All Features
Bruce Hamilton
In my last post, I reflected on a couple of different whys to interrogate a process—either to solve a problem or to create a process improvement. Here are a few more contextual uses of the question, “Why?” that I’ve found very helpful as a manager and improvement leader.
Purpose expansion
When…
Kevin Turpin
A sound that’s slightly off before a bearing fails. A smell that shows up before a chemical reaction runs hot. A texture that feels wrong before any instrument confirms it. Frontline workers pick up on signals like these constantly and, most of the time, nothing in the plant is built to capture…
Mike Figliuolo
As the leader of a high-performing team, how you distribute and balance work for members of that team is a critical success factor. It needs to be done fairly. Note, I didn’t say equally. Work allocation needs to be done fairly because you want your team to operate on the basis of equality. You…
Gleb Tsipursky
The easiest AI costs to count could become the least important part of the story. SemiAnalysis gives a better name to the harder problem: dark output, the economic value created by AI that remains invisible or badly distorted in GDP, price measures, labor data, and industry accounts.
A company can…
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…
Derek Deasy, Enoch Li
From disagreements over the right strategy to heated recriminations following a project failure, conflicts are a regular part of business life. But most leaders and teams view conflict as a negative that should be avoided at all costs. When disputes do occur, leaders are often quick to apportion…
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…
Grant Ramaley
Medical device companies selling into multiple countries don’t answer to one global regulator. They navigate a patchwork of national requirements that two organizations are trying to align in very different ways.
The International Medical Device Regulators Forum (IMDRF) and the Global…
Dave Gilson
When President Donald Trump announced a wave of tariffs in early 2025, he launched a war of words. Threats and counterthreats flew across the Atlantic and Pacific in a swirl of escalation, retaliation, and reprieve. Economists were hard-pressed to get a clear picture of what was happening beyond…
Quality Digest, Gleb Tsipursky
The ongoing AI boom seems to permeate, and sometimes call into doubt, every aspect of almost everybody’s profession.
Wonder what on earth comes next? You’d do well to ask Gleb Tsipursky, Ph.D. He’s widely acknowledged for his expert reads on the future of work. In fact, the man dubbed “The Office…
Cornelia C. Walther
A CEO doesn’t need to read every AI law to understand why regulation matters. It shows up in subtler ways: a sales team using a chatbot with client data, a hiring manager testing an AI screening tool, a board member asking whether the company has an AI policy. AI governance has moved from the…
Donald J. Wheeler
Some of my colleagues have recently been pushing multivariate charts. These charts combine several different process outcome values into a single number that’s placed on a chart. Unfortunately, this theoretically elegant approach breaks down in practice for reasons that will be explained here.
We…
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 (…
Paul Kreis
Ask a leadership team how many hours went into last quarter’s operating review. Then ask how many of those hours went into a problem the team had already solved once before. Watch how the room reacts to the second question.
That reaction is the tell. Most organizations don’t have language for it,…
Neeta Verma
Product compliance is moving beyond certificates and restricted-substance checks. PFAS restrictions, digital product passports, artificial intelligence, supply-chain transparency, and sustainability increasingly require manufacturers to connect regulatory knowledge with reliable product, material,…
Mike Figliuolo
“Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.”—Michael Corleone, The Godfather: Part III
If you’ve ever moved to a new role in your company, you’ve probably felt like Michael Corleone at some point. The folks from your old role keep sucking you back in, asking for help, asking you to…
Pascal Terrien
In the electrotechnology sector, we know one thing for certain: Trust can’t be imposed; it must be built. Standardization enables us to build it every day. As the world grapples with climate, digital, and societal challenges, manufacturers, electricity producers, grid operators, conformity…
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…
Stephanie Ojeda
The recent multistate outbreak of cyclosporiasis is a powerful reminder that food quality involves more than appearance, consistency, and shelf life. It requires an integrated approach to food safety, supplier control, traceability, risk management, and continuous improvement.
By mid-July 2026,…
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…
NIST
From our bank accounts to smartphones, all our sensitive data and devices are protected with a technology known as cryptography. Present-day cryptography essentially uses a very challenging set of math problems that are nearly impossible for current computers to solve. These math problems act as a…
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…
Florian Harzenetter
In industrial manufacturing, quality failures carry consequences far beyond the factory floor. A single defect can trigger warranty claims, production downtime for customers, costly recalls, and long-term damage to brand reputation. Yet despite significant investments in quality programs, many…
Roderick Munro
As this article is being written, the (final draft) FDIS ISO 9001:2026 global vote has concluded, and we should soon see the new published requirements.
If published as drafted, which is widely expected, one of the most significant changes is an increased emphasis on demonstrating the…