13. AI Won’t Fix Your Quality System… and Your Prints Don’t Belong in the Cloud

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Everybody wants to talk about AI in manufacturing. Almost nobody wants to talk about where your data goes once you hand it over. At IMTS, Lee and I sat down with Ephy Torenberg and Josh Olmstead from HighQA to talk about both.

Here’s where I land. AI is real and it’s here to stay, but you can AI your way into a black hole. I’ve lost three weeks to vibe coding, one bug away from done the whole time, and Lee has the receipts. Clean data and people who understand the system come first.

We get into why an inspection is a data set and not a report, why design, manufacturing engineering, and quality end up speaking three different languages, and why keeping the original design intent intact from print to PPAP matters more than any shiny tool.

Then the part that should keep you up at night: CUI headed to the cloud, the primes pushing data-embedded models, and a scanner that can’t measure the parts that go into scanners. HighQA’s answer is local, optional AI and a PolyWorks workflow that Josh says is delivering 3 to 5 times faster metrology programming.

If you run a shop, your job is to remove the uncertainty from the process. This episode is about how.

What’s Covered in this Episode

• (2:06) Ephy’s background and why he’s customer-focused at HighQA
• (5:08) Josh on HighQA Academy and how it gets my new techs on the same page fast
• (6:22) Manufacturing buyers don’t ask simple questions—Navu can help
• (7:41) Ephy on why AI makes garbage without clean, contextualized data
• (9:42) The vibe coding trap: you’re always “one bug away”
• (11:00) The real problem is keeping the original design thread alive
• (12:30) The HighQA approach: a system of quality management
• (14:13) Three departments, three languages, and the plan that gets them talking
• (16:35) My best people write the plan and the whole floor follows it dimension by dimension
• (18:26) Keep your spindles running with the Hennig Workflow Automation System
• (19:17) How HighQA built OCR for GD&T locally, with a human validating every plan
• (21:41) Why customers don’t get direct database access and what the offline data lake does instead
• (23:27) Fully local, AI as an option, and a path forward for CMMC shops
• (26:04) Why software platforms are moving to my customers, and the next divide after five-axis and AS9100
• (27:28) HighQA360: Ending back-and-forth between buyers and suppliers
• (29:44) Data-embedded models, the primes killing the print, and why “just use your scanner” doesn’t work
• (32:52) The PolyWorks and HighQA workflow behind 3 to 5 times faster metrology programming

Resources Mentioned

• Navu
• Hennig Workflow Automation System
• HighQA
• PolyWorks
• IMTS
• MakingChips

Connect with Ephy Torenberg and Josh Olmstead

• HighQA
• Ephy Toringberg
• Josh Olmstead

Connect with Raw Material

• Connect on LinkedIn
• RawMaterial@MakingChips.com
• MakingChips