American Society of Quality Dinner Forum 

Barbara Armstrong

Barbara, a PE CSQE CSSMBB, has had a career from optimizing rocket engines to continuous improvement in mining a mile below the earth’s surface.  She has worked in automotive quality, engineering, product development, failure analysis and process improvement for 18 years. She works for BYTON, an EV start-up here in Silicon Valley, and has previously worked for Faraday Future, GM, Toyota, Delphi Chassis plus several mining companies.  Barbara is a master problem solver and has been a principal troubleshooter on over $700M worth of production and warranty problems.  She has also been an expert technical witness in several court cases. She is a Queen’s U Mech Engineer and has a MSc from the OSU in Materials Engineering.  She has published several technical papers and been a speaker for ASNT, AWS and ASQ.

Ben Tarloff, CQE

Ben is a graduate from the Rochester Institute of Technology in Mechanical Engineering. As a die-hard automotive enthusiast, he has worked in various quality assurance and design roles for companies like Honda, Tesla, Faraday Future, and BYTON. Starting out as a chassis engineer, Ben operated in high pressure automotive design environments and developed a deep respect for quality assurance in design and manufacturing. In his most recent role, Ben Tarloff leads Engineering Quality with Barbara Armstrong at BYTON, where they have instituted numerous Engineering Quality processes for areas like Problem Solving, Problem Management, Software Quality Assurance, DFMEA, and Engineering Release Authorization.