All Features
Gleb Tsipursky
The world has shifted in remarkable ways, and flexible work is an undeniable force reshaping professional life. But do remote and hybrid arrangements help the environment or lead to unintended consequences? A new study by Mark Ma at the University of Pittsburgh, Betty Xing at Baylor University, and…
Jeff Dewar, Steven Garner, Quality Digest
Tom Taormina, esteemed quality consultant and long-time contributor to Quality Digest, has passed away. He is survived by his wife, Midge, and their three children. Recently, Taormina was working with Quality Digest and a consortium of others to design a certified training program for quality…
Peter Chhim
For decades, Six Sigma has been the gold standard in process improvement—a proven methodology for reducing defects, improving yield, and driving measurable operational gains. It delivered tremendous value in manufacturing, healthcare, and financial services. But in today’s shifting business…
Scott Ginsberg
When quality failures go public, it’s not just your product on the line—it’s also your reputation, compliance status, and workforce morale.
From product recalls to OSHA citations, recent manufacturing disasters reveal a brutal truth: The real cost of outdated documentation isn’t just inefficiency—…
Mike Figliuolo
For as many words as we use, we’re terrible communicators. Voicemails are jumbled streams of consciousness. Emails are “text bombs” with no rhyme or reason. Presentations are nothing but crippling piles of slides. But don’t worry—here are three rules of three to make your communications clearer,…
Gleb Tsipursky
Remote work has become a game-changer for older individuals with disabilities, offering a solution that not only improves their employment prospects but also brings substantial economic benefits, according to a new study from the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.
Before the…
Conformance1
Amid uncertainty in manufacturing, AI adoption, labor market fluctuations, and salary disparities across industries and geographic regions, quality professional compensation can be difficult to calculate. Without current job-level salary benchmarks, quality professionals, from technicians to…
Bryan Christiansen
The cornerstone of efficient industrial and facility management, maintenance, repair, and operations (MRO) cover all activities related to equipment maintenance, procurement, upkeep, and inventory management. This includes spare parts, consumables, lubricants, cleaning supplies, safety equipment,…
Donald J. Wheeler
For many hundreds of years, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” has summarized the predominant approach to process operation. From the physician’s admonition to do no harm, to the slightly more positive aphorism that the squeaky wheel gets the grease, there is a common theme of differentiating…
Harish Jose
I am a longtime admirer of George Spencer-Brown’s “Laws of Form.” In this article, I explore how his notion of reentry helps illuminate the paradoxes and blind spots in modern ideologies, especially the rise of xenophobia and extreme nationalism. These rigid ideologies depend on distinctions…
Mike Figliuolo
There’s an old army saying, “No plan survives first contact with the enemy.”
I’m sure some Navy or Marine guy out there will attribute this comment to their branch of service, but to be clear, it came from the Army.
Actually, the original of this paraphrased quote is widely attributed to Prussian…
Nick Haase
When I talk with maintenance leaders, I hear urgency. Pressure is mounting. They’re being asked to cut costs, attract skilled workers, and embrace AI—and fast. Yes, pressure turns coal into diamonds. But constant pressure can wear down even the best teams. So for our 2025 State of Industrial…
Bruce Hamilton
Last year, after many years of physical therapy, cortisone shots, and experimental treatments to prop up my failing knees, I decided to go bionic and get full knee replacements. Holding out hope for more than a decade that emerging cell-therapy technology would offer breakthrough cartilage…
Justin Sirotin
In the early 2000s, at my former company, my team was tasked with creating educational products for a major national educational toy brand. We developed an impressive line of learning tools—forensic kits, microscopes, telescopes—designed to engage curious young minds. After securing coveted shelf…
Akhilesh Gulati
In today’s competitive manufacturing landscape, resilience is the new quality. And one of the most powerful lessons in resilience doesn’t come from a factory—it comes from an art form.
In the Japanese tradition of kintsugi, a broken ceramic bowl is not discarded or disguised. It’s repaired—…
Matt McFarlane
One of the key findings in Greenlight Guru’s 2025 Medical Device Industry Report was that economic uncertainty is playing a large role in the decisions medical device companies make this year.
The report surveyed more than 500 medical device professionals across quality, regulatory, product…
Jones Loflin
In a professional kitchen, no chef prepares a steak, a cake, and a casserole simultaneously with all the ingredients scattered across the counter. There’s a method: one recipe at a time, with only the ingredients needed for that specific dish.
The same principle applies to how we work, especially…
Bruce Hamilton
A few months ago I visited a potential customer, a high-tech startup, which like many Boston-area tech companies is developing astounding products that would have been considered science fiction only 10 years ago. The parking lot was half full at 8 a.m., but the entrance was locked to visitors, and…
Stephanie Ojeda
Every day, quality leaders face a variety of production and process issues. Although some problems are easy to fix, others require deeper investigation, such as using a 5 Whys analysis or fishbone diagram. But then there are the stubborn, recurring issues that can lead to quality issues, increased…
William A. Levinson
The Chinese character for crisis means “danger” and “opportunity,” and tariffs have created a supply chain crisis throughout the United States. Paul Roberts of the Seattle Times reports that fewer ships are arriving in Seattle: “Fewer ships coming into the U.S. means companies can’t get components…
Akhilesh Gulati
When we step into a complex organization—whether in manufacturing, healthcare, or finance—we often find ourselves navigating a sea of competing truths. Everyone seems certain they see the problem clearly. Yet somehow, solving it feels harder than it should.
Why?
Often, it’s not the facts that…
ISO
Occupational health and safety (OHS) is often brushed aside as a checkbox exercise—something assigned to compliance officers or forgotten in day-to-day operations. But this mindset comes at a cost. Every year, millions of people suffer injuries, illnesses, or worse, simply because their workplace…
Stephen Graham, Quality Digest
Uploading something “to the cloud” has become common enough that most people are acutely aware of the storage advantages of cloud services—whether in their personal or professional lives—as well as how they might benefit administrators in any business. What might surprise people is the additional…
Harry Hertz
A little enjoyment is always important. I recently read a blog post titled 15 Facts That Will Make You Laugh.
A few of those facts were:• There is a Welsh town with a 58-letter name:Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.• You used to be able to send children by mail in the U.S…
Mike Figliuolo
We humans love to complicate things. The more crap we hang off of a product, the better we think it is. The more engineering that goes into it, the more we can sell, right?
Wrong.
Simplicity wins. Every time. (iPod, anyone?)
As an entrepreneur, I get to hang out with other entrepreneurs (and we…
