Quality Management Practices in the Era of Industry 4.0

Abstract

Industry 4.0 is a recent trending topic which is widely being discussed in research from different perspectives. Industry 4.0 refers to the fourth industrial "revolution"; some literature defines it as a further industrial "evolution", resulting from the integration of innovative technologies such as the Internet of things, cyber-physical systems, big data, robotics, artificial intelligence, and cloud C computing with industry. This development hascreated new techniques to improve different segments of industry. Such integration has significantly improved production systems, created smarter and highly responsive supply chains, and boosted the product quality due to instant, massive, and real-time quality control systems. Industry 4.0 has a strong impact on different socio-economic fields, thus, several researchers increasingly focus on addressing different impacts on different levels. Accordingly, this paper aims at discussing the impact of Industry 4.0 on quality management systems and practices, such as quality control, quality assurance and total quality management. The paper reviews the best quality practices and proposes a modern framework of an (Industry 4.0-Quality) integrated model, where Industry 4.0 is directly linked with quality practices to produce a new level of quality practices.