Engineering Excellence Built on Experience
Schouten-Quality is deliberately independent and personal. You work directly with Gerard Schouten — a former engineering-quality executive from aerospace and automotive engineering.
Gerard Schouten
After more than 44 years in high-technology product engineering - fifteen years in aerospace and almost thirty years in the automotive industry - Gerard Schouten established Schouten-Quality to help engineering organizations strengthen their engineering capability, improve product quality and achieve sustainable process excellence.
Having spent most of his career inside engineering organizations rather than advising them from the outside, Gerard understands the challenges engineering leaders face every day: balancing technical excellence, project delivery, customer expectations and business objectives. His recommendations are therefore grounded in practical experience, not theory.
Read more about Gerard Schouten
Leadership That Makes a Difference
For twenty-seven years, Gerard worked closely with Product Engineering leadership and was a member of the Product Engineering Management Team. This gave him a broad perspective on the decisions, trade-offs and organizational challenges that influence engineering performance.
As Manager Quality & Reliability, he spent seven years leading a department of approximately twenty quality professionals supporting the engineering quality of around 1,200 engineers across all engineering disciplines.
This responsibility covered a broad range of engineering quality disciplines, including engineering governance, quality management systems, functional safety, configuration management, reliability engineering, independent quality assurance and continuous improvement. He was accountable for Product Engineering compliance with IATF 16949—but the real challenge was never compliance alone. It was building the capability to prevent problems, make better decisions and deliver quality by design.
From Compliance to Capability
Throughout his career, Gerard has helped engineering organizations improve the way they develop complex products.
He led the implementation of engineering methods and product creation processes, as well as systems supporting requirements management, engineering change management, problem solving and global quality reporting. This experience helps him recognize where processes genuinely support engineers—and where they have become unnecessary overhead.
For more than twenty years as a Six Sigma Black Belt, Gerard led international improvement programmes and coached multidisciplinary engineering teams throughout Europe and North America. His approach has always been the same: solve the real problem, simplify where possible and create sustainable improvements that engineers will use.
More Than Automotive SPICE®
For clients, an assessment is therefore not the end product. The real value comes from understanding why weaknesses exist and turning the findings into improvements that strengthen the organization's engineering capability.
Having worked with both IATF 16949 and Automotive SPICE®, Gerard considers them complementary. Quality management systems provide the organizational foundation; Automotive SPICE® helps engineering organizations continuously improve the way they develop complex products.
How the practice works
- Independent — no tooling to sell, no implementation arm to feed.
- Findings written to be actionable by the team, not just defensible to an auditor.
- Small enough to say no to work that would not help you.