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NPI: A How To Guide for Engineers & Their Leaders
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Leading from the Front
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Marcel Tremblay: The Olympic Mindset & Engineering Leadership
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Anurag Gupta: Framework to Accelerate NPI
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Kyle Wiens on Why Design Repairability is Good for Business
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Nathan Ackerman on NPI: Do The Hard Thing First
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JDM Operational Excellence in NPI
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Building the Team
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Quality is Set in Development & Maintained in Production
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3 Lessons from Tesla’s Former NPI Leader
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Maik Duwensee: The Future of Hardware Integrity & Reliabilitypopular
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Reject Fake NPI Schedules to Ship on Time
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Leadership Guidance for Failure to Meet Exit Criteria
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Screws & Glue: Getting Stuff Done
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Choosing the best CAD software for product design
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Screws vs Glues in Design, Assembly, & Repair
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Design for Instrumental - Simple Design Ideas for Engineers to Get the Most from AI in NPI
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Best Practices for Glue in Electronics
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A Practical Guide to Magnets
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Inspection 101: Measurements
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A Primer on Color Matching
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OK2Fly Checklists
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Developing Your Reliability Test Suite
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Guide to DOEs (Design of Experiments)
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Ten Chinese phrases for your next build
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NPI Processes & Workflows
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Production: A Primer for Operations, Quality, & Their Leaders
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Leading for Scale
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Greg Reichow’s Manufacturing Process Performance Quadrants
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8D Problem Solving: Sam Bowen Describes the Power of Stopping
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Cut Costs by Getting Your Engineers in the Field
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Garrett Bastable on Building Your Own Factory
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Oracle Supply Chain Leader Mitigates Risk with Better Relationships
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Brendan Green on Working with Manufacturers
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Surviving Disaster: A Lesson in Quality from Marcy Alstott
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Ship It!
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Production Processes & Workflows
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Failure Analysis Methods for Product Design Engineers: Tools and Techniques
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Thinking Ahead: How to Evaluate New Technologies
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How to Buy Software (for Hardware Leaders who Usually Don’t)
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Adopting AI in the Aerospace and Defense Electronics Space
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Build vs Buy: A Guide to Implementing Smart Manufacturing Technology
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Leonel Leal on How Engineers Should Frame a Business Case for Innovation
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Saw through the Buzzwords
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Managed Cloud vs Self-Hosted Cloud vs On-Premises for Manufacturing Data
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AOI, Smart AOI, & Beyond: Keyence vs Cognex vs Instrumentalpopular
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Visual Inspection AI: AWS Lookout, Landing AI, & Instrumental
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Manual Inspection vs. AI Inspection with Instrumentalpopular
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Electronics Assembly Automation Tipping Points
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CTO of ASUS: Systems Integrators for Manufacturing Automation Don't Scale
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ROI-Driven Business Cases & Realized Value
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Manufacturing teams come in different cultural flavors:
- Execution-oriented where the timeline is king
- Cost-oriented where cheap (efficient?) is the name of the game
- Quality-oriented where getting it "right" matters most
In reality, most teams are a mix of these -- but there are some outliers where the cultural emphasis comes through.
I've had the distinct pleasure of getting to know some quality-oriented teams in my career. They operate differently. They believe that the thing that matters most is delivering a solid and reliable customer experience -- and that if they wow their customers, they will earn their patronage forever. They can often demand a premium because of the brand value they spent decades investing in. I've noticed they tend to be privately owned, with founders who worked in the business for decades (or still do), and that the engineering and operations teams at these companies are some of the nicest I've personally met. The founder's principles are often invoked in meetings or in the hallway -- they line up old products in small museums in their office lobbies or hallways and speak reverently about them.
While it may not be possible to build in exactly the same way as Bose, Lutron, or others, I think there's a lot to learn from companies that have made the strategic decision that the best outcomes come from an extreme focus on quality. This section will highlight learnings from leaders and teams taking quality-first stance.