality at Harmonic Bionics, shares his evolution from a scientist with a background in chemistry and biology to a Quality Systems expert. He delves into his experiences in laboratories, IT systems implementation, and his expertise in qualifying systems within regulatory frameworks.

Transcript

00:00 - 00:09
My name is Denis I'm a Quality Systems expert, if you can call it that way. Background is in chemistry and biology.

00:09 - 00:20
So I'm a scientist by training, by application. Um, I went to schools, Iowa State, graduated, I went to work in laboratories. So that was really where I started.

00:20 - 00:43
And then from laboratories I started implementing I.T Systems and from there I went into quality systems and started managing laboratories and then found out there was a requirement to do testing and qualifications of systems and from testing of systems ended up with regulations because I figured out how to qualify systems using less effort.

00:43 - 01:06
And by doing that, my manager at that point said, you're really good at this. Maybe you can help do more qualifications of systems in the laboratory. And after that, quality got a wind of what I'm able to do. And once they did that, I was called to do quality activities. Review became my supervisor in the lab and after that moved to a different company and went into quality activities.

01:06 - 01:29
And soon after that I started my own company doing this type of activities of qualifications. So qualifications was really how I got into the industry. And then when I started going into quality assurance activities, one of the things that I found was somebody who could be able to see what was happening and put that into words.

01:29 - 01:43
What I mean by that is there's a lot of activities that happen in a company and sometimes you need somebody. You can see the whole picture, the relationships between information, relationships between systems and data and access.

01:43 - 01:51
And really that drove my passion to understanding how everything supposed to work together. I was called in to be a quality systems analyst.

01:51 - 01:57
I became one of the people in the organization that was able to connect different systems, to be able to communicate.

01:57 - 02:20
And once I did that, the next activity after that was quality assurance, becoming a data driven person, making decisions, getting data. This could be data like CAPA data, this could be data that is used in the industry like Non-Conformances It could be data related to laboratory notebooks failures, aggregating some of that data so that good decisions could be made.

02:20 - 02:37
So once I became a data analyst, the rest is history. They put me into qualifications and putting quality systems together and implementing them through the organization because I understood with the information was located where and how to access that information and being able to present it.

02:37 - 02:54
I was a vice president for quality assurance and regulatory affairs for Harmonic Bionics out in Austin. For that organization, what I did is all things quality related to making decisions based on what information needed to be kept as part of our regulations.

02:54 - 03:13
I have worked in medical devices. I've worked in pharmaceuticals, I've worked in petrochemicals, oil and gas. I've also worked in combinatorial products and some of those industries of somewhat and not have a quality system and tobacco industry also. So I've worked in all those industries.

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Transcript

But what we've known from what I experience was, is we were able to get there with the system. We still there with the system. The system has what is needed to provide us what we're looking for, because every company, admittedly, is trying to get compliant. If we educate people, if we get people the education that they need and to get over the fear factor, I think 90% of those things can be resolved because most people will go to what they're most familiar with.What I worked with from a different company, but they're not willing to sit down and look at what the demographics are saying. People are into social media now. People are moving fast into fast paced world. But technologies are still antiquated. So there's a disconnect here, right? So while we're moving at a fast pace at home with dragging at work, so why can't we continue that speed while we at work?If your supplier has issues and you're not informed on time, you want to have an alternate supplier in place. If your suppliers are not qualified, you may not know that that needs to happen. And so when you have an integrated system that speaks to itself and is giving you all this data, you literally have the pulse of the organization in your hands as an executive at a money bound access.

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