Top 10 manufacturing trends driving production quality 4.0
Manufacturing global takes a look at the top 10 manufacturing trends driving the evolution of production quality.
Competency
A common battle for manufacturers is the ability to improve the baseline competency of workers, and to scale specialised knowledge.
Leaders looking to improve the structured approach of traditional quality can use 4 key Quality 4.0 approaches
- Experience: sharing experiences and lessons learned across internal groups or across industry
- Expertise: developing new expertise via machine learning, artificial intelligence, augmented reality and virtual reality
- Appraisal: deploying connected worker strategies ensuring compliance, competency, efficiency, and safety
- Management: consolidate learnings in learning management systems
Culture and leadership
“Many leaders have an initiative to develop a culture of quality, since quality often owns process execution with insufficient participation and ownership from other functions,” says SAS.
A company with ‘a culture of quality’ is stated to display four key elements: process participation, responsibility, credibility, and empowerment. With quality 4.0, manufacturers can better attain a culture of quality via improved connectivity, visibility, insights, and collaboration.
Compliance
Across most industries compliance is important to quality teams, due to quality taking a lead role in ensuring that processes, products, and services comply with requirements. Manufacturers are already leveraging technology to reduce the cost and effort to comply, however quality 4.0 introduces even more opportunities to automate compliance.
Management system
EQMS — “the hub of quality management activities”. This system provides a scalable solution to automate workflows, connect quality processes, improve data veracity, provide centralised analytics, ensure compliance, and foster collaboration within one solution.
Scalability
Scalability — the capability to support data volume, users, devices, and analytics on a global scale. “Without global scale, traditional quality and Quality 4.0 are much less effective, unable to harmonise processes, best practices, competencies, and lessons learned corporate-wide.”
SAS reports that 37% of companies struggle with fragmented data sources and systems, which are a top challenge for achieving quality objectives.
“Cloud computing is an important contributor to scalability,” via cloud computing manufacturers can gain access to:
- Software as a Service (SaaS)
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
- Platform as a Solution (PaaS)
App development
“Apps are the mechanisms through which companies fulfill processes, collect and expose data, visualise analytics, and establish collaboration,” explains SAS.
As software evolves to become more powerful, the trend to develop role-based apps for a better, simpler experience has emerged. This has resulted in technology companies increasingly providing mobile apps to give a higher quality experience.
“Mobility provides greater accessibility, participation, adoption, and efficiency. While we often connect the idea of mobile apps with smartphones and other mobile devices, companies can write apps for a wide array of hardware.”
Collaboration
Collaboration is critical for quality management and has drastically changed in recent years with the advancements made in industry 4.0.
However, SAS reports that Companies execute traditional quality business processes via email, automated workflows, and portals, but much of the market is yet to take advantage of automated workflows and portals, with only 21% having adopted a core EQMS.
Connectivity
Connectivity — the connection between business information technology (IT), which includes the enterprise quality management system (EQMS), enterprise resource planning (ERP), and product lifecycle management (PLM); and operational technology (OT), the technology used in laboratory, manufacturing, and service.
“Industry 4.0 transforms connectivity through a proliferation of inexpensive connected sensors that provide near real-time feedback from connected people, products and edge devices, and processes.”
Analytics
Analytics, the capability to gain insight from captured data. When it comes to analytics, 37% of the manufacturing market identifies poor metrics as a top roadblock to accomplishing quality objectives.
SAS explains that analytics falls into four categories: descriptive, diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive. “Companies striving toward Quality 4.0 should build their analytics strategy after or concurrently with a data strategy. Powerful analytics applied to low veracity data yields poor veracity insights,” comments SAS.
Data
For decades, data has been driving decision making when it comes to quality improvements, with many recent updates to standards placing greater importance on evidence-based decision making.
Research conducted by SAS, highlights that “much of the market continues to struggle with evidence while more mature companies have mastered traditional data and are now leveraging big data.”
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