One of the most pressing issues for any manufacturer is ensuring that every single one of its products adheres to internal or regulatory standards for quality and conformity. This is known as quality management, and it has evolved along with the industrial sector over the years.
Today, modern quality management tools are referred to as Quality 4.0, reflecting the evolution in technology that the field has experienced. These tools, including AI, digital twins, and augmented reality, promise to deliver better compliance and superior results through greater precision and monitoring.
Why Manufacturers Need Quality 4.0
Quality management is a critical part of any production process, equally important as design, procurement, and assembly. Failing to develop and implement an effective quality management system can leave a manufacturer vulnerable to monetary and legal consequences.
Safety
In many cases, a defective product is an unsafe product. For consumer-grade devices and applications, this could lead to personal injury or property damage. The repercussions can be even more disastrous in industrial settings, with broken machinery and workplace accidents just the tip of the iceberg. Even something as minor as a flawed bolt or broken rivet can have severe consequences if it isn’t identified and removed by a manufacturer’s quality management system.
Savings
Implementing quality management systems is often a cost-saving measure. If a product breaks down due to the manufacturer's negligence, that manufacturer has to pay to have that product replaced or repaired. If enough examples of a product ship with flaws, it can lead to requiring a product recall, which is time-consuming, expensive, and embarrassing for the manufacturer. The first quarter of 2025 alone saw 775 recalls issued, representing 125.37 million products. This number represents billions of dollars lost due to wasted work hours, destroyed product, and future sales lost as a result of negative press.
Regulatory Compliance
For products used in high-demand work environments, quality management is an absolute necessity. For example, healthcare device manufacturers must adhere to ISO 13485 standards, which set requirements for aspects such as product realization and identifying areas for improvement. ISO 13485 certification can only be granted by an independent third party and is critical for selling medical-grade technology, as most healthcare groups and nations will not purchase devices from companies lacking this certification.
Challenges for Achieving Product Quality
Quality management is often one of the most significant challenges for a business, as it relies on multiple factors, such as staffing, business partners, and the business’s own workflows.
Staffing and Employee Retention
While hiring and retaining employees is always a headache, it is particularly troubling for quality management. This is because new employees are more likely to make mistakes, which often result in quality errors, and are more likely to miss said errors, letting them slip through the company’s quality management system and reach the store shelf. This makes retaining a trained and effective workforce especially critical, so that they can both catch these errors and train new hires on how to do so as well.
Pace of Operations
A necessary part of any quality management system is taking the time to inspect and verify products before they get packaged and shipped to the customer or retail store. However, companies have to maintain a certain pace of production to ensure they manufacture enough products to maintain their profitability. Thus, these two elements exist in tension with each other; a manufacturer has to work fast enough to keep making money, but not so fast that they cannot maintain product quality.
Inconsistent Supplier Quality
Virtually every manufacturer relies on other companies to provide subassemblies or components for their own devices. Unfortunately, this reliance often puts a part of the end-product’s quality outside of the control of the manufacturer. This makes working with trustworthy partners with their own rigorous quality management systems especially critical. Consider hard data points, such as low failure rates for their products, to help determine if a business can be trusted as a partner.
Unclear Objectives
To improve product quality in the first place, you need to know what your current standards are as well as what you aim to achieve. After all, “quality” is a subjective term and will have different meanings for different businesses. Are you aiming for a longer service lifespan, a wider range of operating conditions, fewer manufacturing defects, or greater uniformity to standard? Whatever your objective is, you need to make it a quantitative factor that can be reliably captured and inspected.
What is Quality 4.0 Technology?
Given the challenges of quality management, what is Quality 4.0’s solution? The goal is to leverage modern technological advances, many of which are already utilized in other business applications, to enhance quality management by making it easier and more precise.
Dedicated QMS Software
One of Quality 4.0’s most significant advantages compared to previous generations of quality management is the advent of dedicated quality management systems (QMS). In the past, quality management was performed using analog methods, such as paper records and documentation. A digital QMS can serve as a basis for other quality management technologies, which we will cover soon, collecting the information they gather for easier analysis.
For instance, a QMS can analyze product failure reports to identify any common issues, as well as track machinery in real time to alert employees if there is a breakdown or manufacturing defect detected.
AI and Machine Vision
One of the best ways to determine if a product is defective or not is to simply look at it. But when a company manufactures thousands of products a day, how can employees possibly inspect every single one? The answer lies with machine vision and artificial intelligence. By training AI on what is and isn’t an acceptable example of a product and connecting it to cameras monitoring an assembly line and feeding information to an industrial AI box PC, the AI can identify defective products and have them pulled before they are packaged and shipped off.
Digital Twins
Digital twins in manufacturing are a technological framework that creates virtual counterparts of real-world objects and processes. For example, a car on an assembly line will have a digital twin representing it in the plant’s industrial computers, tracking it as it moves from one station to the next. This makes it easier for QMS software and employees to track products as they are assembled. The data gathered by digital twins can also be used to test and optimize various parameters, including different production layouts and materials. These improvements can be used to make quality management easier and less impactful on a business’s operations.
Augmented and Virtual Reality
Augmented and virtual reality, collectively known as mixed reality, consist of using modern technology to either project information over physical space and objects (augmented) or to completely replace the user’s view with a digital environment (virtual). With this technology, digital models or images can be overlaid on top of objects in the real world, walking workers through different steps in the production process.
For example, Schaffhausen’s Cyberloupe 3.0 technology is an AR-enhanced loupe that guides watchmakers through correctly assembling their luxury watches and is capable of recognizing individual parts and where they’re used within the watch. This helps ensure that the watch is assembled correctly, which is absolutely critical for a small product with numerous intricate parts.
Embracing Quality 4.0 With Cybernet Computers
What is Quality 4.0? It is the next step in ensuring products function exactly as intended, saving manufacturers time, money, and reputation. With Quality 4.0 technology, businesses can prevent defective products from reaching the shelves and enjoy fewer recalls.
If your company needs rugged industrial computers capable of supporting Quality 4.0 technology, contact Cybernet Manufacturing. Our industrial PCs and tablets are advanced enough to support modern QMS software and systems, while durable enough to handle harsh vibrations, extreme temperatures, and more.