Comparison Between Product and Process Oriented Zero-Defect Manufacturing (ZDM) Approaches

Contemporary manufacturing companies pay a lot of attention to product quality as this aspect affects directly their competitiveness, productivity and the reputation of the company. Traditional quality improvement methods such as Six Sigma, Lean etc. seems unable to cope with the market's quality standards. Contemporary technological advancements allowed the successful implementation of Zero Defect Manufacturing (ZDM) which is replacing traditional quality improvement methods. According to a recent review article ZDM can be implemented in two ways the product oriented and the process oriented approach, but there is no clear understanding of the advantages and disadvantages of each approach. The current research proposes a methodology for quantifying the performance of each approach. To accomplish that a set of ZDM parameters is defined to describe the problem and the proposed methodology is applied on a specific industrial use case in order to enumerate the ZDM parameters. The results from the application of the proposed methodology will assist manufacturers and researchers to select the most suitable approach to their specific case in order to achieve sustainable manufacturing. The results showed that the performance of either product or process oriented approach is heavily depending on the input parameters and use case.