Inside the Control Livestream Launch: How Fulcrum Is Bringing AI to Quality Management
One thing is clear after working with over 600 manufacturing customers, and visiting some of your shops in person: the work happening on shop floors is extraordinary.
Sunny Han, CEO & Founder of Fulcrum, kicked off the Control Launch Livestream by emphasizing this extraordinary work. Manufacturers are responsible for the parts that make airplanes fly, save lives, or defend our country. Could there be a greater need for precision, clarity, and confidence when it comes to quality control?
We know it’s only the manufacturers who know how to get this job done right. The philosophy behind Control, our new quality management product, is to help shops harness AI to both save time and strengthen compliance. Still, we are asking manufacturers to strongly consider modernizing their technologies to adapt to our rapidly changing world of work.
“If your data isn’t digital, then this new technology can’t help you,” Sunny said plainly. “You no longer have the luxury of having information and data and knowledge that is not digitized. That era is over.”
Control starts with digitizing the most important trust layer in manufacturing: quality.
Quality As the Trust Layer
In a distributed manufacturing network made up of thousands of shops, quality is the handshake. It’s how parts move from supplier to machine shop to OEM without friction. It’s how assemblies don’t get rejected. It’s how trust scales.
“The reason why we started with quality,” Sunny explained, “is that we believe that quality is the trust layer between businesses. It’s the way that you and your customers shake hands with each other.”
But today, that handshake is burdened by manual work: drawing reviews, bubbling, data entry, compiling PDFs, and re-entering the same information in multiple systems. Every additional handoff adds coordination tax. Control removes that friction at the source.
With AI-assisted bubbling, quality teams can highlight a feature control frame or dimension and have the system automatically extract the type, tolerance, and target value. Critical features can be flagged, sampling plans defined, and reporting checkpoints designated — all without duplicate data entry.
We’re also rolling out auto-bubbling, where Control scans a drawing and predicts which annotations should become inspection checkpoints. Teams start from a draft rather than a blank page, reviewing and refining instead of manually transcribing. The goal is not to automate judgment. It’s to eliminate repetitive work so your team can focus on actual quality control.
From the Shop Floor to Fully Digital
Once the inspection plan is built, it flows directly to the shop floor. Operators select the measurement tool they’re using, enter data with real-time tolerance feedback, and jump directly to the correct bubble location on the drawing. Every measurement captures who performed it, when it was completed, what tool was used, and that tool’s calibration status. The information updates in real time inside the job record.
This traceability matters more than ever. As Alex Troesch, VP of Product, explained during the livestream, “The shops that are winning work seem to be the ones that can prove that their quality systems are real — that they’re not just paper compliance — that it’s real, actual digital traceability.”
She shared a concrete example: “We have a customer who told us they landed a new aerospace contract specifically because they could demonstrate that their traceability was digital, and their competitor couldn’t. Same machines, same capabilities, different system, different outcomes.”
Reporting is where many quality processes break down into paperwork. Control automatically compiles raw material certs, outside processing documentation, Certificates of Compliance, and First Article Inspection Reports. Job data flows into AS9102 Form 1, material data into Form 2, and checkpoint measurements into Form 3. You can electronically sign and generate a consolidated PDF packet in seconds.
As we continue building, customizable document generation will allow shops to create templates tailored to specific customer requirements. If the data already exists in the system, you shouldn’t have to re-enter it to create value.
Building a Digitally Connected Network
Manufacturing doesn’t happen inside one shop. It happens across a network of OEMs, contract manufacturers, suppliers, and processors. Every connection is a handoff, and most handoffs today still rely on email, PDFs, and manual data entry.
“Our vision is, what if this entire chain was actually digitally connected?” Alex asked. “What if the quality requirements could flow automatically down from your customers and your packet of information automatically back up to them?”
In the future we’re building, an RFQ comes in, Control reads it, drawings auto-bubble, quality requirements are extracted, and an inspection plan is drafted for review. When the job is complete, documentation flows directly into your customer’s system — no duplicate entry on either side.
This is what coordinated, distributed manufacturing looks like. “Distributed systems are more resilient,” Sunny said. “But only if they can coordinate. We’re going to be incredibly aggressive with AI implementation where it’s safe.” At the same time, we’ll “create really beautiful UI interactions for places where humans are still critically important.”
See It in Action
If you’re ready to modernize your quality system and remove the coordination tax from your shop, book a demo to see Fulcrum Control in action and explore how it fits your workflows.
Or, watch the full livestream to hear directly from Sunny, Alex, and our product team about how we’re building AI for manufacturing — safely, responsibly, and with your shop at the center.
