Michelle: So to start off with, do you think it's important for every employee to have a base level knowledge of GD&T? I know you've said it's great for sales, engineering, production, quality, just everyone to have this knowledge.

Dustin: So what I've seen in the field, we have customers all over the Midwest and we actually have our training program nationwide and everything, I can always make the joke that I see everything from solo cups to spaceship parts. So we see everything in between and a wide range of different GD&T on different prints. Some companies are say, “Aw, we don't need it.” Some companies overdo it sometimes and it's all in between.

Going from the top down, everybody learning what GD&T is and knowing at least the basic skills of it, of why it's on blueprints, basic skills of how to measure it. It's really helpful if you think of sales is selling to a company, say, Hey, we can make your parts. We put this GD&T on there. Sales will then know what it is, how production is going to manufacture it, and then how quality is going to check on it.

One of the scary things that I see at some companies is that quality doesn't know that they're going to be measuring something until it's already being produced and then they realize, Hey, we're not able to measure this with the equipment that we have. So we, they either need to outsource it to a company like our contract inspection team here at ATI or wherever they are in the United States.

Or they have to buy capital equipment and then it's a big, you know, price tag on there. So that's for sales wise knowing, Hey, these are our capabilities is what we can do. This is what we can handle when they see that stuff. And then with production, you go to production and you go to the manufacturing floor, realizing that all the machining processes that go through, creating these different tolerances, what's it going to take, what care do we have to take with it?

And then with quality, GD&T is super important because we can actually make sure that we are passing good parts with older standards. There were some faults that, um, you could actually pass bad parts without GD&T. GD&T is making sure that everything that's going out the door is a good product, but if we don't know what it is, how to check it, how to manufacture it. It's a very scary topic. When I have people come through GD&T training, everybody's kind of really scared of this profile tolerance that everybody talks about. One, a lot of universities didn't teach it to design engineers and then quality folk maybe never got a class or never knew how to check it or anything like that, that, you know, this profile is super scary. But when you really break it down and you see like in the, in my class of profiles, not as scary if we just learn what it is, how to measure it and how to get it out the door. Profile is actually making sure that everything is, the whole surface is good, not just maybe a quick caliper measurement. And when we kind of break it down that way, that really scary profile word kind of gets softened a little bit. And we realized that, hey, a lot of things really should have GD&T. And we thought it was over engineered when actually it's how it should be engineered, how it should be manufactured, and how it should be checked. That makes a lot of sense. I've heard people say that they're kind of intimidated by GD&T or it seems really hard.