Quality 5.0: Towards sustainable quality improvement in organizations

The concept of Quality 5.0 in management sciences has emerged relatively recently. It is an attempt to respond to the limitations attributed to Quality 4.0, which focuses on industry and the use of advanced technologies mainly in production processes. Quality 5.0 goes beyond this framework and introduces an equally strong human and social factor. The article defines the concept of Quality 5.0 in relation to quality improvement in organizations and presents the author’s conceptual model of Quality 5.0 as a sustainable concept for quality improvement. The proposed model consists of 12 attributes of Quality 5.0, divided into four categories: (1) Balanced Techno-Human Centric Management System: agile and aware leadership, real-time data decision making, continuous improvement; (2) Human: empowerment, creativity, diversity; (3) Process: integration, efficiency, flexibility; (4) Technology: analytics, connectivity, and scalability. In the Quality 5.0 model, the organization supports the Triple Bottom Line of Sustainable Development through value co-creation, problem-solving, cooperation, and innovation.