Impact of Industry 4.0 on Quality Management: identification of main challenges towards a Quality 4.0 approach

Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI) and especially machine learning (ML) are popular topics of Industry 4.0 (I4.0) and are more and more applied in factory operations. This paper provides a vision of how Quality Management is evolving towards a Quality 4.0 (Q4.0) approach. Although the term Q4.0 was introduced with the fourth industrial revolution, its use and understanding are still unclear and not widespread. In this paper, a bibliometric analysis on the topic has been carried out followed by a more general overview of literature on the impact of digitalization on Quality Management. The literature findings along with the empirical experience of the authors led to the development of a comprehensive framework depicting the challenges of different nature faced during the adoption of a Q4.0 approach from the initial awareness of the topic, till the implementation phase. After its empirical validation, the framework can be used as a basis to develop an implementation framework of Q4.0.