In the quality industry, dealing with big data can feel like battling extraneous detail and being ever vigilant against poor assumptions. With millions of points of data, we can be overwhelmed by what is important and what is not.

Under Debra Dahlin's leadership, WBE-certified Reed Switch Developments Corp. (RSD) has grown steadily, despite a series of recessions, a global pandemic, and a major pivot from primarily standard parts into small-to-medium volume custom ones. Read more about the 2023 Quality Plant of the Year winner.

For their dedication to quality, Larsen Manufacturing (Mundelein, IL) has earned our 2022 Quality Plant of the Year award.

The single most important thing manufacturing leaders can do to engage their employees is to share the ‘why’ behind their daily work, says Kathleen Skarvan, CEO at New Prague, MN-based Electromed—Quality’s 2021 Plant of the Year.

When your production is set to in-crease tenfold, it’s time to expand.

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.

Greg Mann doesn’t want to brag. Although he’s proud of the company’s work, he isn’t satisfied. “We’re just getting started,” says Mann, the operations manager at Accurate Gauge & Manufacturing (Rochester Hills, MI). 

If you aren’t excited about manufacturing today, you might need to visit Mississippi. There you’ll find the PACCAR Engine Company (PEC) plant, where process improvement has been a constant since its launch in June 2010.

We have a tendency to overuse certain words. I know this because on an annual basis many media outlets publish lists of the most overused words of the year. It usually happens in December to commemorate the end of the year. 

Winona PVD Coatings takes quality so seriously that out of the almost 1.5 million wheels shipped in the past ten years, the company has seen the number of returns in the single digits.