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Across industries that depend on advanced composite components, the common feature has been that meaningful quality inspection happens at the end of the production process. 

Robots are no longer confined to fenced cells performing repetitive tasks on the factory floor. 

Machine vision cameras have crossed a threshold.

The landscape of automotive quality control is undergoing a profound transformation. 

If you’ve ever had a vaccine or a routine blood draw and didn’t even feel the “pinch,” congratulations, you’ve been a silent witness to a manufacturing miracle.

Senthilkumar (Senthil) Thiyagarajan, PhD., is a supply chain analytics professional at Medline Industries, specializing in digital twins, supply chain optimization, and Industry 4.0 technologies. 

Lean thinking is often associated with manufacturing floors, production lines, and complex value stream maps. Yet waste exists in every type of process. Once you begin to see it, you realize that inefficiencies appear not only in factories but also in the everyday services we interact with.

Becoming a Fellow in a professional society such as the American Society for Quality (ASQ), Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), American Institute of Architects (AIA), or Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) is a recognition of sustained achievement throughout one’s career, not merely a starting point. 

Mid-sized manufacturers are increasingly being squeezed on one side by large companies with the budgets and expertise needed to succeed in today’s fast-paced environment, and on the other by smaller, more entrepreneurial producers who are better able to adapt, specialize, and grow to meet the continually evolving needs of customers.

This is the fourth article of a five-article series on lighting design for machine vision.