Even in a normal year, achieving high levels of quality is no small feat; it's a daily challenge that requires buy-in from everyone. This year, as COVID-19 wreaked havoc on supply chains, worker safety and consumer demand, maintaining high levels of quality became a nearly superhuman feat.

In our 21st Annual Spending Survey, we’ve looked into who will be buying what and when. Despite the economic upset resulting from COVID-19, equipment budgets look to be steady, if not growing, for the next fiscal year.

Additive manufacturing (AM) technologies continuously blaze the trail of what’s possible for part design. As such, reliably and accurately inspecting the latest parts has become increasingly complex.

In today’s increasingly connected and intelligent production environment, manufacturers are inundated with data. It can be challenging to see quality data throughout an entire enterprise, which makes it more difficult to lower costs, advance product quality, decrease waste, maintain compliance and boost profitability.

To save time and money throughout the course of product development, quality professionals rely on first article inspection (FAI), which is a popular way to examine and test products in the early stages of production.

The U.S. manufacturing industry’s skilled labor shortage has been widely reported in the past decade. Millions of jobs became vacant due to the retirement of baby boomers and economic expansion.

Industry 4.0 represents the fourth and newest phase of the Industrial Revolution, one that is centered around interconnectivity, automation, machine learning, and real-time data. 

Gage management provides manufacturers with data to ascertain the quality of their parts.

As baby boomer engineers retire from manufacturing, younger generations aren’t rushing in to fill their shoes. Rapidly changing technology has created greater demand for new skills among shrinking pools of talent, just as reshoring efforts promise to make domestic manufacturing even more robust.
This is why the field’s well-documented skills gap will only widen.

Thickness measurement is the gauging of coatings or films on surfaces—such as paint on metal parts. Manufacturers are increasingly using thinner and higher-performance coatings these days, with tighter applied thickness tolerances and an increasing need for more accurate and precise tools.