Insights & Articles
Field notes on quality leadership, crisis management and operational excellence — from the shop floor to the boardroom.
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%.
Your risk register is a spreadsheet of wishes
Risk-based thinking was supposed to transform quality management. Instead, most companies built a risk register, filed it, and forgot it. Here is why your risk register is not managing risk — and what to do about it.
Your customer complaints process is designed to lose information
Every company has a customer complaint process. Most of them filter, sanitise, and destroy the most valuable information the customer provides. Here is how to fix a system that is actively working against improvement.
"I gave my operators the authority to stop the line. Here is what happened."
Stopping the production line is usually a management decision. I gave that authority to the people closest to the problem — the operators. The results were not what anyone expected, and the cultural shift was bigger than the quality improvement.
Your preventive maintenance schedule is reactive maintenance with better marketing
Most plants have a PM schedule that looks impressive on paper and fails in practice. After auditing maintenance systems for twenty years, here is why your preventive maintenance is not preventing anything — and what world-class maintenance actually looks like.
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