Knowledge Should Be Owned by Quality Practitioners in the IT Age

Industry 4.0 is a collective term including a number of automation, data exchange and manufacturing. It will create many kinds of innovative business model via customized design and marketing. From the supplier chain: purchasing, production controlling, incoming, production and shipping to the demand chain: ordering, logistics delivery, retail, and maintain service, it can integrate the all processes to be a value chain through computation, communication, controlling, collaboration and real time response. The quality requirements of all processes of the value chain would be much more transparent. As the demand chain, product and service will be required more accurate, speedy, reliable, safety, ecological, and environmental. As the supplier chain, the product and service will be required more easily to design, manufacture, change, transport, maintain, recycle and trace. Under the development of Industry 4.0, the entire value chain system will generate a large amount of data, including data related customers, data from suppliers and production, analysis of these data must apply SPC (statistical process control) and statistical techniques. Therefore, people in the value chain should strengthen the traditional quality management knowledge and skills, but also understand the development and application of ICT (information communication technology). The following are the relevant ICT knowledge and technologies of the sensing layer, the network layer, the application layer and value integration layer in the entire value chain system: (1) Sensing layer: SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition), PLC (programmable logic controller), sensor equipments, Bar Code ID, RFID (radio frequency identification); (2) Network layer: basic network knowledge, basic knowledge of cloud computing; (3) Application layer: DBMS (database management system), MES (manufacture execution system), ERP (enterprise resource planning), PLM (product lifecycle management), CRM (customer relationship management), SCM (supplier chain management); (4) Value integration layer: hardware and software system integration engineering. This article try to summarize the ICT related knowledge should be owned by the participants of all the processes of the value chain.