Insights & Articles
Field notes on quality leadership, crisis management and operational excellence — from the shop floor to the boardroom.
Traceability lives in the database. The proof is on the part.
Here is an uncomfortable observation from two decades in automotive and aerospace plants: the mark is the first record in your traceability chain and the last process anyone qualifies. Recently a…
The work comes home. The process knowledge didn't.
Here is an uncomfortable observation: in the space of one week, Honeywell Aerospace has said publicly that it is rethinking its outsourcing strategy and may pull work back in-house, while GE…
The machine is repeatable. The nugget is assumed.
A market research house published its forecast this week: steady growth for resistance spot welding machines through 2033, pulled along by EV body structures. I read it twice, looking for the word…
The robot has no history. The audit pretends it does.
Here is an uncomfortable observation from two decades of qualifying suppliers with a launch clock running: when the buyer's own engineers walk a supplier's plant, the audit stops measuring capability…
The models vote. The failure is unanimous.
A TRiSCM vendor announced 514% growth this quarter, selling platforms that watch what AI agents do. I read the number twice, then thought about a gate interlock on a transfer press I used to walk…
The QMS market is booming. The quality system isn't for sale.
Here is an uncomfortable observation – the fastest-growing product in quality right now is software, and none of it can close a nonconformance. Market analysts report a surge in QMS platform spending…
The PPAP is on file. The process it approved is gone.
Here is an uncomfortable observation: the boots that fell apart under US Marines during a NATO exercise in the Arctic were almost certainly approved boots. Somewhere sits a qualification file –…
The bottleneck isn't the factory. It's the qualification queue.
Vestas says the wind industry must slow down to scale up — because audits, capability studies, and PPAP queues run on calendar time, not budget.
Quality is the operating system. The kernel isn't for sale.
Here is an uncomfortable observation. Now that quality is being sold as an operating system, most plants will buy the screenshot instead. The ZEISS Factory of the Future coverage – quality as the new…
The audit found seven observations. The process failed once.
Here is an uncomfortable observation from two decades on both sides of audit tables, automotive and aerospace: the findings list is the cheapest quality data a plant receives all year, and most of it…
The value matrix ranks vendors. It can't rank your process.
Nucleus Research has published its QMS Technology Value Matrix. Give it a week. Three vendors will have demos booked with your CFO, and one of them will already have sent a deck with a competitor's…
Their plant got encrypted. The shipments didn't stop.
Black Kite's 2026 report puts manufacturing at the top of the ransomware table – 1,183 victim companies through July, and no longer a US-only story. Every plant manager I know will read that as an IT…
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