Product Quality Improvement Policies in Industry 4.0: Characteristics, Enabling Factors, Barriers, and Evolution Toward Zero Defect Manufacturing

In the competitive market of manufacturing, quality is a criterion of primary importance in order to win market share. Quality improvement must be coupled with performance point of view. Lean Manufacturing, Six Sigma, Lean Six Sigma, Total Quality Management, Theory of Constraints, and their combination are philosophies dedicated to this goal. This study is a literature review on the implementation of these philosophies to improve quality of processes and products in a system, and also covers the commonalities and differences with Zero Defect Manufacturing (ZDM) philosophy. In this study, 45 articles have been analyzed. These articles have been selected by a research on several scientific libraries with specific keywords. The methodology is based on a list of information extracted from each paper. The data searched are on the tool selections, critical factors of implementations and the benefits obtained from them. Based on the review and analysis of the literature and practices, we provide the top 10 main components of the tools used for quality improvement, enabling factors, benefits, and barriers to implementation. Moreover, we present and discuss categorization of quality improvement methods and the way toward ZDM. The need of standardized toolkits for different levels of maturity in quality management systems and a better education have been enlightened. Thanks to technological improvement in information flow management, ZDM seems close to be achieved even though some new risks and wastes have to be taken care of within the implementation.