All Features
Henry Nonnemaker
When doctors need to deliver precise doses of medicine on a strict schedule, they often administer it intravenously. Intravenous drug delivery methods need to carefully control the flow of medicine into a patient. Knowing the medicine’s flow rate—or the volume of fluid flowing into the patient each…
Sam Somerville
Trust is the foundation of business and commerce. Every transaction, partnership, and working relationship depends, to some degree, on confidence that others will deliver on their commitments.
In business, we often focus on customer trust that products and services will meet their needs and…
Rick Heilshorn
Manufacturing has a people problem, but not in the way we usually talk about it.
We talk about the skilled-labor shortage. We talk about retirements. We talk about doing more with fewer people. Usually those are treated as separate problems.
They aren’t. Rather, they are compounding.
Deloitte and…
Neeta Verma
Extreme heat, drought, wildfires, floods, record-low rivers, and rising energy demand have defined much of the summer of 2026. But for businesses, the important story isn’t simply that weather records are being broken. It’s where those physical changes enter the operating system of a company.
A…
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…
Akhilesh Gulati
The real test of a quality system isn’t what happens when everything works. It’s what happens when something doesn’t.
Recently, two of my cameras failed. They were newer versions of models whose older predecessors still worked, so I contacted the manufacturer to report the problem.
I expected a…
Adam Zewe
Researchers at MIT have overcome a major challenge holding back the real-world deployment of microwave quantum technologies for advanced signal processing and secure communications.
The team developed a scalable platform that generates pairs of highly correlated radio frequency waves without bulky…
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…
Neeta Verma
The European Commission’s latest Joint Actions on Compliance of Products (JACOP) project offers a useful starting point for understanding why products can still fail environmental compliance checks even when manufacturers have established compliance programs.
Published in June 2026, the JACOP…
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…
Josh Peterson
Quality management system software helps life sciences organizations manage documents, training, quality events, change controls, audits, and other regulated processes in one controlled environment.
Most electronic quality management systems (eQMS) offer some version of these core capabilities.…
FARO CREAFORM
Quality control processes are never about single-inspection scenarios—and yet most inspection systems are. Inspection requirements constantly shift between part dimensions, hard-to-reach areas, quick validations, and precise feature measurements, creating daily challenges for QC professionals.
As…
Paul Hanaphy
In the world of mining, structural collapse is a worst-case scenario. Whenever ground gives way, it puts miners at risk—and it often leads to site closure.
Once all miners are accounted for, it’s time for the recovery operation to begin. Limited visibility often means it’s difficult to assess…
Mike Figliuolo
I tried to achieve some balance in my life by taking a few days off to go fishing on Lake Erie with my son. We chartered a boat for three days—just the two of us. If you’ve never been walleye fishing on a trolling boat (we hadn’t), it’s a bit different from what you would expect, and it was a lot…
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…