All Features
Megan Wallin-Kerth, Vick Vaishnavi
Octave is taking AI-driven innovation seriously: That much was clear from its OctaveLive keynote this summer in Austin, Texas, where the focus remained on amplifying human capability as well as hiring more people, not fewer, to maintain quality.
Vick Vaishnavi, the head of Octave Reliance, took…
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…
Neeta Verma
Manufacturing Day fell on Oct. 2 this year. Manufacturers opened their doors and showed the public what modern manufacturing looks like, and, hopefully, built some interest in manufacturing careers.
Visitors saw robots, sensors, software, and connected production systems. What they may not have…
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…
Donald J. Wheeler
When a time series displays a pattern that repeats itself periodically it is said to have seasonal effects. The word seasonal may apply to days, weeks, months, quarters, or any pattern that recurs regularly throughout the data. While these seasonal effects will complicate our analysis, their…
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…
Paras Kharwal
On Sept. 16, 2026, ISO published the sixth edition of ISO 9001. Within days, the summaries arrived: what changed in Clause 5, what the new Annex A says, how the 2024 climate amendment carries forward. They’re useful, but they answer the questions certified organizations ask least often. The…
Davide Bertoletti
Adding a control element to any system may seem like an easy path, even a necessary one. Redundancy reassures the stakeholders and the auditors, and it might become a sales pitch for the customers. Removing such elements is, on the other hand, more challenging; it’s an effort that requires…
Declan Fitzsimons, Jennifer Petriglieri, Gianpiero Petriglieri
M ore than 80% of restructuring efforts in firms fail. Most explanations focus on poor execution or bad strategy. Our research points to something more uncomfortable: Embarking on organizational transformation isn’t always a rational response to a business challenge but can be a defensive reaction…
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…
Katie Gilbert
William Overman began his Ph.D. program at Stanford Graduate School of Business at an auspicious moment—just two months before ChatGPT publicly launched in November 2022, exploding widely held understandings of what machines can do.
Even as Overman began enlisting AI for his research, he grew wary…
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…
Megan King
Painter Bob Ross taught us that “happy accidents” can make beautiful art. Happy accidents also happen in science when experiments take research in unexpected directions. One dramatic example is Sir Alexander Fleming’s accidental discovery of penicillin.
Not all unexpected scientific developments…
Steve DeWitt
A problem shows up, and the fix usually arrives five minutes later.
“We need more training.”
“We need a better system.”
“We need another person.”
“We need a new checklist.”
Sometimes one of those answers is exactly right. Too often it’s not. The organization has named a solution before even…
Mike Figliuolo
People pitch ideas all the time. Most of those pitches never get heard. Why? Because they don’t consider the audience.
I get ideas pitched to me all the time. My inbox is flooded by emails from PR professionals asking me to carry guest blog posts, do book reviews, share their infographics, and…
Konstantin Saifoulline
It’s one of the most dangerous sentences you can hear on a factory floor: “The drawing is updated, and we’re good to go.”
It sounds like the finish line. We fixed it! Nothing else to do here.
I’ve watched this play out countless times in different hardware teams. A part caused a headache on the…
Ron Cowen
Four years ago, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) researcher Cyrus Daugherty developed an algorithm to virtually unroll the tightly wrapped layers of a cylindrical lithium-ion battery. Daugherty’s software transformed X-ray images of the battery, taken at different angles, into…
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…
Megan Wallin-Kerth, Greg Hutchins
Given that AI has been this century’s biggest disruptor for nearly every industry in the world, it has been met with justifiable levels of angst, anger, questioning, and skepticism. It’s as if our world has essentially been turned into a version of Jurassic Park, where, instead of dinosaurs, we…
Santoshi Muriki
As food companies stand up digital traceability platforms to meet FSMA 204 requirements—now due by July 2028 after the compliance date extension—a quieter problem is showing up behind the deadline itself.
Most of these platforms are being deployed alongside existing quality management systems (QMS…
Neeta Verma
ISO 9001:2026, the sixth edition of the quality management systems standard, was published on Sept. 16, 2026, replacing ISO 9001:2015. ISO lists the new edition as Edition 6, 2026-09. ISO/TC 176 confirmed that the Final Draft International Standard (FDIS) was approved ahead of publication.
However…
Silke von Gemmingen
Highly reflective metallic surfaces are among the most challenging inspection targets in machine vision. Reflections obscure details; defects often become visible only from certain angles, and the quality of manual visual inspections fluctuates throughout the workday.
The Austrian company Danube…