All Features
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,…
Rob Moorey
The healthcare technology management (HTM) industry is facing a looming labor shortage and must attract enough skilled professionals to meet future demand. The industry is grappling with an aging workforce, a shrinking traditional talent pool, and increasingly complex medical equipment. Healthcare…
Vick Vaishnavi
The complexity of today’s manufacturing operations and ever-evolving digital disruptions, including the biggest of all, artificial intelligence (AI), require standards that set the pace and keep organizations around the world aligned with what quality looks like.
ISO 9001 has been the…
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…
Phanish Puranam
When a CEO tells me they wish their employees were more capable of “self-organizing,” I usually ask what exactly that means. The answer matters for more than academic precision; leaders drawn to the notion of decentralization routinely turn to self-organization as the mechanism that will deliver it…
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…
Aimee Levitt
The premise of AI large language models (LLMs) is that any problem can be solved by vacuuming up as much information as possible, running it through probability models, and performing complex calculations to make predictions and come up with the optimal solution.
Another premise behind LLMs is…
Megan Wallin-Kerth
Every industry has blind spots. Sometimes the problem is not a lack of expertise, or even information, but of connection.
While in Austin, Texas, at a recent Octave Live OnTour event, sitting in a large room filled with people from different industries, different methods, different states,…
Adam Zewe
The deployment of automated software systems called AI agents has recently exploded. A November 2025 report by MIT Sloan School of Management and Boston Consulting Group found that 35% of surveyed businesses had already deployed AI agents, while another 44% planned to implement agentic AI soon.
To…
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…
NIST
Whether you’re a researcher stumped by a mystery compound or a manufacturer perplexed by an unknown substance, there’s a major resource you can rely on: a library of chemical fingerprints, known as mass spectra, that the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has maintained for…
Rick Young
Manufacturers are exploring artificial intelligence, but most are still struggling to scale it across operations. According to the latest Sikich Manufacturing Industry Pulse survey, 92% of manufacturers are actively exploring AI. Yet roughly three-quarters of respondents remain in research or pilot…
Bruce Hamilton
Walk into almost any factory, hospital, office, or warehouse, and you’ll likely encounter tier boards with a familiar set of colors: green, yellow, and red. Green means good. Red means bad. And yellow? Well, it has… some issues.
I began thinking about this after a discussion with my good friend…
Megan Wallin-Kerth
Speaking with experts who love their jobs usually makes you aware of two things simultaneously: 1) how much you don’t know, and 2) how much you’d like to know. My conversations with Prashant Darisi and Vick Vaishnavi were no exception. I walked away with an appreciation for the decades of expertise…
Chip Bell
Theodore Roosevelt skinny-dipped in the Potomac River, owned a pet hyena, boxed in the White House, and reportedly drank a gallon of coffee a day (a legend that inspired Maxwell House to attribute the phrase “good to the last drop” to him). At his funeral, a New York police captain said, “It was…
Donald J. Wheeler
Walter Shewhart’s average and range chart had been around for more than a decade when, in 1941, W. J. Jennett came up with the chart for individual values and moving ranges (an XmR chart). The XmR is built on the same foundation as the average and range chart, but it involves two unique ideas.…
Gleb Tsipursky
The next advantage in business will come from leaders who can manage machine labor as deliberately as they manage people. Professor Ethan Mollick at Wharton framed this as AI management after watching executive MBA students use ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Claude Code, and Google Antigravity to build…
John Tschohl
Most organizations are reluctant to spend time and money training their workforce on customer service.
There are a variety of reasons:1. It will do no good.2. By the time they’re trained, the employees will leave.3. It’s common sense. Everyone already understands customer service.4. It’s too…
Cornelia C. Walther
Every boardroom has heard it. Every procurement checklist includes it. Every investor deck now features it somewhere between the mission statement and the revenue model. “AI ethics” has become the term that signals seriousness without necessarily delivering it. That gap deserves examination—because…
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…
Mike Figliuolo
During times of excessive work and crisis, something has to give. Sometimes brutal prioritization is the only way to make it through those challenging times with your sanity intact.
It happens to all of us. The universe, in its infinite wisdom, determines this month, of all months, is the month to…