How to Build (and Sustain) a Quality-Centric Culture with Chris Masterson

What It Covers

Chris Masterson, SVP and Chief Quality Officer at Tomar with 36 years in biopharma, outlines how organizations build and sustain quality-centric cultures. He covers leadership accountability, realistic three-to-five year timelines, ROI justification, measurement frameworks including the ANSI PDA Standard 06-2025, and learning from regulatory failures.

Key Questions Answered

• •Culture Timeline & Accountability: Shifting organizational culture realistically takes three to five years and requires senior leadership actively living company values — not just stating them. Progress requires incentivizing aligned behaviors and disincentivizing violations. Key drivers include consistency, repetition, patience, and perseverance. Without executive modeling, cultural transformation stalls regardless of budget or initiative size.
• •Quality Culture Measurement: Rather than building custom metrics, use the ANSI PDA Standard 06-2025 (Parenteral Drug Association) quality culture assessment tool, freely available at pda.org. This semi-quantitative survey benchmarks current culture, identifies specific improvement areas, and tracks progress over time. Gartner also offers a comparable benchmarking survey as an alternative resource.
• •ROI Justification for Quality Investment: When justifying quality culture budgets to finance or the C-suite, frame returns as compliance improvement, waste reduction via lean six sigma, and regulatory risk avoidance. A single FDA consent decree can cost a pharmaceutical company $500 million or more — making proactive quality investment substantially cheaper than reactive remediation after a warning letter or enforcement action.
• •Inspection Readiness Over Remediation: After a difficult FDA inspection, convert post-inspection remediation meetings into permanent Inspection Readiness Steering Committees. This reframe shifts the organization from reactive problem-fixing to continuous proactive risk identification and mitigation. Supplement with external mock inspections from qualified consultants to surface compliance gaps before regulators do.
• •Contract Manufacturer Responsibility: Holding a market authorization means full regulatory responsibility for every contract manufacturer and contract testing lab in the supply chain — regardless of which FDA district oversees that facility. Organizations cannot transfer compliance accountability to vendors. Proactive oversight, auditing, and quality agreements are the only mechanisms to manage this risk effectively.