Clayton Christensen points out inThe Innovator’s Dilemma that there are many good companies that fail precisely because they do things right, because sometimes the biggest risk is not in doing things wrong, but in continuing to perfect a model that the market is starting to leave behind.
In my case, this reflection stems from my own experience.
My first professional stage lasted eight years and was spent in aproduct development engineeringcompany for theautomotive, railway and aeronautical sectors with more than 200 employees. It was a period of great intensity and learning, where I was able to work in team management and be very close to cutting-edge technologies applied to the manufacture of prototypes. The technical demands, speed and adaptability were part of the day to day.
It was an extraordinary school. It allowed me to acquire a very practical vision of how to transform an idea into a real product, how to coordinate different technical profiles and how to work under pressure without losing focus on quality and execution.
That era came to an abrupt end. In 2003, the company closed, dragged down by a wave of crisis in the automotive industry. Although I experienced it from the position of a worker, this did not lessen the harshness of these processes when they fully affect the professional project, the team and the confidence in the stability of what has been built. It was a tough experience, yes, but it taught me that even the most solid projects can be overtaken by context changes that they do not control, and that understanding the market in time is not a strategic luxury: it is a necessity.
I immediately joined the family business specializing in die-stamping dies for automotive sheet metal stamping, a natural step personally but not an easy one professionally, since it was at a particularly complex time, marked by agenerational change forced by a serious illnessand aproduct crisisin the die-stamping market. It was, in many ways, a perfect storm. There was no room for comfort or theoretical decisions: we had to understand very quickly what was changing and how to adapt without losing our way. The great advantage was that we inherited a fantastic team of people who were experts in precision mechanics, small but very agile and open-minded, and a healthy financial situation that allowed us to make investments.
That stage gave me another kind of apprenticeship.Toolingwas still a world of great technical value, precision and specialization, but the market was beginning to show clear signs of change. And there was a basic lesson that I have come to recognize several times in my professional life: mastering an activity very well does not guarantee that it will continue to occupy the same place of value in the market.
The Big Bet
This reading led to the first major change in 2005. The transition fromtoolingtodimensional checking fixtures, checking fixtures or checking models for the automotive industry.
This movement had an industrial logic. Checking fixtures required technical knowledge, design skills, precision, standardization and a deep understanding of validation and quality assurance processes. For years I worked very close to that environment, participating in demanding projects, with high technical standards, tight deadlines and the constant need to ensure repeatability, reliability and robustness.
This stage reinforced a conviction that over time became central to my journey: industrial quality is not just a matter of inspection, but a discipline that connects product, process, organization and decision-making capacity.
With the passage of time, once again, the market moved again. We were able to assemble an excellent, high-performance team of more than 50 professionals, with facilities and machinery that, although not the latest technology, we obtained exceptional results that were highly valued by our customers. Geographically diversified and with a multitude of customers, but there again appeared the innovator’s dilemma mentioned by Christensen. The natural thing to do was to continue improving what we already knew: more precision, more capacity, more complexity, even new possibilities supported by sensor technology, automation or artificial vision. But it was becoming increasingly clear that the value was beginning to shift to another layer. The challenge was no longer just in the physical control environment, but in the way companies record, manage, trace and use quality information.
The next big change: moving from dimensional checking fixtures to QMS software.
When I decided in 2014, I did not see it as a break, but as a coherent evolution in my way of understanding the industry and quality, first from the physical dimension of control, and then from the operational, transversal and digital dimension of quality. The focus was no longer on verifying a part or an assembly, but on managing defectologies, non-conformities, traceability, follow-up and continuous improvement in a more structured and useful way for the business.
And 2023 is where I see one of the big levers of the industrial future. I firmly believe thatquality management and the data it generatesare going to gain even more relevance with the incorporation ofAIand the development ofdigital twins in the industry.
You can automate analyses, simulate processes, adjust parameters and optimize manufacturing recipes, but someone has to say whether that path is really the right one, and that “someone” will not be an opinion: it will be the data.
This quality data will be the judge of whether the decisions made, the parameters defined or the recipe applied are really leading to a more robust, stable and close to zero-defect manufacturing.
That is why I believe that quality will cease to be seen only as a layer of control or compliance, and will increasingly become an intelligent validation of the industrial system. It will serve not only to detect what goes wrong, but to confirm what works, what needs to be maintained, what needs to be corrected and what decisions deserve to be escalated with confidence.
None of what we have experienced happened overnight. It was a process of observation, learning, testing, adjustment and perseverance, although it was also marked by strokes of bad luck, poor decisions, unexpected turns in the market, a pandemic that no one saw coming and the inevitable wear and tear that the passage of time leaves on teams. But that was precisely the key: not in dodging the difficulties, but in knowing how to read them in time. The comfortable thing would have been to continue improving what was known; the important thing was to understand in time that the future lay elsewhere.
Looking back, I see an evolution built on several very distinct stages:product development engineering, tooling, dimensional checking fixturesandQMS software. Different contexts, different challenges and the same bottom line: read the change before it is too late and have the constancy to build in that direction.
I am convinced that, in industry, competitive advantage lies not only in doing things right, but in understanding before others what will matter most tomorrow.
Content written by:
Xavier Conesa Foix, CGO of Kapture.io QMS
With more than 30 years dedicated to industrial quality improvement, Xavier combines technical expertise and strategic vision to transform quality control and incident management in the plant.
