Customized quality inspection cycles for achieving sustainable manufacturing in the era of Zero Defect Manufacturing

Abstract

Manufacturing businesses aim to provide high-quality products at the lowest cost possible. Quality management is crucial for improving productivity, sustainability, competitiveness, and profitability. Quality assurance (QA) methods are used to produce high-quality parts with minimal performance loss. However, traditional QA methods may not meet the needs of contemporary manufacturing standards and market needs. To address this issue, Zero Defect Manufacturing (ZDM) is an approach that can provide greater industrial sustainability. ZDM requires 100% product inspection to ensure that the desired product quality is achieved. However, increasing quality inspection to 100% can be time, cost, or resource-consuming, significantly increasing production costs. The current research work introduces a framework that considers customized product inspection cycles for minimizing the product inspection time and at the same time assuring product quality for discrete manufacturing systems. The proposed framework identifies the parameters, factors and Industry 4.0 technologies that manufacturers need to pay attention at and use to implement the customized quality inspection cycles. The proposed methodology is tested in a real industrial use case coming from the semiconductor domain. A dynamic scheduling tool was utilized for the conduction of the simulations. The results of the simulations revealed the benefits of such a radical method and also the implementation challenges were identified and discussed.