Quality 4.0: Motivations and Challenges from a pilot survey in European firms

Quality 4.0 is about the digitalisation of quality management and is complimentary to the concept of Industry 4.0. Quality 4.0 is not a direct replacement of existing best-in-class quality management practices in organisations that have proven to work for many years. However, Quality 4.0 rather builds and improves the existing quality systems and practices to demonstrate significant value chain improvements across customer satisfaction, operational efficiency and productivity. The adoption of Quality 4.0 helps organisations to automate and simplify traditionally time-consuming and error-prone business processes, resulting in superior product performance from operational, economic and environmental perspectives.

A recent blog indicated that only 13% of organisations believe that quality is a strategic priority for senior management. Developing an effective Quality 4.0 strategy enables organisations to address long-standing quality issues due to ineffective or poor communication across the business, lack of cross-functional ownership, and fragmented data sources and systems that are not inter-connected across the business. The authors argue that the emergence of Quality 4.0 will provide a platform for improved data transparency and high quality data-driven decisions for people across various business functions so that effective decisions can be made at all levels. In our personal experience, too often, quality professionals make their decisions using only intuition and/or qualitative assessments, which are very subjective. Quality 4.0 addresses this issue with the availability of sensors, big data analytics (BDA), and Internet of things (IoT). Big data are possible because of the development of better, faster, and more informative sensor devices that are able to collect data from multiple sources and store it in an integrated database for easy access to engineers, operators, and senior managers at any time for decision-making.

Traditional quality management practices are faced with a multitude of challenges. For example, customer needs are ever-changing, which makes it difficult to maintain a high level of quality. In addition, product recalls cost organisations millions of dollars and loss of goodwill and reputation. Employee efforts must also match demand and customer expectations. Further, resources must be allocated for research and innovations in order to develop new methods of quality. Also, global standardisation of quality standards is difficult when companies are producing from different locations. Finally, it is difficult to sustain quality levels as products become more customised.

Quality 4.0 is uses technology such as cyber-physical systems, IoT, cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI), and additive manufacturing, among others, to meet the quality of design, quality of conformance, and quality of performance requirements of an organisation. This article presents the findings of a pilot survey on the implementation of Quality 4.0 initiatives in European firms. Approximately 36 quality directors from European firms participated in this pilot study, which are provided by sector in Figure 1. Further, Figure 2 presents Quality 4.0 implementation status by sector from the participating firms.

Figure 1: Quality director responses by sector

Figure 2 indicates that Quality 4.0 is implemented more in the automotive sector compared to other sectors. It is important to note that the results are generated from a pilot study with few organisations participating in this stage of the research. We found that Quality 4.0 can be implemented faster in industrial sectors such as the automotive industry because of the high degree of automation which generates large amount of data.

Figure 2: Status of Quality 4.0 implementation by sector

In our pilot survey, one of the first objectives was to understand the motivation behind the organisation to implement Quality 4.0. Analysing the motivations behind the organisations to adopt Quality 4.0 indicates that organisations are seeking digital alternatives to extend the quality of design, quality of conformance, and quality of performance to meet customer needs of today and tomorrow. The top five reasons for adoption of Quality 4.0 were:

1. Offer high quality products and services to our customers

2. Provide faster delivery of services to customers and fewer human errors

3. Simplify data handling, analysis, and reporting

4. Create transparent processes, and

5. Reduce costs, and improve efficiency and safety

Our second objective was to understand the potential challenges in adopting Quality 4.0 from the perspective of quality directors.

The top five challenges were:

1. Investment and skill requirements

2. Reduced human interactions

3. Lack of top management support and parochial interests amongst line managers

4. Training costs, and

5. Implementation - It must be implemented alongside a cultural and processual change, otherwise new technology will bring only cost and complexity

The early findings of the study suggest that Quality 4.0 can use digital technologies to better understand the customer needs of tomorrow in a much faster manner. Further, the customised offering of products and services increases customer satisfaction, which can also be achieved from the implementation of Quality 4.0. In traditional quality management approaches, the retrieval of data and documentation for quality management is a challenge; whereas in Quality 4.0, it can be tackled fairly easily through the use of digital technologies. The investment in Quality 4.0 is an issue in terms of prevention and appraisal costs due to the high investment in technology. However, in the long run, these costs could be offset by a drastic reduction in internal and external failure costs. Quality 4.0 needs highly skilled workforce; therefore, the organisations should strategically plan for skilling the workforce.

Like any other quality and continuous improvement initiatives, our findings explicitly indicate that leadership has an immense role to play in the successful introduction, implementation, and sustainability of Quality 4.0. The authors argue that it is impossible to develop a quality culture without a strategic and visionary leadership. Due to fragmented data systems and sources as well as interconnected processes across the business, meeting quality objectives fully and developing a quality culture was a challenge for many leaders. Quality 4.0 makes a culture of quality more attainable through better connectivity, visibility, insights, and collaboration. Quality leaders of tomorrow should lead quality across the organization, with increasingly broad ownership by cross-functional executives and top management to broaden the focus on quality and enable effective corporate-wide quality.

Authors

Professor Jiju Antony, Professor of Quality management and Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK

Dr Michael Sony, Senior Lecturer in Industrial Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Namibia University of Science and Technology, Namibia

Dr. Elizabeth Cudney, Associate Professor of Engineering Management and Systems Engineering at Missouri S&T

References

https://www.juran.com/blog/quality-4-0-the-future-of-quality/

Zonnenshain, A. & Kenett, R.S. (2020), Quality 4.0—the challenging future of quality engineering, Quality Engineering, DOI: 10.1080/08982112.2019.1706744