Insights & Articles
Field notes on quality leadership, crisis management and operational excellence — from the shop floor to the boardroom.
Prompt injection turns your AI agent into the insider nobody vetted
Twenty years ago I walked a new hire through a plant and told them: the most dangerous person on this floor isn't the one who breaks in through the loading bay. It's the one with a badge, a login,…
A 99.9% battery yield isn't quality. It's a safety incident on a delay.
A 99.9% battery yield sounds impressive—until you realize that the 0.1% passing final QC could be the cells that cause thermal incidents 18 months later in the field.
A mature product on a new assembly line is still a quality prototype
A proven product doesn't make a new assembly line proven. Boeing's 737 expansion reveals why quality systems must be rebuilt and re-validated from first principles every time capacity grows.
Volume before stability isn't scaling. It's multiplying failure.
Vestas said what nobody in manufacturing wants to hear. The company told its own sector to slow down — not because demand is softening, but because production velocity has outrun the quality systems…
Your predictive system isn't failing at prediction. It's failing at response.
Predictive systems generate signals, but organizations rarely engineer the response. The result is a silent alert backlog nobody owns or measures.
ISO 42001 doesn't care if your AI works. It cares if you manage it.
Manufacturers are bolting AI onto production lines with zero integration into quality systems, and ISO 42001 is the standard that will expose that gap.
BMW deployed a humanoid. Nobody wrote the PFMEA for it.
BMW deployed a humanoid with no PFMEA for it. The real risk isn't whether adaptive robots work—it's whether the quality architecture around them can contain variation that learns.
Everyone has the certificate. Few have the discipline.
AS9100 certification is the easy part. Building the daily discipline that makes the standard work takes years of unglamorous practice.
Inspection without stop authority isn't quality control. It's surveillance.
AI inspection without stop authority isn't quality control—it's surveillance. Detection without response breaks the foundation that every quality system from Jidoka to PFMEA relies on.
Five-second rule on the shop floor — why visual management beats digital dashboards
The best information system I ever implemented cost 200 euros and took twenty minutes to build. It was a board with magnets. It outperformed a 200,000-euro digital dashboard. Here is why visual management works when technology does not.
The AI quality dashboard nobody asked for and nobody uses
Every vendor is selling an AI-powered quality dashboard. I have implemented three of them. Two were failures. Here is what went wrong, what the vendors do not tell you, and what actually works when it comes to quality data.
Foxconn lost 11 million files. The quality damage outlasts the downtime.
Foxconn's 11 million stolen files highlight why exfiltration, not downtime, is the lasting threat. Quality directors must join cyber response before institutional knowledge walks out the door.
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