Insights & Articles
Field notes on quality leadership, crisis management and operational excellence — from the shop floor to the boardroom.
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.
The audit finding I see in 80% of management reviews
Management review is supposed to be the engine of continuous improvement. In most companies it is a checkbox meeting that produces no decisions, no actions, and no evidence. Here is the pattern and how to fix it.
The consultant who audited your auditor
After two decades of audits on both sides of the table, I have seen great auditors who transform organisations and poor ones who rubber-stamp mediocrity. The quality of your auditor determines the quality of your certification.
The quality system I would build if I started over tomorrow
After twenty years of inheriting, fixing, and rebuilding quality systems across automotive and aerospace, here is the system I would build from scratch — stripped of legacy, convention, and the weight of "how we have always done it."
Speed without quality gates isn't productivity. It's deferred rework.
Here is an uncomfortable observation. The software industry published findings last week: AI coding tools slashed cycle times, and software defects climbed right alongside them. Stability dropped.…
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