Jidoka Founder and CEO Featured in Industry4o Magazine on Visual Inspection

Industry4o.com has published a feature article by Sekar Udayamurthy, Founder and CEO of Jidoka Technologies, on why visual inspection systems fail on the factory floor. The piece, titled "Visual Inspection in Manufacturing," appeared on 13 July 2026.

The argument opens with a pattern most quality teams recognise. A model performs well in evaluation, then the station collapses in its first week of production. The article locates the cause upstream and downstream of the model rather than inside it: lighting drift, loose fixturing, rushed changeovers, brittle PLC handshakes, and workflows that operators do not trust.

From there the article lays out visual inspection as a stack rather than a piece of software. Operations and governance sit at the top, then integration with PLC, MES and QMS systems, then deployment reliability, then model and decision logic, then data, then compute and cameras, and at the base lighting, optics and mechanics. When the lower layers are unstable, no amount of model tuning compensates for the variability they introduce.

The second half deals with what happens after inference. Detection carries limited value if the result cannot drive a reliable manufacturing action, meaning a pass, reject or hold decision, a PLC signal, a rework loop, an alarm, and a traceable record in MES or QMS. Defect categories have to line up with the control plan, and evidence images have to be readable by the operators who act on them.

The closing section reframes the question the industry has been asking. Not whether AI can detect defects, but whether an inspection system stays stable, maintainable and operationally useful under real production conditions, shift after shift and line after line.

The perspective draws on Jidoka deployments across more than 180 manufacturing lines.

Read the full article on Industry4o.com: https://industry4o.com/2026/07/13/visual-inspection-in-manufacturing/