Regardless of where you look across manufacturing industries, you’re likely to see that the knob on operational speed has been steadily turned up during the past decade. As trends such as increased automation, mobility, cloud solutions, the Internet of Things (IoT), and enterprise manufacturing solutions take hold, manufacturers are able to collaborate more effectively, forecast and respond to demand more accurately, gain better visibility into internal and external processes, and measure their performance more precisely.

What this means for the quality professional is that that the bar for product quality is rising, and today it’s higher than ever. The speed of manufacturing, combined with increasingly global and disparate suppliers, tightening regulations and compliance initiatives, and a sword hanging over the organization’s head in the form of brand damage via social media have placed enormous pressure on quality organizations. More and more, the processes and systems of yesteryear are no longer making the grade.

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