Insights & Articles
Field notes on quality leadership, crisis management and operational excellence — from the shop floor to the boardroom.
Eighty percent of corrective actions are Band-Aids on bullet wounds
Most corrective actions do not correct anything. They suppress symptoms, close findings, and guarantee the problem returns in six months. Here is what real corrective action looks like — and why so few organisations do it.
When you pay for quality metrics, you get metrics — not quality
Ford is tying bonuses to quality after massive recalls exposed dashboard gaps. But financial incentives alone won't fix a culture that buries defects instead of finding them.
Your calibration interval is a guess. Prove it.
Every measuring instrument in your plant has a calibration interval. Most of those intervals were set by the manufacturer, accepted without question, and never validated. Here is why that is a problem — and what to do about it.
Your management review is a status meeting pretending to be governance
The management review required by ISO 9001 is supposed to be the engine of continuous improvement. In most companies, it is a PowerPoint parade where nothing is decided and nothing changes.
Audit-Ready Every Day: How We Cut EASA Audit Findings by 50% in One Cycle
Most plants prepare for audits. The best plants stop preparing — because their daily operating system already produces the evidence auditors ask for. Here is the approach that halved our EASA findings.
The tier nobody audits: why your supplier quality is a controlled assumption, not a managed fact
Your IATF or AS9100 badge says your system is robust. It says nothing about what is happening two tiers down, in the shop you have never visited.
Quality is the only moat they can't copy
Teardowns can copy geometry and materials in months, but not decades of quality systems, supplier development, and process control—that's Toyota's real moat.
Why your CAPA system produces paperwork instead of improvements
Corrective and Preventive Action systems are supposed to drive continuous improvement. In most organisations, they drive documentation. After auditing CAPA systems for twenty years, here is why yours is broken — and the four changes that will fix it.
The cost of quality conversation executives refuse to have
Every executive says quality is a priority. Almost none of them want to see the actual number — the true cost of poor quality in their organisation. After two decades of fighting for that conversation, here is what I have learned.
Zero Escalations: Crisis Management as a Quality Discipline
Escalations don't happen when problems are big. They happen when trust is small. How we resolved every critical customer escalation to zero within one quarter — and kept it there.
Why your internal audit team needs a rebel
The best internal auditor I ever hired was the one who made everyone uncomfortable. She found things that the certification body missed, challenged the quality manager, and saved the company from a recall. Every audit team needs someone like her.
The 98% Playbook: Cutting the Cost of Poor Quality with QRQC, A3 and Q-Wall
Failure costs are not a quality metric — they are a leadership metric. The exact three-tool system we used to take 98% of failure costs out of an automotive operation, and why most COPQ programs stall at 30%.
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