Every manufacturer publishes a quality metric. Most choose one that flatters them. Defect PPM measured at the customer’s dock, for instance, mostly measures how good your final inspection is at catching bad parts — not how good your process is at not making them.

First-pass yield is harsher. It asks: of everything we cut this year, what fraction went through every operation and every inspection gate without a single rework loop, re-measurement or deviation request? In 2025 our answer was 99.7 percent, and the remaining 0.3 percent is where all of our engineering attention goes.

Chasing FPY changes behavior upstream. It pushes money into on-machine probing rather than bigger inspection rooms, into hob-wear tracking rather than sorting, and into design reviews that remove tolerance ambiguity before the first chip is cut. A part that never needs rework is also a part that never misses its ship date — which is why our on-time delivery and FPY numbers have moved together for a decade.

If you audit us, we will show you both charts, including the bad quarters. A quality system you can only see when it is winning is not a quality system at all.