All Features
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…
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…
Michael Masser
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 (…
Adam Zewe
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 they…
Wilhelm Klein
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…
Steve Romig
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 area…
George Schuetz
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 characteristic, air gauging…
Yuan Wang
Most manufacturing engineers have experienced some version of the same problem: A production process successfully completes validation. The production part approval process (PPAP) is approved. Yield is stable, customer requirements are being met, and everyone assumes the process is under control.…
Adam Grabowski
Imagine running a race where every second counts and your competition is constantly breathing down your neck. That’s the magic (or madness) of cycle time. It’s the secret ingredient that transforms a sluggish assembly line into a well-oiled machine churning out products faster than you can say “…
Alexandra Vazquez
Operations leaders usually have more maintenance data than they can use.
They probably have access to dozens of dashboards, automated emails, and spreadsheets. But when an important asset fails, the “why” sticks around.
Effective maintenance reporting should act as a filter, not a firehose. It…
Brian Gutierrez
3D printing has matured from a speculative sci-fi fantasy into a practical tool. Plastic is the most commonly used material for 3D printing, but research at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is helping expand 3D printing into a new area—ceramics. Small details matter when it…
Darren Goh
Ask anyone who’s bought a handheld 3D scanner with optical tracking system in the last few years about what sold them, and you’ll hear about speed. More points per second. Larger scanning areas. Faster data capture.
Those improvements matter. But when you look at the entire inspection process,…
Dan Leiva
The vision system scanned the part and logged a pass. The SPC chart stayed inside its control limits. The line kept moving.
Three weeks later, the customer complaint arrived. The defect had been there the whole time, sitting just inside the algorithm’s confidence threshold, close enough to spec…
Carl Andrews
Enterprise resource planning (ERP) projects are among the most significant technology investments an organization will ever make. They support everything from finance and procurement to inventory management, customer service, and workforce planning. Organizations rightly spend months selecting the…
Wilhelm Klein
In manufacturing, some of the most important financial gains never appear as an obvious line item.
A machine doesn’t stop. A batch doesn’t need to be quarantined. A customer doesn’t complain—no defective product has reached them. A warranty claim never arrives. A quality manager doesn’t have to…
Bhuvan Yadav
False rejects quietly impede manufacturing efficiency, yet most quality teams treat them as an acceptable cost. This article examines why they persist, what makes them hard to eliminate with conventional systems, and how AI-based visual inspection is helping plants address the root cause.
The…
Janine Kyle
Businesses running equipment that depends on actuators, especially in high-cycle or nonstop operations, already know this: It’s common for actuators to fail without showing any warning signs.
All of a sudden, the production line stops midshift. It’s not until hours later that you find out that the…
Creaform
High-mix manufacturing has become the norm. Production lines are expected to produce more part variants in smaller batches and at a faster pace than ever before—all while maintaining very high quality.
To keep up, many manufacturers turn to automated quality control (AQC). Robots and 3D scanning…
Allen Yeung
As a significant portion of the experienced manufacturing workforce approaches retirement, companies face the critical threat of losing undocumented tribal knowledge. Veteran operators possess decades of hard-won, job-specific insights that rarely exist in paper manuals or corporate file systems.…
Sabine Terrasi
Inbound receiving operations (aka goods-in) in the electronics industry are under increasing pressure.
Countless components from a wide range of manufacturers arrive with constantly changing label layouts, multilingual markings, and ever shorter throughput times. What once could be managed…
Dusty Alexander
Ask anyone in manufacturing or in a project-driven company who has the most difficult job, and without hesitation they will say: the scheduler/planner.
It’s no wonder. Foolproof scheduling is critical to the smooth operation of most companies. Yet, planning and scheduling the workflow is akin to…
Bryan Balch, Quality Digest
With Hexagon Manufacturing Intelligence’s recent announcement of its inclusion in the NASCAR Competition Partner Program, details on the strategic partnership have emerged. By cementing this tie, the two companies can expand a professional relationship that will enable them to focus on precision,…
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) have created a new tool that can catch and correct potential mistakes in real time while 3D-printing large plastic parts.
The automated system could help U.S. manufacturers produce large, custom parts with…
David Isaacson
Quality Digest recently spoke with David Isaacson, the executive director of portfolio marketing at Octave. Besides his work on marketing strategies, he also helps people manage, understand, and better control their operations with software solutions that protect industry assets and people while…