Essential organizational variables for the implementation of Quality 4.0: empirical evidence from the Indian furniture industry
Abstract
Purpose
Quality 4.0 represents the integration of quality management principles with digital technologies to drive continuous improvement and innovation in organizations. The purpose of this paper is to explore the essential organizational variables (OVs) for the successful implementation of Quality 4.0 in the Indian furniture industry.
Design/methodology/approach
Through a broad literature review, data from the Indian furniture industry and experts’ judgments a list of nineteen OVs have been recognized and classified into four major categories of digitalization, design, continuous improvement and employee training and up-skilling. The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) has been used to give comparative importance and prioritize the identified nineteen OVs of Quality 4.0 in the context of the Indian furniture industry.
Findings
The results of this study reveal that the identified variables are very important for successful Quality 4.0 implementation and have been supported by empirical evidence from the Indian furniture industry. The variable “automation” under the digitalization-related category is a significant variable having a maximum weightage of 26.8% followed by Cloud computing (DI4) having a global weight of 12.8%.
Research limitations/implications
In addition to offering valuable insights and practical recommendations, the study recognizes a few limitations, such as industry-specific and the limited sample size. To diminish these limitations, future research should believe in conducting similar studies in different industries and extend the scope of the study.
Originality/value
Quality 4.0 is a term that refers to the integration of advanced digital technologies and smart data analytics into quality management systems to implement it considering OVs.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers, Associate Editor, and Editor-in-Chief for their valuable comments and suggestions that helped to improve the manuscript.
Funding: The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Citation
Mittal, A., Sachan, S., Kumar, V., Vardhan, S., Verma, P., Kaswan, M.S. and Garza-Reyes, J.A. (2023), "Essential organizational variables for the implementation of Quality 4.0: empirical evidence from the Indian furniture industry", The TQM Journal, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/TQM-06-2023-0189
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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