Michelle Bangert

Data isn’t everything. But it’s perhaps the main thing standing between you and a successful project. Continuous improvement takes effort, but more than anything, it takes solid information and analysis. In other words, wouldn’t it be more helpful to use statistical process control to find out where your process is going wrong, rather than just a hunch?

The Automate Show brought thousands of robots to Chicago this week. The robots were serving ice cream and beer, playing music, and in one case, boxing. They were wowing attendees with their speed and service, musical skills (the KUKA ones wore bows for their performance), and fight demos. Machine vision and image analysis was also on display.

If you’ve ever suffered through a difficult lesson, you were likely not in Gary Griffith’s class. Griffith teaches geometric dimensioning and tolerancing (GD&T), quality audits, measuring and gaging, and other quality-related subjects, and though the technical aspects could make for a dry learning experience, his students say Griffith makes it fun.

Most people would agree that quality is essential to have but difficult to execute. Among the many tools available, a quality management system (QMS) can provide a roadmap toward better quality. 

Picture a plant floor that is updating operators, managers and even other plants about potential machine problems. It would connect one machine to another and one system to the next. In order to maintain the highest quality, the systems would monitor any data that seems out of order or check on the line in process.

Whether you’re training employees, tracking defects, or conducting audits, a good quality management system should make life easier.

If you ever get a chance to watch an aircraft being built, take it. Walking through the aircraft hangar at Northrop Grumman’s Palmdale, CA, facility, you will see two unmanned aircraft, each with a 130-foot wingspan, parked behind yellow tape. The scale of the aircraft and the desert setting make it feel like a movie set.

The pervasiveness of rubber and plastic products is hard to overstate. They are everywhere, and they have been around for a while. In the case of rubber, it’s been in use since the early 1800s. While rubber and elastomers (from “elastic polymers”) previously had slightly different meanings, today for all practical purposes they are synonymous. 

If you subscribe to Quality, it seems safe to assume that quality is a priority for you. But even when it is a priority, achieving high levels of quality is an ongoing challenge that requires effort from every member of the organization every day.

NASA. Volkswagen. BP. It’s not hard to find examples of quality gone awry. The consequences of the Challenger disaster, VW’s Dieselgate, and the Deepwater Horizon were tragic and far-reaching. While these are some of the most well-known incidents, stories of quality failures are numerous and almost constant.