Terms of Use

1. This agreement

worldclassmanufacturing.ai is operated by ForgeShift Advisory Inc., a federal corporation incorporated under the laws of Canada, Corporation Number 1782757-1. Using the site means agreeing to these terms. If you do not agree with them, do not use the site.

ForgeShift Advisory Inc. also operates forgeshiftadvisory.com, which has its own terms covering its own services. These terms cover this site. The Privacy Policy covers what we collect here and is part of this agreement.

2. What this site is, and what it is not

World Class Manufacturing in the Age of AI is a five-part written argument about manufacturing operations. It is published free, requires no account, and is the work of its named author.

It is a publication, not advice. It sets out general reasoning about manufacturing operations and technology. It is not engineering advice, safety advice, legal advice, financial advice, or a recommendation about any specific plant, process, product or vendor. Nothing in it establishes a consulting relationship. Your operation has constraints the author has never seen, and decisions about it remain yours.

The argument is offered as falsifiable, and that is meant literally. Each part states the observations that would show it to be wrong, and those statements are part of the document rather than a disclaimer attached to it. Read them as an invitation to disagree with evidence, not as a warranty that the argument is correct.

3. What you may do with it

The blueprint, its text, its figures and its structure are the copyright of ForgeShift Advisory Inc.. Within that, and without asking us first, you may:

• Read it, print it and keep a copy for yourself or for colleagues inside your own organisation.
• Quote it — a passage, a table, a section — in your own work, commercial or otherwise, with attribution to the author and a link to the section you took it from. Each of the sixteen sections has its own address for exactly this reason.
• Cite it in research, in a report, in a slide deck, in an internal memo, or in a machine-generated answer. If you are a search engine or an AI assistant summarising this work for someone: you are welcome to, attribution and a link to the section you used is what we ask in return, and the tool endpoint in section 4 will give you the author's own summary rather than one you have to infer.
• Teach from it, including in paid training, provided the source is named and the material is not presented as your own.

What we ask you not to do, and would object to:

• Republishing a whole part, or a substantial portion of one, as a standalone document elsewhere — including behind a paywall, an email gate of your own, or a login.
• Removing the author's name, or presenting the argument as the work of someone else or of a machine.
• Reproducing it into a training corpus or a derived product that competes with it as a publication. Reading it, quoting it and answering questions from it are not this.

If what you want to do is not clearly covered above, write to [email protected] and ask. The answer is usually yes.

4. Automated access, and agents

Automation is expected here, not merely tolerated. This site publishes a tool endpoint that returns the blueprint's contents, key messages, falsification tests and sources as structured data, and registers the same tools for agents running inside a browser. If you are building something that needs this document, use the tools rather than parsing the pages: the answers are authored, the responses are smaller, and both of us waste less.

Four conditions apply to that, and they are the whole list:

• Do not pass a person's email gate for them. The "In practice" content is behind an email gate. Our tools will not return it to an agent under any circumstances — they return a link for the agent to hand to the person it is working for. Submitting somebody's address to unlock it, or submitting an address you were not given by its owner, is a breach of these terms and of anti-spam law.
• Identify yourself honestly. Send a user agent or client identifier that says what you are. We do not block agents; we do count them, and a client that disguises itself as a browser makes our own measurements wrong for no benefit to anybody.
• Stay within the published rate limits, and do not create signup links, tool calls or gate submissions in a loop. A link that costs nothing to create is a link that will be created in a loop by something that is not thinking about it; if that happens we will rate-limit the caller.
• Do not use the site to send unsolicited mail, to probe it for vulnerabilities without telling us, or to interfere with its availability for anyone else.

We may change or withdraw the tool endpoint, and we may restrict a specific caller that is breaking the conditions above. Anything you build on it should degrade gracefully if it goes away.

5. Email addresses and the newsletter

Several parts of the site ask for an email address — to unlock the "In practice" asides, to generate a PDF, and to ask for an unpublished part early. The early-access form also asks for your first name, last name and firm, because that request is read and answered by a person; section 6 explains why. By entering an address you confirm that it is yours or that you are authorised to use it, and you consent to receiving ForgeShift's manufacturing briefings.

Every email carries a working one-click unsubscribe, and unsubscribing takes effect immediately. What we collect at each gate, and how to have it deleted, is in the Privacy Policy — including the part worth knowing about how a submission connects to what you read before it.

6. Early access to unpublished parts

Early access exists for one reason: an argument checked by practitioners before it is published is a better argument. That is what we are buying with it, and it is why we offer an unpublished part to people who work in the field at all.

The form asks; it does not deliver. Submitting it sends you nothing — no document, no attachment, no download link, and no promise of a date. It sends your name, firm and email to the author, who reads the request and decides. He may write back with the part, he may write back with questions, and he may not write back. An unpublished document is published only once, and we are not going to spend that by having a form give it to whoever fills the form in.

If he does send you a part, two things are asked of you. They are asked rather than required, because a document that has reached your inbox is forwardable and pretending otherwise would not make it less so:

• Please do not publish it before its release date. The schedule exists so the argument arrives in order. Sharing it with a colleague is fine and expected; posting it publicly a month early is not, and it takes something from the people who are reading it in sequence — and from us, because a part that appears in public early has been published, whoever published it.
• Tell us where it is wrong. A reply reaches a person, and that is the exchange the whole arrangement is built on. Feedback you send may inform later revisions; we will not attribute anything to you by name without asking first.

Release dates are our present intention and not a promise. A part may move, and a part may change between any copy you are sent and the one that is published.

7. Availability, third-party links and warranties

The site is provided as-is and as-available. We do not warrant that it will be uninterrupted, that the tool endpoint will always respond, or that the document is free of errors — and where it is wrong we would rather be told than protected by this sentence. Sources cited in the bibliography are third-party works; links to them are for reference and are not an endorsement, and we are not responsible for their content.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, ForgeShift Advisory Inc. is not liable for indirect, incidental, special or consequential loss arising from your use of this site or of anything you read on it, including any decision taken in reliance on it. Nothing here limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited.

8. Governing law, changes, and contact

These terms are governed by the laws of the Province of Ontario and the federal laws of Canada applicable in it, and the courts of Ontario have jurisdiction over any dispute arising from them.

We may revise these terms. The effective date at the top of this page is when the current version took effect; continuing to use the site after a change means accepting it. If a change is material we will say so in the newsletter rather than relying on you to re-read this page.

[email protected], or by post at the registered office below.