The blog · Manufacturing SMEs
What AI changes for quality — and what it never will
In-depth articles written from the shop floor: ISO 9001, inspection, metrology, and AI's real role in a shop.
Start with the guide26 articles so far
My approach
My approach to quality in small manufacturing companies: seven principles
A feature list says nothing: every quality software package handles non-conformities and calibrations. What separates two tools is what their authors believe. Here are the seven principles on which everything we build rests…
Structuring quality management in a small manufacturer: the complete guide
Quality isn't decided on audit day but in six daily moves: seeing a problem, knowing where it came from, handling it in time, heading it off, deciding on numbers, closing the loop. This guide is the map — one section per axis, and where to read on…
We automated the wrong end
AI was supposed to free up time for what matters. Instead we're automating what matters itself: conversations. Chatbots, voice systems, generated emails answering generated emails — while the paperwork still waits. For a small manufacturer, the right move is exactly the opposite…
The quality system
Making ISO 9001 accessible to small shops: the realistic role of AI
ISO 9001 has a reputation for being reserved for companies that can afford a full-time quality engineer or a consultant on retainer. For many small manufacturing…
Running your ISO 9001 management review without a consultant
The management review (clause 9.3) is the ISO 9001 exercise small shops dread the most: once a year, leadership has to sit down, look its quality system in the…
Seeing the weak points in your quality system at a glance
An ISO 9001 quality system isn't a stack of folders. It's a network: a nonconformity points to a process, a corrective action points to that nonconformity, an…
Is your quality system reactive, or under control?
Everyone asks you where you stand, and you answer what everyone answers: "we're ISO 9001 certified." True — and it says almost nothing. Here is a five-level maturity scale that fits a shop of thirty…
In fourteen years, I never saw a quality system in a small shop
For fourteen years, I never saw a real quality management system in a small shop. Everywhere, the same homemade assembly — Excel, network folders, the ERP's forgotten module — that nobody designed and everybody inherited. And if the person who understands it left tomorrow?…
The report & measurement
The machining inspection report: four people, four readings of the same document
The machinist sees a chore that casts doubt on a part he knows is good. The inspector, a signature committing him to measurements he didn't all take again. The owner, a cost that shows up on no quote. And at the customer's end, a reviewer calls go/no-go without ever holding the part. All four are right at once…
Inspection reports: the real hidden cost of machinist time
In a machine shop, the inspection report isn't paperwork: it's a mandatory deliverable demanded by the customer, on the same footing as the part itself. Without…
OCR on dimensioned drawings: why generic tools fail in manufacturing
A dimensioned drawing is not a letter or a contract. It is a dense technical object: dimensions, tolerances, geometric-tolerancing symbols, datum reference frames,…
Drawing ballooning: numbering dimensions without doing it by hand
Ballooning is the most thankless step of an inspection report: one balloon per dimension, with a highlighter, then retyping everything into a spreadsheet. A skipped dimension, a typo, a drawing revision — and it all starts over. Here is what automatic extraction changes…
Metrology beyond the spreadsheet: never miss a calibration again
In nearly every machine shop I have visited, the fleet of measuring instruments lives in a spreadsheet. One column for "last calibration date," one for "next," and…
AI, tools & organization
Quality tools in a small shop: two well maintained beat four on principle
FMEA, process capability, internal audits, supplier evaluation: a shop is always told it should have all of it. Yet every tool presupposes a foundation, and adopted before that foundation exists, it produces a record instead of an effect…
AI and quality: what it can do, and what it must never do
Artificial intelligence is arriving on the shop floor, and two camps are squaring off: those who believe it will do everything, and those who believe it will break…
SaaS or local server: what you really pay for (and why AI has nothing to do with it)
In our software, AI does very little: four reading or drafting tasks. So the cloud is not justified by AI but by cost: everything around the software is shared between customers. On a server in your own shop it is possible, but nothing is shared there…
Building trade-specific software with framed AI: behind the scenes
I spent fourteen years in quality, several of them doing dimensional inspection in the hydroelectric sector, before I wrote my first serious line of code. Today,…
The innovator you're looking for already works for you
When software fails to take hold in a machine shop, the software gets the blame. Almost always wrongly. What blocks it is people: the ones on the floor who fear what the tool will reveal about them, and the owner who doesn't understand what the person pushing for it is doing. That person already…
The floor asks, management is afraid: the ceiling on change
Change is always told the same way round: management wants to modernize, the floor resists. In the shops I know it is often the reverse. The request comes from below, travels up, and stops at the ceiling — without ever meeting an explicit refusal…
One ecosystem, not silos: when the work order is entered only once
In most of the shops I visit, the same work order gets re-entered three, four, five times: once for inspection, once in the quality system, once in the metrology…
Your drawings hosted in Canada: what privacy law changes for your shop
The drawings your customers entrust to you and the quality history you build up over the years are sensitive assets — every bit as much as your machines. Two…
Near you
Sorel-Tracy, from the turbine to the heavy part: the quality demands of a metallurgical hub
Sorel-Tracy did not grow up making small production runs. It grew up pouring steel, building heavy fabrications and assembling hydroelectric equipment — turbines,…
Drummondville: the strength — and the quality headache — of a manufacturer that does a bit of everything
Drummondville doesn't have one industry, it has ten. Metal, machinery, plastics, furniture, food processing, transportation, and subcontracting for the nearby…
From hydroelectricity to aluminum: a century of industry in the Mauricie, and the quality that comes with it
The Mauricie is the birthplace of hydroelectricity in Quebec. It was at Shawinigan, in the very first years of the twentieth century, that the Saint-Maurice River…
Aerospace machining in Greater Montreal: when the proof weighs as much as the part
Greater Montreal is one of the few places in the world where a complete aircraft can be assembled without leaving the region. That aerospace cluster pulls up a…
Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean: machining for heavy industry, far from the big centres
Nowhere else in Quebec is heavy industry so present, so old, and so structuring as in the Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean. Aluminum reigns here — but aluminum only exists…