Operations

With the publication of the new VDA AIAG SPC Manual in July 2026, one of the most significant changes to statistical process control (SPC) in decades has been introduced. While much attention has been given to the new process capability indices, an equally important change is the introduction of…

There’s a number that stopped me in my tracks recently. U.S. manufacturers spent about $32 billion training and upskilling their people—a 22% jump from 2019—and the average worker now logs close to five more training hours a year than they did back then, climbing from 42.9 hours to 47.6 (…

Engineers often use vision-language models to produce new designs, such as for airplane or automobile components. To simulate how those components will perform in realistic situations, they’ll use tried-and-true computer-aided design (CAD) software to generate 3D models of those designs that…

Quality inspection has always depended on people who know what they are looking at. That remains true as automated visual inspection becomes faster and more widely deployed. The strongest systems don’t try to remove expert judgment completely. They capture it, structure it, and apply it…

Quality teams throughout the food manufacturing industry face increasingly difficult obstacles and risks while keeping our food safe. A team can discover a positive Listeria result on a slicer component inside a ready-to-eat production zone after earlier environmental monitoring signals in the…

I’ve written many times about how air gauging allows you to measure many jobs faster, more conveniently, and more accurately than other gauging methods.

For measuring all hole conditions, air gauging is unsurpassed for speed and accuracy. When checking any dimensional…