While COVID dampened demand early on, the skills gap and labor shortage that has plagued the industry for more than a decade is still in full swing. As new NDT methods advance, quality professionals require new training, and technicians transitioning from film techniques to non-film techniques need hands-on experience.

In the fall of 2021, COVID-19 was a top concern for more than half of respondents in our September 2021 survey. Today that number is down to 17%, according to our Annual Quality Spending Survey, which surveyed subscribers in September 2022.

The probe stylus is the key component in the successful utilization of the CMM. The ease of availability and lowered costs during the past 20 years for this material has made it the top choice for CMM manufacturers worldwide.

After a presentation, it’s important for me to read the reviews from participants in order to know what worked well and what I should change with future audiences.

The tensile testing processes remain constant and with a good understanding of your organization’s relevant quality assurance requirements, dealing with evolving external factors can be relieved.

Product failures, scrap, and recalls can have a devastating impact on a manufacturer’s reputation and bottom line.

Rapid growth in electric vehicle sales along with an increasing interest in fuel-cell-electric powertrain systems presents the auto industry with serious and largely unanticipated quality-control issues.

The science behind 3D scanners and CMM technologies is different; however, both collect coordinate measurement data and are widely used within the plastics industry. When is it better suited to use non-contact structured light 3D scanners than touch CMMs?

Additive manufacturing produces parts layer by layer and this opens up an array of unique issues that can affect the integrity of a finished product, and also a unique set of surface characteristics that make the job of measuring and validating that much more difficult.

As the pendulum swings from past decades of customized PLM to a far more flexible, highly-configured version, organizations need to borrow a page from modern software development and embrace automated testing as part of routine deployment.