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The main purpose of this paper is to analyse the current literature situation in terms of relationships between Industry 4.0 and quality management and TQM. The author wanted to understand what topics and issues can be considered the most relevant referring to the so-called Quality 4.0, what the literature is missing opening avenues for further research.

This research employed a systematic literature review. In total, 75 papers from different sources were reviewed using specific inclusion and exclusion criteria.

Four categories of topics emerged, namely: creating value within the company through quality (big) data, analytics and artificial intelligence; developing Quality 4.0 skills and culture for quality people; customer value co-creation; cyber–physical systems and ERP for quality assurance and control. This paper also tried to understand if there is a definition of Quality 4.0 based on determined methods.

Systematic literature review could have introduced some limitations in terms of the number and reliability of reviewed papers. Probably some interesting papers had been not intentionally missed.

Consultants and managers in developing and implementing their own Quality 4.0 models could use many practical and discussed implications concerning I4.0 technologies and quality management.

This is one of the first papers which employed the systematic literature review for researching Industry 4.0, quality management and TQM relationships.

The purpose of this paper is to compare principles from the original Toyota Production System (TPS), the Toyota Way 2001 and Kaizen philosophy with principles derived from Japanese Zen Buddhism. The paper would also like to enlarge the debate concerning some lessons learnt from Japanese culture in order to avoid Lean implementation failures.

The original English version of Taiichi Ohno’s book dedicated to the TPS, the Toyota Way 2001 and other relevant papers regarding Kaizen were reviewed and analyzed. The principles that emerged from the review of this literature were then compared with similar philosophical principles from Japanese Soto Zen Buddhism. The literature concerning Zen philosophy was methodically analyzed and categorized using the content analysis.

The results of this research show many theoretical parallelisms as well as lessons for practitioners, in particular referring to principles such as Jidoka, just-in-time, waste identification and elimination, challenge, Kaizen, Genchi Genbutsu, respect for people and teamwork.

Analysis and results are mainly based on the literature that was found, reviewed and categorized, along with the knowledge of authors on Zen philosophy. Results could differ depending on the literature reviewed and categorized.

The results of this research bring food for thought to practitioners in terms of lessons learnt from Japanese culture, Toyota principles and management style in order to avoid Lean implementation failures.

This is one of the first papers which compares Lean-TPS and Kaizen principles with the Zen philosophy to try to learn lessons for succeeding in Lean implementation.

The purpose of this paper is to enlarge the debate on total quality management (TQM) implementation in the healthcare sector and to evaluate how and whether leadership can affect TQM implementation.

This paper is based on findings from a literature review of TQM and leadership. The authors analysed these findings to categorise causes of a lack of leadership in TQM programme implementations.

The authors propose three categories of causes of a lack of leadership in TQM programme implementation. The first cause is well-known: a lack of senior managers’ involvement and commitment. The second category is the “combined leadership” that occurs in large healthcare organisations; and the third category is the influence of an external “political leadership” on public healthcare.

This paper presents researchers with three categories of causes of failure of leadership in TQM implementation that can be investigated. It also encourages reflections from practitioners concerning TQM leadership in the healthcare sector.

The authors request that practitioners reflect on ways to create or sustain a “monolithic” leadership, especially in large organisations, to ensure a common vision, values and attitude for unitary TQM governance.

In an original way, this paper analyses and proposes three categories of causes linked to a lack of TQM leadership in the healthcare sector.

The purpose of this paper is to theorize and prioritize the main categories of risk sources for the European manufacturing small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in accordance with the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 9001:2015 requirement “risk based thinking.” Furthermore, the research analyses how these organizations intend to manage the risks and their effects.

A first exploratory interview with 28 experts from international certification bodies and manufacturing companies which revealed 11 risk sources has been performed. Then, quality managers from European manufacturing SMEs were surveyed to determine whether or not they intended to manage the risk sources suggested by the experts. A 95 percent confidence interval was performed to evaluate the range of plausible values for the population. The quality managers were also asked to comment on each category of risk source.

The research shows that the most taken into account categories of risk sources were the internal production of nonconforming products followed by poorly trained workers with a lack of skills and awareness, supplier nonconforming products and lack of risk-based assessment. The least taken into account category was nonconforming technical results in the design process. The quality managers’ qualitative comments also brought to light interesting issues which represented avenues for new research.

The limitations of this research lie in the first exploratory interview with the 28 experts. This process could be improved by means of a larger sample of experts. Furthermore, these experts could have included risk source categories which could fall outside of an ISO 9001 quality management system (QMS) scope and application.

Quality managers in SMEs can now address the new ISO 9001:2015 requirement knowing what the priorities from a statistical point of view are. This implication is also relevant to QMS consultants who are implementing ISO 9001:2015 QMS together with their customers.

The novelty of this research is that it has been tried for the first time to theorize what the main categories of risk sources in accordance with the risk-based thinking requirement are for European manufacturing SMEs.

There are different ways of implementing a corporate social responsibility (CSR) system. One interesting way of implementing a CSR system is based on standards such as SA8000 and ISO 26000. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the differences brought by the two standards in European manufacturing in CSR implementation using a survey.

Eight hypotheses were derived from an analysis of the implementation pattern for a CSR management system revealed from a review of the literature as well as from the actual two investigated standards. A questionnaire based on these hypotheses was administered to the CSR managers of 326 European manufacturing companies. A χ² and Cramer’s V-tests were used to validate the results. The CSR managers also added comments to their responses. The qualitative results gathered from the respondents’ comments helped the authors’ to better understand the quantitative data.

The results showed differences in how the standards affect strategies, economic and financial issues, stakeholders involved, environmental management, customer and market issues, supply chain management and CSR key performance indicators. The results indicated that it is not clear how production and technical departments can be involved in and committed to such standards or, in general, to a CSR system.

The research is based on a sample of European manufacturing managers and limited to the implementation of two specific CSR standards.

The differences between the standards should be interesting to practitioners who are thinking of implementing a CSR system in a manufacturing context and weighing the pros and cons of each standard.

This research analyses, for the first time, the differences in CSR implementation brought by SA8000 and ISO 26000 in manufacturing and, in particular, in production and technical departments.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the factors that are important for improving the performance of ISO 9001 certified small- and medium-sized service enterprises (SMSEs).

Preliminary research questions were set on the basis of a literature review and then submitted to a Delphi panel of experts. The results from the Delphi panel were transformed into hypotheses in the form of a survey. A sample comprising 115 Italian SMSEs answered the survey, which also included specific fields for qualitative notes. The hypothesis tests used 95% confidence intervals, and notes and suggestions from the respondents were also collected.

The findings relate to the role and responsibilities of the quality manager, as well the entrepreneur and partners, the quality of the enterprise culture, training, awareness concerning process key performance indicators, visual management and modern digitised documentation and communication. Furthermore, criticisms emerged regarding the ISO 9001 standard in terms of cost of quality measurement, day-to-day improvement and problem-solving.

This research is limited to SMSEs. The limitations of this research open avenues for further research. In particular, many suggestions from the respondents seem generalisable to other industries and also to large manufacturing firms.

The findings of this research could be used as a guideline for implementing ISO 9001 in the SMSE sector. Moreover, some of the criticisms could be taken into account for the next revision of the ISO 9001 standard.

This is one of the first papers to discuss important factors for improving the performance of ISO 9001 in the SMSE sector.

The rapid increase in importance of the remanufacturing operation in the present scenario is just because of its ability to retrieve the functional value of the End-of-Use or End-of-Life products which is as good as the original product. However, customers are still concerned about the reliability of the remanufactured product which is considered as one of the major problems in the area of remanufacturing. The purpose of this paper is to study and analyse the behavioural pattern of the mixture failure rate of a remanufactured product.

In order to analyse the behavioural pattern of the mixture failure rate, different proportions of new and remanufactured products are mixed. In this paper, a two-parameter Weibull distribution is used to observe the mixture failure rate characteristics. Also, the mixture failure rate of the remanufactured product is evaluated under two conditions, that is when the shape parameter of new and remanufactured components is the same and when the shape parameter values are different.

From the analysis, it is observed that the mixture failure rate is always decreasing in nature when the shape parameter values are same. In that case, the value of the mixture failure rate depends only on the proportion of the new components. When the shape parameter values are different, the mixture failure rate characteristics depend upon the shape parameter value of the remanufactured product.

The results of the research can be applied to any remanufactured automotive product. This study also shows the behavioural characteristics of the mixture failure rate of a remanufactured product at different mixture proportions.

This study expands the debate on the reasons that wine producers adopt sustainable, organic wine production. It aims to ascertain the enabling factors facilitating behavioral intention regarding such an adoption and whether these factors can be combined in a conceptual, measurable model.

A sample of 157 Italian winery companies was used. Results were analyzed through the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology model, various quantitative methods and a multi-regression model.

Gender, age, role, experience in the sector and company existence do not affect behavioral intention. Conversely, performance expectancy, effort expectancy, social influences, facilitating conditions, attitude and self-efficacy strongly affect behavioral intention, whereas the determinant anxiety has a negative effect. Further, four factors account for most of the variability in behavioral intention.

The research is limited to Italian wine producers, and the discussion is based on quantitative results alone. Qualitative data would probably produce a richer, more comprehensive understanding of some phenomena.

Managers and entrepreneurs intending to invest in organic wine production can gain a detailed understanding of factors that affect the behavioral intention toward these technologies by comparing their attitudes with those of Italian producers.

Several studies have focused on wine consumers' behavior, but very few have investigated wineries' intention to adopt organic wine technology and the likely driving factors.

This research enlarges the debate on the operations management strategies pursued by manufacturing companies. The purpose of this paper is to focus on issues concerning servitisation and customisation, enterprise resource planning (ERP) and Lean-agile, supply chain orchestration, corporate social responsibility (CSR) and Lean for design management.

A questionnaire of eight questions which stemmed from a literature review was completed by 152 senior operations managers from 120 large European manufacturing companies. Responses were scaled from strongly agree to strongly disagree. The results were tested for reliability using Cronbach’s α test. The questions were tested through a one-sample t-test.

The 152 respondents consider servitisation and standardisation to be a trade-off. They consider integration of ERP strategies with Lean and agile systems and customised products/processes to be difficult. Furthermore, suppliers’ orchestration is considered not that suitable for manufacturing companies and suppliers’ CSR performance measurement excessive. By contrast, a CSR internal performance measurement is helpful for increasing sales. The respondents also indicate that there is a lack of Lean tools for design and development processes and Six Sigma is the only strategy for improving quality performance in design and development processes.

The findings are applicable only to the manufacturing sector. The findings of this research indicate many avenues of research for scholars.

The findings can be very useful for manufacturing operations managers deciding their future strategies on operations.

Findings related to servitisation and customisation, ERP and Lean-agile, supply orchestration for manufacturing companies and Lean and agile for product design are original and open a valuable debate.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) methodology can help in the decision-making process of choosing action plans linked to manufacturing strategy. The research also analyses the path which some managers followed for defining and selecting the action plans as well as the organisational obstacles and pitfalls the managers encountered.

The authors conducted an exploratory case study in a medium-sized Italian manufacturing company. The authors collected, coded and discussed data from the AHP implementation. Furthermore, during the observation of how the managers dealt with the decision-making path, the authors collected, coded and discussed the qualitative data.

Results showed that AHP made the decision-making process of choosing between alternative plans more objective. However, the authors observed obstacles and pitfalls mainly linked to organisational aspects such as creating team and staff’s awareness, involvement and commitment as well as staff’s skills. Other interesting findings are linked to the creation of managers’ consensus and the top manager’s managerial style and how the latter could affect the AHP consistency ratio.

This research is based on a case study. The findings need to be tested by other scholars and practitioners in different organisations. Moreover, issues such as management consensus and negotiation in manufacturing organisations and managerial style need further research.

AHP methodology can help practitioners who are dealing with the deployment of strategic manufacturing objectives and who are trying to employ methods for choosing the right action plan. Besides, practitioners are aware of specific organisational obstacles and pitfalls encountered on the strategic deployment path.

This paper proposes for the first time the use of the AHP methodology for choosing between action plans derived from strategic manufacturing objectives.