The ongoing Fifth National Quality Conference in King Faisal hall conference at InterContinental Hotel here has launched fourth workshops. The conference will conclude on Oct. 15. The conference is aimed at emphasizing the importance of quality and organizational excellence and its role in achieving sustainability, highlighting the importance of the national strategy for quality and its role in strengthening the competitive capacity, and showing the success stories of the best national and international practices in quality sector. The governor of Saudi Standards, Metrology and Quality Organization and the Chairman of the Steering Committee of the fifth National Quality Conference, Dr. Saad Al-Kasabi stressed on the importance of such a conference, specially in this period which is witnessing accelerated steps toward achieving the vision that the Kingdom has for quality and its improvement by 2020. He noted that the conference witnesses six scientific sessions, punctuated by 23 lectures, and four workshops organized by the Saudi Standards, Metrology and Quality under the slogan quality. He pointed out that the board has a program to reduce the importation of goods from non-conforming standard specifications. The four workshops held on the first day were the complementary relationship between the continuous improvement of operations, creativity and innovation, and organizational excellence, basics of quality and indicators to measure performance of customer services, great leadership, the power of visualization, and the Six Sigma, which is a set of techniques and tools for process improvement. Professor Hani Al Omari of the Saudi Quality Council pointed out in the second workshop titled ‘Basics of Quality and Indicators to Measure Performance in Customer Service' that the relationship and harmonious association in the modern practices of institutional superiority between the overall quality science orientation and system performance measurement indicators are two sides of one coin. Chairman of the Scientific Committee of the Conference Dr. Ayed Al-Amri stressed that the workshops on the first day of the conference were successful, especially that several topics and theories such as the Six Sigma and ISO 18404 were discussed in the Middle East for the first time. — SG