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Thomas Balch of Hexagon talks with Michelle Bangert, managing editor of Quality, from the MAX Show in Nashville, TN.

Michelle: Can you tell us what's new with your organization?

Thomas: Well, the past year or so, we have had some leadership changes at the top. So, that's new and encouraging. It's always encouraging when you have new leadership that is interested in the products, not only that, but interested in the people willing to invest some resources to make some new products better and things like that, so that's encouraging.

One of the things that we do have coming is a new CMM that we've just launched, but to tell you about that, you have to go back several years, back in about 2000. I'll date myself a little bit, but back about 2000, we released the Global CMM. The Global for the past couple decades has been a staple in the quality world, the most reliable, the fastest CMM.

But as things change in this industry, so does the equipment. So, we've invested a lot of resources and used a lot of that knowledge from the Global to launch our new Maestro CMM.

Michelle: So, when you talk to customers today, are there certain challenges that you've seen a lot of them facing?

Thomas: Sure. I mean, there's always quality challenges. I mean, let's face it, quality seems to always be perceived as a bottleneck in the manufacturing world. We don't make chips. do things of that nature, so there's always that bottleneck and part of that challenge with manufacturing is to show them how important quality is, return on investment, and justify the purchase of quality equipment.

So, it's always a challenge in manufacturing quality.