Quality control

And with that setup or with that situation, we had to do a lot of different jobs.

And so while I was working in the QC lab as a QC chemist, I also had to do some QA work.

just to help the company out and the department out.

And I really liked what I was doing.

So I had my one foot in the lab and one foot outside the lab dealing with regulatory compliance and FDA inspections and things of that nature and, you know, ISO certification.

And little by little, I transitioned out of the QC lab and started doing more of a QA and regulatory compliance work.

And after that, it's mostly making sure that the organizations are following regulatory requirements, whether it's FDA or XUS regulators, MHRA or EMA or other regulators.

And after that, it was just progressing in that direction.

On the other hand, I do think it's necessary to have some guidance, whatever it looks like, or at least a process to tell people, here's how, if you're going to do it, here's how you would do it.

And the reason why we created it was so that we didn't have to go out and implement this QA, QC, this in-process QC that we were doing, which is, if you know anything about bolted flange joints, most of the QC that happens comes before and after the joint is already closed, right? They might come look before, look at the materials, make sure things are there.

They'll come after and they'll take a hammer and like ping the nuts or something.

Right.

You'll see there's a new long record form in there that was replaced with another type of torquing and tensioning sheet that my colleagues and I created.

And you'll see there's some talk about criticality in there, very lightly.

But if your facility has this sort of thing in place, you can make sure that in-process QC happens if it's a critical flange.

Yeah, I could see, too, where, for instance, in hydrofluoric acid alkylation units or wherever HF is being handled, whether it's a chemical plant or a refinery, there's so many considerations there that guidance is critical, including picking the right gaskets.

Yes.

Relying solely on a factory's internal QC is a recipe for heartbreak.

You need independent third-party inspections at specific stages.

The source calls this the three pillars of inspection.

Right.

Yeah, because it just shows that Nintendo had the right idea about, I mean, they did some quality control.

Right, exactly.

So, and Atari was just, I mean, this is how computers were.

It's just that it was easier to put out crap.

Yeah.

And the thing about it, the reason I talk about wishing that the USA market had stayed on for longer is there seemed to be a modicum of more quality control in the USA market on the Atari 8-bit, early Atari ST, and then it fell off.

And it really

And if this stops working at some point, I'll definitely have to try something different.

And what does quality control look like for you in the final piece of content? It's not that AI is writing bad content.

It's that it writes content that sounds fine if you're prompting it really well or if you have those workflows, but it says nothing specific or nothing differentiated.

Yeah, I think that's a great point.

We have an agent that's developed using standards and it's great.

Again, agents are kind of being developed with different firms as quality control layers, which I think is great.

And it's really going to help improve the quality of our valuation reports going forward.

The other one I'd mentioned that I've heard from other guests of how they're using AI on their reports is as rebuttal.

easy for architects to take advantage of, as well as owners and manufacturers.

So in essence, you're reverse engineering all the stuff that you've seen, the things you've had to go investigate, undo, maybe depose possibly, and taken a preventive approach as how you've developed the QA, QC approach.

at AECOM is that's the approach.

Yeah, the, the approach was, um, especially in the beginning.

Even the best product with the best training, sometimes just stuff happens.

And the best you can do is just learn from it or to say, wow, this just fell through the cracks.

And that's why a QAQC team exists, to catch that.

Exactly.

how they're going about their projects.

It's almost like printing out every single QA, QC so you can do it by paper versus like, I'm all digital, all digital, no paper.

And so that process of even just printing it out, I just cut out an hour of my time or whatever it is.

So I think that that's, I guess my contrast for it is it kind of speeds things up quite a bit.

But you also mentioned you're now doing the double and triple checks.

And maybe what I infer by that is in the past, maybe you always didn't have an opportunity to do that third check or that extra.

Have you been able to, so the question is, have you been able to add layers of QA, QC that you hadn't in the past?

A hundred percent.