Recently we were tasked with scanning Odawara Castle, a massive heritage site in Japan, including every detail from courtyards and buildings down to a drawbridge and individual rivets on castle gates.

Odawara Castle was built more than 500 years ago, with fortifications first erected during the Kamakura period—a time famous for the emergence of the samurai and Japan’s first…

Just like the people who use them, gauges should have periodic physical examinations. Sometimes, gauge calibration is needed to identify the seriousness of a known problem, and sometimes it uncovers problems you didn’t know existed.

But as with a human exam, the main reason for the annual checkup is to prevent problems from occurring in the first place.

The accuracy of a…

For more than 30 years I’ve audited management systems in manufacturing, automotive, laboratory, service, and nuclear environments. During that time I’ve watched internal auditing change shape several times. Paper checklists gave way to process-based auditing. Filing cabinets gave way to digital document control. Strictly onsite work gave way to remote and hybrid methods, codified now in ISO/…