Tag Archives: Quality 4.0

How Quality 4.0 is Changing the Future of Business: Part 5

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Quality 4.0 holds the potential to provide innovative new business models, particularly for smaller firms. (Radziwill, 2020). While the financial investment in technology will be a constraint for some organizations, the reality for most is that the customers and end-users will increasingly expect businesses to respond to their needs for customization and enhanced customer experience. Ibarra et al (2018) suggest several different approaches for new business models. 

Service-Oriented Approach 

Organizations should move from a product-focus to a service-focus of which products are simply one component. The Product-Service System (PSS) is a framework that integrates product development and offerings to provide customizable solutions that meet specific customer needs and are co-created with the customer.  

Network-Oriented Approach 

As demonstrated by Logistics 4.0, organizations must look beyond vertical integration and embrace both horizontal and vertical integration across the value chain. This integration will blur the line between one organization and the … Read more...

How Quality 4.0 is Changing the Future of Business: Part 4

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In the last few weeks, we’ve explored some of the different ways in which Quality 4.0 is changing the future of quality in areas such as logistics and maintenance. In this installment, we’ll look at the impact of Quality 4.0 on health and safety. 


Healthy Operator 4.0 


In traditional manufacturing environments, keeping workers safe is an ongoing concern. While most organizations dedicate significant resources to worker safety, variability in job roles and individual performance can make it difficult to prescribe operating procedures that prevent injury and illness from over-exertion or cognitive overload. Humans, after all, are not machines, and small differences between the way people perform a task like carrying a heavy load can mean the difference between safety and crippling musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs) that are both painful and expensive. 

Industry 4.0 provides the technology to collect real-time data on job performance. This can be used to design physical … Read more...

How Quality 4.0 is Changing the Future of Business: Part III

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Quality 4.0

In this installment of our series dedicated to Quality 4.0, we continue our look at some of the practical applications of Quality 4.0 methods in different industries. With supply chain being a prominent concern during the COVID-19 pandemic, the tools of Quality 4.0 promise to alleviate many of the stresses that currently plague industries around the world and to improve the future of global supply networks. 


Logistics 4.0 


Supply chains, particularly those that stretch across international boundaries, are extraordinarily complex systems. They involve millions of products moving across multiple touchpoints. Every participant contributes to the goals of maximizing efficiency, productivity, and profit while minimizing damage, risk, and threats to safety.  

Logistics examines how producers, inspectors, and distributors are interconnected and can complement one another to increase overall system performance. This contrasts with the typical approach taken inside of an organization, in which individual functions pursue their own agendas and … Read more...

How Quality 4.0 is Changing the Future of Business: Part II

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Industry 4.0 and Quality 4.0

In our previous blog on Quality 4.0, we introduced the ways in which the principles of Industry 4.0 have impacted the practice of quality. In today’s blog, we’ll look at the first of a series of case studies to see how this revolution plays out in today’s organizations.


Maintenance 4.0


Equipment failure in a manufacturing environment can disrupt cash flow and productivity. Not only do machine repairs cost money and time to repair, but there is also a cost to sitting idle. Time and money are lost through decreased productivity and missed deadlines, while rushed work (for example, immediately after recovery from the failures) can lead to additional product defects or safety hazards. While traditional maintenance techniques react to machine failures only after they occur, Maintenance 4.0 offers the opportunity to collect data to predict and prevent machine downtime before it occurs, potentially protecting millions of dollars of productivity … Read more...

How Quality 4.0 is Changing the Future of Business: Part 1

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Quality 4.0
What is Industry 4.0?


Industry 4.0 is one of the most frequently occurring terms in contemporary business articles. Entering “Industry 4.0” into the Google search engine produces 298 million hits in English alone. Many technology companies are talking about it, promoting it, and selling it. However, defining what it means and who it impacts can be a difficult task.

The concept of Industry 4.0 was introduced in 2011 at the Hannover Fair. This project, launched by the German government, was dedicated to the accelerating digital transformation in Germany’s manufacturing industries. Also referred to as Smart Manufacturing or Smart Production, the concept derives from the “fourth industrial revolution,” which is the modern culmination of industrial macrotrends since the late 1700’s:

  • Industry 1.0: the introduction of machine production to replace manual production in the eighteenth century.
  • Industry 2.0: the introduction of electricity, railroads, and the telegraph to augment machine production in
… Read more...

How Quality 4.0 Can Support Successful Digital Transformation

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Digital transformation is a way of using cutting-edge technology to solve traditional problems and create new models for knowledge organization, revenue generation, and innovation. Since 2010, the topic of digital transformation has been the focus of considerable attention in every industry. It holds the promise of digital platforms that provide a single-source-of-truth for collecting, analyzing, and sharing data and information across the organization to allow immediate, data-driven decision making that can help to confront any operational challenge.

However, many organizations fall into the trap of believing that a successful digital transformation project is simply a matter of purchasing the correct technology, and that the technology itself will dictate the behaviour and processes that lead to organizational excellence. As a result, many digital transformation projects collapse and fail before creating any meaningful change in the organization.

Quality 4.0 can help prevent this. It’s a digital transformation strategy that emphasizes quality and … Read more...

World Quality Day 2019: Leading Quality for 100 Years

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World Quality Day – November 14 – provides a forum to reflect on how we can implement more effective processes and systems that positively impact KPIs and business results.

Each year, the second Thursday of November is set aside to reflect on the way quality management can contribute to our work and our lives. Led by the Chartered Quality Institute (CQI) in the United Kingdom, World Quality Day provides a forum to reflect on how we can implement more effective processes and systems that positively impact KPIs and business results — and celebrate outcomes and new insights.

This year’s theme marks the centennial of the CQI’s efforts to grow and expand attention to quality across the United Kingdom and in Europe.

We usually think of quality as an operations function. The quality system (whether we have quality management software implemented or not) helps us keep track of the health and … Read more...

What’s Your Quality 4.0 Strategy?

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In ISO 9001:2015, quality is the “degree to which a set of inherent characteristics of an object fulfils requirements.” (3.6.2) Quality 4.0 describes the technological innovations that will help us more quickly assess compliance and customer satisfaction and optimize business processes through systems integration — whether the object we’re working with is a process, a product, a person or an intelligent software system.

Quality 4.0 systems are:

  • Connected— electronic, networked, and capable of communicating in real time with people and systems.
  • Intelligent— autonomous, reactive, proactive, social and/or adaptive to new data or new environmental conditions.
  • Automated — able to carry out instructions with or without human participation.

As a result, Quality 4.0 strategies emphasize real-time visibility, intelligent decision support, and improved communication — between people, systems and machines.

For example, Nikon’s recently announced Quality 4.0 strategy focuses on real-time measurement: improving and automating measurement systems, automating inspections and … Read more...

Your Data is Your Most Valuable Asset: Getting Started with Quality 4.0

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Data science and machine learning have surged in prominence over the past few years, and digital transformation seems to be on everyone’s agenda. Have you ever wondered why? Even though quality engineering has long been a data-driven pursuit, we now have the potential to get even deeper insights from our data because of several recent innovations:

  1. Computing power per dollar has increased steadily (e.g. through adoption of GPUs).
  2. Open-source software packages with powerful machine learning algorithms are freely available, reliable, robust, and well-maintained.
  3. Infrastructure for data storage and management is readily available and cost-effective.
  4. Cloud-based software, platforms, and infrastructure helps companies focus on their core competencies and scale rapidly when needed.
  5. Algorithms are often more revealing when Big Data is available.

It’s easy and cheap to collect data but using it to generate actionable insights can be more challenging. Think, for example, about the digital displays available to a production … Read more...

Your Data is Your Most Valuable Asset: Getting Started with Quality 4.0

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Data science and machine learning have surged in prominence over the past few years, and digital transformation seems to be on everyone’s agenda. Have you ever wondered why? Even though quality engineering has long been a data-driven pursuit, we now have the potential to get even deeper insights from our data because of several recent innovations:

  • Computing power per dollar has increased steadily (e.g. through adoption of GPUs).
  • Open-source software packages with powerful machine learning algorithms are freely available, reliable, robust, and well-maintained.
  • Infrastructure for data storage and management is readily available and cost-effective.
  • Cloud-based software, platforms, and infrastructure helps companies focus on their core competencies and scale rapidly when needed.
  • Algorithms are often more revealing when Big Data is available.

It’s easy and cheap to collect data but using it to generate actionable insights can be more challenging. Think, for example, about the digital displays available to a production … Read more...