The new healthcare venture formed by Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase announced June 20, 2018, that Harvard professor and well-known author Atul Gawande would be the company’s CEO. The idea for the new company is to innovate by cutting costs from the healthcare system, starting with the more than one million employees of the three companies behind the venture.

It’s an open secret that many automotive and aerospace manufacturers have unacceptably high defects and costs. And where defects are on the rise, quality costs aren’t far behind.

Even one defect could mean recalling an entire batch, a problem that can cost thousands of dollars per minute if it means a line stoppage for a customer. In extreme cases, a customer’s entire plant might have to shut down, with the full cost billed to you.

Tensile testing of materials is critical to a wide array of industries, which means preparing specimens for testing is equally important. If a specimen is not prepared correctly, the test results will be inaccurate; this is costly if a material fails a test that it should have passed, and potentially catastrophic if it passes a test it should have failed.

First article inspection (FAI) is that critical step between design and production which verifies that the factory’s production line can manufacture a part on a mass scale. Aerospace, automotive, and medical device manufacturers cannot skip FAI. But, manufacturers of any durable goods that skip FAI do so at tremendous risk of delayed production and skyrocketing development costs.