Building a new culture for quality management in the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution

Abstract

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is coming, and it is changing almost all aspects of human life, including the culture of quality and quality management (QM) in industry. This paper first examines the essence of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and its impact on our lives. Next, new concepts of quality as well as QM are discussed as follows. First, we analyse the multiway flow of QM in the stages of plan – design – production – marketing – sales, and data-oriented multiway interactions for creating new value and quality are discussed. Second, four distinctive approaches are introduced for implementing the multiway flow in real-world applications. The four approaches, which utilise Big Data, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), and more, are composite dimension, team creativity, total inspection, and new valuation. Finally, we argue for the necessity of combining quality experts with data scientists to prepare well for the coming Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Keywords:

• Fourth Industrial Revolution
• quality
• quality management
• Big Data
• Internet of Things
• artificial intelligence
• data scientist
• quality expert

Acknowledgements

The main idea of this paper is based on the plenary presentation of Prof. Sung H. Park (2016a) at the 19th QMOD-ICQSS International Conference which was held in Rome, Italy, on September 21, 2016. The authors are thankful to the comments on this paper made by Professors Jens Dahlgaard and SuMi Dahlgaard Park at the conference.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research was partially supported by an NRF grant (No. 2011-0030810) funded by the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning (MSIP), Korea.