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Heather Wade is our 2026 Quality Professional of the Year, as well as the president of the Heather Wade Group.

Michelle: We're so happy you got the award.

Heather: Oh, my goodness. It is such a thrill, such an honor, and I wasn't expecting to be able to give a little thank you speech. So, I wanted to take a moment and say thank you to Quality Magazine, to BNP Media, for all of the support and collaboration over the years.

It's a wonderful partnership and I look forward to many more years.

Michelle: Yes, us too. So, you also have been everywhere at the show. You're doing a lot of presentations and you did a workshop yesterday on measurement. Could you tell us a little bit about that? It was about calibration and appropriate calibrations, choosing the vendors.

What would you say is one thing that manufacturers don't seem to understand about calibration these days?

Heather: There are a few things that manufacturers don't keep in mind about calibrations. One, what equipment needs to be calibrated. And then with the definition of calibration being a comparison against a standard that has a known value and assigned in an associated measurement uncertainty, a lot of times, not just manufacturers, but lab people may be thinking and believing that we can't calibrate it because we can't adjust it.

And the good news is, that because calibration by definition is just a comparison between what you're trying to calibrate, what you're trying to know what the measurement is, comparing it to a standard that has better accuracy and a known, an estimated uncertainty and an assigned value, out of that comparison becomes a value you can assign to the previously unknown or what you wanted to prove, as well as that propagation of measurement uncertainty.

So, calibration must have the associated measurement uncertainty for it to be valid. That's one thing that the manufacturers and labs sometimes miss in that understanding.

The other thing is knowing what they need for calibration. And a struggle for a lot of manufacturers, a lot of people in labs, as well as the calibration vendors, are when somebody just hands them a piece of equipment and says, calibrate this.

Part of it is the person handing the equipment doesn't know what needs to be calibrated, what measurements are used on it.

So that's a struggle point.

And then for the lab that is there to calibrate it, they're like, okay, we're going to make our best guess about what you use for this.

So, the point of the session yesterday was to dispel some of the myths about calibration, what calibration means.