Zero Defect Manufacturing: A complete guide for advanced and sustainable quality management

Abstract

Without product quality, companies cannot survive in today’s competitive and regulated environment. Quality affects not only the product, process, and services, but also the true sustainable capability of a company, being economic, social, and environmental. Different Quality Management (QM) paradigms and approaches have been used to plan, assure, control, and improve production processes and product quality. Nevertheless, most such paradigms were conceived before major technological advancements, thus relying heavily on processes and on people’s knowledge. New paradigms such as Digital Lean, Quality 4.0, and Zero-Defect Manufacturing (ZDM), challenge such views and incorporate emerging technologies into the QM umbrella. Through a literature review, this paper analyses the different QM approaches and combines all the best practices of past and present to support sustainable manufacturing. This paper’s findings include (i) a methodological conceptualization of different QM approaches, (ii) an identification of shortcomings, (iii) analysis of the domain of application, (iv) a proposal for a conceptual framework, and (v) proposals for future work consisting of aligning such theoretical findings with empirical results.