All Features
Mike Huey
John owned a distribution company, and he was the entire sales department. Every major deal ran through him. Every key relationship lived in his phone. He was missing his daughter’s dance recitals. His wife told him he was never home. The business was growing, but John had become its ceiling.
If…
Quality Digest
(TRIGO: Nanterre, France) -- TRIGO is deploying practical AI solutions to help manufacturers and transportation OEMs anticipate supplier risks, accelerate continuous improvement, and strengthen supply base quality.
Already in operation, these solutions have reduced supplier assessment times by…
Bruce Hamilton
According to Shigeo Shingo, a subtle but important distinction exists between problem-solving and continuous improvement.
I grew up in manufacturing with the idea that problem solving was standardization kaizen: a means to return flagging process performance to an established standard. For example…
Ken Maren
Metrology, the scientific study of measurement, has never been faster or more precise. Yet many quality problems that land on a CMM table were decided weeks earlier, when someone measured against a drawing that was no longer the approved one.
Closing that gap isn’t a measurement problem. It’s a…
Lily Fang
Who makes the better call: a manager with a wide-ranging career or a narrow one; a doctor who trusts their instincts, or one who sticks to clinical guidelines; a human recruiter, or an algorithm that assesses job candidates?
In this roundup of INSEAD research, we look at how people and machines…
Radhika Kumar
When hospitals treat device downtime as isolated, one-off incidents, they miss a critical opportunity to improve system reliability, manage long-term costs, and safeguard patient care. Downtime patterns often reveal far more than a single equipment failure; they point to the underlying condition of…
Stephanie Ojeda
A longtime raw-material supplier exits the market, and a manufacturer needs a replacement quickly. The new supplier completes a questionnaire, receives approval, and begins shipping. Months later, delivery slips and defects increase. A broad audit produces a passing score, but the problems continue…
FARO CREAFORM
If you engage in a game of word association, chances are when you hear the term Formula 1, responses will be terms associated with speed: race car, acceleration, fast, momentum, velocity...
But as much as Formula 1 is about speed, it’s also about controlling and channeling that speed with…
CheeYee Tang, Robert Stea, John Wiltberger
Recent cyberattacks on U.S. water and wastewater systems (WWS) are highlighting the escalating threat to our nation’s critical infrastructure and the practical challenges of securing it.
These incidents underscore an important challenge: The connectivity that utilities depend upon must be designed…
Akhilesh Gulati
Before something important leaves the ground, someone has to be willing to ask an uncomfortable question: What could make this fail?
That question takes on a different meaning when the “something” is a spacecraft.
During the development of NASA’s X-43A, an experimental hypersonic aircraft, the…
Angie Basiouny
When the Covid-19 pandemic struck in early 2020, all the dithering about remote work stopped virtually overnight. Working from home wasn’t perfect, but people made it work.
At first, remote employees were triumphant as they checked off their personal and professional to-do lists from the comfort…
Harish Jose
In this article I’ll be looking at the shape of this question regarding complexity that comes from Plato. In the Euthyphro dialogue, Socrates asks whether a thing is pious because the gods love it, or the gods love it because it is pious. If piety is defined by the gods’ love, it has no ground of…
Gleb Tsipursky
On a Tuesday morning, a support agent in Dublin closes a tricky ticket while an engineer in Bengaluru ships a fix, and a sales manager in my hometown of Columbus, Ohio, joins a customer call spanning four time zones. None of them set foot in the same building, yet the work clicks.
New findings in…
Etienne Nichols
Most early-stage medical device companies never decide to skip a quality management system (QMS). They just never decide to buy one. The founding team opens a shared drive, builds a spreadsheet for design inputs and outputs, starts a document register in another tab, and agrees to sort out the real…
William A. Levinson
Leadership responsibility is included in ISO 9001:2026, Clause 5.1.1, to promote quality culture and ethical behavior. A strong argument could be made for adding safety as well.
Ethics has a very wide range of applications, including the need to avoid conflicts of interest (like recommending a…
Bill Fisher, Ryan Galluzzo
As AI matures, enterprises and customers are rapidly deploying agents seeking to unlock the next level of automation and productivity. Agentic AI shows potential to handle a multitude of use cases, from buying personal items on Amazon to customer service applications to enterprise security and…
Mike Figliuolo
Projects go off the rails all the time. Some statistics I’ve seen say only one in eight projects can truly be declared successful.
Why are we so horrible at executing projects, especially when we have all these “tried and true” project management methodologies?
There are seven deadly killers of…
CANEA
Establishing a long-term improvement effort is one of the best investments an organization can make. This is because almost all industries and businesses today are in, or facing, a major digital transformation where business models, services, and working methods are rapidly changing. To succeed in…
Cornelia C. Walther
When OpenAI introduced ChatGPT on Nov. 30, 2022, it arrived as a research preview: a conversational system that could answer follow-up questions, draft fluent text, and give millions of people their first direct experience of generative AI. The early mood was experimental. People tested it, teased…
Lexi Sharkov
They may seem simple, but standard operating procedures (SOPs) are surprisingly tricky. On the surface, they describe how a specific process is carried out at your organization. Pretty straightforward, right?
In reality, there are a lot of requirements for writing a good SOP, and auditors have a…
Stephanie Ojeda
A quality team’s supplier toolbox is deep. Supplier questionnaires, PPAP, supplier scorecards, incoming inspection, audits, corrective action—the list goes on.
In my years of experience as a quality leader, the challenge I see is matching each one to the right stage in the supplier process and the…
Gleb Tsipursky
A new Financial Times analysis reports that U.S. technology companies have cut nearly 140,000 jobs in 2026 while pouring record sums into artificial intelligence infrastructure. The obvious story is that AI is replacing workers. The more important story is that executives are using AI to justify…
Susan Robertson
Six weeks after a global manufacturer’s leadership team approved a group of promising new ideas, someone asked for an update. There wasn’t one.
Not because the ideas had been rejected. Not because priorities had changed. Not because anyone had decided innovation no longer mattered. The projects…
Brant Engelhart
Poor quality rarely announces itself as a single, contained problem. In manufacturing environments, it may first appear as a rejected batch, a scrapped component, an unexpected line stoppage, or a customer complaint that requires investigation. These visible failures matter, and most manufacturers…
Keith Stouffer, Michael Galler
Recent cyberattacks highlight the growing threat to operational technology (OT) used in critical infrastructure. Whether you work for an infrastructure owner/operator or are a consumer of an infrastructure service, recent events have made it clear that cybersecurity is an important factor in…