There have been thousands of articles written about Quality 4.0 in various contexts and for various industries. Some claim that you should gather information, make the SOP digital available and train employees via e-learning. Yes, you should do all of this but that was part of Quality 3.0, not 4.0. If your company hasn’t moved to a Quality Management Cloud Platform, you are not ready for Quality 4.0, unfortunately.
So before you start to even think about a Quality 4.0 strategy, make sure you have a good foundation. You simply cannot try to execute the strategy without a proper QMS Cloud platform. You need to have the infrastructure to gather the data, connect the data and analyze the data. The implementation of the Quality 4.0 strategy can take years, so make sure the platform is able to adapt to changes in the market and allows for adjustment.
Data Is Key
Quality 4.0 is mainly about leveraging a significant amount of data to increase the Quality of the products and services produced. This sounds pretty straightforward because we crunch data every day, but having the right data is actually quite difficult. Most companies do have data, lots of data. However, when they start analyzing it they see big missing chucks, inconsistent data and simply corrupted data.
Having machines that are able to share their data, easy-to-use interfaces to create valuable data and other sensors and IoT solutions that generate data are essential sources. To further enrich your internal data, it is possible to buy datasets from bit Data Management Platform provider. These external sets can be used to benchmark your internal data or find context. The data needs to be vast, but more importantly accurate, so make sure data quality checks are in place to ensure this. In the end, wrong data can lead to wrong conclusions.
Connecting the Dots
When you really want to make sense of the data you are harvesting, it is important to connect it all. When going the Quality 4.0 route, open platforms and systems are key. It should be possible to connect the different systems and platforms with each other without much effort. This way data can easily flow between the systems and they can make sense of it for their particular purpose. The machine data can be used to predict production problems in a badge by the QMS platform. The same data can be used to plan predictive maintenance by the Asset Management platform while the ERP uses it to bill the customer. A single source of data can be interpreted and used in several different ways by different solutions so make sure it flows easily. This is why it is essential to allow for integration between different solutions and platforms.
The important component is that the data should be accessible to multiple departments. Different departments can leverage data in different ways as described by how the machine data can be used. In order to make the data accessible and interpretable for different departments, great BI tools are key. These are the platforms that visualize the data and give them more context to the people.
Make sure the data is not only accessible to management but make it visible to every layer in the company. This will get them informed but also engaged in the performance of the company. Quality 4.0 is not only digital and data, the main component is still and will always be the people.
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