All Features
Jeff Dewar
The next Coordinate Metrology Society Conference (CMSC) takes place July 20–24, 2026, at the Fairmont Dallas in Dallas. If you want to know why it matters and who might be there, read on.
There’s a moment, familiar to anyone who works in metrology, when someone outside the field asks what you do…
Megan Wallin-Kerth, Shaun Wissner
Hexagon is showcasing innovation in metrology with the launch of APOLLO, a platform designed to predict failures in CMMs and machine tools before quality and production schedules are affected. This technology highlights the shift from reactive to predictive metrology, saving teams from significant…
Megan Wallin-Kerth, Kevin Atkins
Quality Digest interviewed Kevin Atkins, product manager for Geomagic Freeform at Hexagon’s Manufacturing Intelligence Division. Atkins has more than 25 years of experience in 3D modeling and sculpting. His understanding of organic design not only helps in development and management of Geomagic’s…
Douglas Longenecker
For a long time, manufacturers could afford to treat growth as a series of separate functions.
Marketing drove awareness. Sales handled relationships. Technical teams answered product questions. Operations focused on delivery. Quality ensured standards were met.
That separation is getting harder…
Viola Kirk
With unique device identification (UDI) required under U.S. Food and Drug Administration regulations and the EU Medical Device Regulation, direct part marking has become mandatory for many medical devices, including surgical instruments and implants.
In practice, these requirements are challenged…
Abdullah Al Masum Jabir
In high-volume manufacturing, inspection often struggles to keep pace with production. That challenge becomes even greater when the material itself is naturally variable and the defects aren’t always easy to define consistently. In one high-volume manufacturing environment producing about 20,000…
James Glover
When manufacturing leaders discuss operational challenges, “culture” becomes the catch-all explanation: “Our culture doesn’t support discipline like Asian manufacturers,” or, “We need to change the culture around quality,” or, “It’s a cultural resistance to following procedures.”
This framing…
Jennifer Chu
When fundamental particles are heavier or lighter than expected, physicists’ understanding of the universe can tip into the unknown. A particle that’s just beyond its predicted mass can unravel scientists’ assumptions about the forces that make up all of matter and space. But now, a new precision…
Jesse Walker
In a lot of plants, motion-control equipment stays in service far longer than anyone originally expected. Servo drives, spindle amplifiers, operator panels, encoder interfaces, and power supplies often keep running for years after the OEM has shifted its attention elsewhere.
That long service life…
Donald J. Wheeler
The way we think about our process will shape the way we collect, analyze, and interpret our data when things go wrong. This in turn will shape the actions taken and the results obtained. In this column, we look at an example of the difference between the traditional approach and an alternate…
Cooper Schorr
There’s no shortage of AI in manufacturing. There is, however, a shortage of AI that works when things get complicated—AI that can move the needle.
If you spend any time in industrial service environments, where assets go down and the fix is buried in five different systems and 4,000 pages of…
Scott Ginsberg
At Dozuki, our teams are constantly on the factory floor. We spend hundreds of hours every year walking production lines, sitting in breakrooms with operators, and standing alongside quality managers during high-stakes audits. These site visits have given us a front-row seat to witness the friction…
Jeffrey T. Slovin
Manufacturers can’t control tariffs, supply chain volatility, labor shortages, or geopolitical instability. But they can manage operational efficiency.
Operational excellence is one of the few factors that organizations can fully control. In challenging economic times, quality is an increasingly…
Leena Rinne
Manufacturing leaders often focus on technology, automation, and efficiency metrics to drive productivity. But the reality is that most KPIs on the factory floor still depend on people.
When frontline employees feel valued and supported, they show up more engaged, do better work, and contribute…
Jennifer Chu
The next time you’re scrolling your phone, take a moment to appreciate the feat: This seemingly mundane act is possible thanks to the coordination of 34 muscles, 27 joints, and more than 100 tendons and ligaments in your hand. Indeed, our hands are the nimblest parts of our bodies. Mimicking their…
Stephanie Ojeda
In the high-stakes world of modern manufacturing, environmental, health, and safety (EHS) management is no longer a back-office checkbox. It has become a strategic function that directly affects worker safety, regulatory compliance, operational continuity, and long-term performance. Unfortunately,…
Paul Hanaphy
At the heart of every construction project around the world is a handful of vehicles doing all the heavy lifting. Whether it’s a digger, tractor, or crane, this machinery must be safe, efficient, and fit for purpose—and purpose can depend quite a lot on the project at hand.
It’s often possible to…
Mike Melzer
If you ask 10 different manufacturers to identify their toughest problem, odds are at least five of them will say, “We can’t get parts through the shop floor fast enough.”
When you think about it, that answer shouldn’t come as a surprise. Today’s manufacturing customers demand increasingly shorter…
Dmitriy Osnach
In precision machining there’s a particularly deceptive failure mode. Everything looks fine. The toolpath is clean, cutting is stable, the part’s almost finished. And then you discover that you took off too much somewhere. Or the opposite—you left a small island of stock that now must be removed by…
Mike DeCapua
Buffalo Metrology Inc. (BMI) was recently tasked with reverse engineering an 8 ft outside-diameter clarifier cover used in the mixing/agitation industry. The goal was to inspect the fracture on the tapered face of this component as part of a possible new cover fabrication.
Clarifier agitators are…
Vick Vaishnavi, Quality Digest
Octave, a new company from Hexagon, is one of the latest additions in a string of improvements and innovations. This company will unite several Hexagon departments and functions, increase the efficiency of Hexagon’s digital communication, and provide support for vital infrastructure. Vick Vaishnavi…
Scott Ginsberg
Quality leaders know that an audit rarely fails because a company lacks documentation. It fails because the information exists somewhere but can’t be retrieved, verified, or executed consistently when it matters. For decades, preparing for an audit meant assembling binders, tracking down…
Ben Kitson
Researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology recently found that manufacturing process selection influences product design outcomes, yet is still often guided by experience rather than structured evaluation of alternatives. Understanding the differences between chemical etching and other…
Global Shop Solutions
Picture this: It’s Monday morning. Coffee in hand. The schedule is full. Shipping is stacked. Your biggest jobs are lined up like dominos, ready to fall into place.
Then, the floor supervisor walks into your office with that look. “We can’t start Job 2471.”
You blink. “Why not?”
“Missing parts.”…
Angela O’Sullivan
Regulated manufacturers today face a paradox. As products become more complex and regulatory oversight more stringent, the volume of quality data required to demonstrate compliance has increased dramatically. At the same time, many organizations continue to rely on fragmented systems—documents…