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Quality Digest
(Momentum Technologies: Carrollton, TX) -- Momentum Technologies, a critical minerals refining and recovery company, has announced a series of milestones. Using its proprietary MSX technology, the company produced some of the purest rare earths ever reported at its demonstration plant in Carrollton…
Quality Digest
(Fluke: Everett, WA) -- Calibration laboratories are under growing pressure to do more with fewer resources while managing disconnected systems, manual workflows, and increasing compliance demands. To address these challenges, Fluke has announced the latest release of CalStudio, headlined by…
Bruce Hamilton
In my last post, I reflected on a couple of different whys to interrogate a process—either to solve a problem or to create a process improvement. Here are a few more contextual uses of the question “Why?” that I’ve found very helpful as a manager and improvement leader.
Purpose expansion
When…
Etienne Nichols
Ask a premarket team where corrective and preventive action (CAPA) sits on the priority list, and it usually lands below design controls, risk management, and the submission itself. The reasoning is easy to follow. Nothing has shipped, so there are no complaints to investigate, no returned product…
Quality Digest
(APM Steam: Woburn, MA) -- American Plant Maintenance (APM Steam), a leading provider of steam system maintenance services, highlights steam trap surveys that create a complete inventory of steam traps, identify failing units, and uncover trap station issues that reduce thermal energy delivery and…
Quality Digest
(QT9 Software: Aurora, IL) -- QT9 Software, a global technology leader in quality management software and ERP solutions, will exhibit its integrated QMS and ERP platforms at the International Manufacturing Technology Show (IMTS), September 14–19, 2026, at McCormick Place in Chicago. At Booth 134047…
NIST
(NIST: Gaithersburg, MD) -- Nanoscience, which studies small objects, has a big problem. According to a team of scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the field confronts a pervasive error of data analysis that can give misleading insights into how these tiny…
Kevin Turpin
A sound that’s slightly off before a bearing fails. A smell that shows up before a chemical reaction runs hot. A texture that feels wrong before any instrument confirms it. Frontline workers pick up on signals like these constantly and, most of the time, nothing in the plant is built to capture…
Quality Digest
(LG Electronics: Seoul, South Korea) -- LG Electronics (LG) has opened a new plant in Paraná, Brazil, reinforcing its manufacturing footprint in Brazil and supporting long-term growth across Latin America, a key growth region for LG.
Representing an investment of approximately $310 million (BRL 1.…
Mike Figliuolo
As the leader of a high-performing team, how you distribute and balance work for members of that team is a critical success factor. It needs to be done fairly. Note, I didn’t say equally. Work allocation needs to be done fairly because you want your team to operate on the basis of equality. You…
Gleb Tsipursky
The easiest AI costs to count could become the least important part of the story. SemiAnalysis gives a better name to the harder problem: dark output, the economic value created by AI that remains invisible or badly distorted in GDP, price measures, labor data, and industry accounts.
A company can…
Quality Digest
(Platinum Tooling: Prospect Heights, IL) -- Heimatec, a world leader in live tools, angle heads, and multispindle drill heads, has announced immediate availability of its popular u-tec flexible changing system on all live tools in the company’s product line.
Tools are now available for the most…
Quality Digest
(Baldrige Foundation: Washington, DC) -- The Foundation for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, known as the Baldrige Foundation, has released the 2026 Baldrige Excellence Framework for Business, Nonprofit, and Government organizations.
The new edition, developed in close partnership with…
James Glover
At a typical manufacturer, the cost of poor quality runs to 15–20% of sales. Shellye Archambeau, a Quality Digest contributor, once put a face on that number: A $250 million company added up its repair, rework, scrap, warranty, and write-off costs, and found they equaled 20% of sales. That’s one…
Boning Xu
A foundry can produce an impressive inspection package and still leave its customer with an unanswered question: Which records actually supported the decision to ship this part?
An alloy chemistry report might identify a melt. An X-ray image could show one internal area. A coordinate measuring…
Quality Digest
(Genesis AEC: Blue Bell, PA) -- Genesis AEC, a consulting engineering firm specializing in pharmaceutical water and utility systems, is highlighting its PharmaWater Pro modeling capability as part of its consulting services for pharmaceutical manufacturers planning new facilities or evaluating…
Quality Digest
(Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence: North Kingstown, RI) -- Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence has announced the availability of Hexagon Connected Worker Integration, a lightweight middleware platform that connects manufacturing software, enterprise business systems, industrial equipment, and…
Derek Deasy, Enoch Li
From disagreements over the right strategy to heated recriminations following a project failure, conflicts are a regular part of business life. But most leaders and teams view conflict as a negative that should be avoided at all costs. When disputes do occur, leaders are often quick to apportion…
Quality Digest
(Physik Instrumente: Shrewsbury, MA) -- Physik Instrumente (PI) has introduced the A-725, a five-axis air bearing nanopositioning system that pairs a true planar XY stage with an integrated parallel-kinematics Z-θX-θY module.
Designed and built in the U.S., PI’s 5-DOF stage targets semiconductor…
Marc Schaeffers
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 a…
Grant Ramaley
Medical device companies selling into multiple countries don’t answer to one global regulator. They navigate a patchwork of national requirements that two organizations are trying to align in very different ways.
The International Medical Device Regulators Forum (IMDRF) and the Global…
Quality Digest
(Info-Tech Research Group: Arlington, VA) -- Applications are now a primary target for threat actors, yet many organizations still rely on traditional secure software development life cycles (SSDLCs) that limit their ability to respond to evolving risk.
Recent research from Info-Tech Research…
Dave Gilson
When President Donald Trump announced a wave of tariffs in early 2025, he launched a war of words. Threats and counterthreats flew across the Atlantic and Pacific in a swirl of escalation, retaliation, and reprieve. Economists were hard-pressed to get a clear picture of what was happening beyond…
Quality Digest
(1factory: Milpitas, CA) -- 1factory, a leading provider of cloud-based quality management software for manufacturing, announced the availability of its FedRAMP Moderate Equivalent environment, providing aerospace and defense manufacturers with a secure deployment option designed to support…
Quality Digest
(Artec 3D: Luxembourg) -- Global 3D scanning hardware and software leader Artec 3D has announced Artec Point II, the successor to Artec Point, its target-based handheld laser scanner for industrial metrology.
With an expanded laser configuration, Point II captures up to 5.8 million points per…