Digitalisation and quality management: problems and prospects

Abstract

Digitalisation provides both challenges and opportunities for Quality Management (QM). The purpose of this study is to identify various roles QM practitioners play in digitalisation initiatives to uncover the challenges and potential of QM's digitalisation journey. This issue is addressed through an analytical framework that stresses two dimensions: the exploration and exploitation of digitalised QM processes and value creation, which is performed by the customer or in interactions facilitated by the provider. Through a multiple-case study of four large Swedish organisations, we propose six different challenges and corresponding roles for QM. Further, the study identifies challenges of digitalisation affecting both exploitative and explorative practices throughout an organisation's value creation process. This research contributes to the existing literature with empirical evidence on the challenges induced by digitalisation, an area often discussed but not as often studied empirically.

Digital Transformation and The Changing Shape of Quality Management Practices

“…digitalisation, new digital vision and digital strategy. To secure long-term outcomes of digitalisation the top management commitment, customer orientation and technology focus on satisfying customers and business needs are imperative (Elg et al, 2020). Here comes the role of quality management in digitalisation and reshaping of quality management practices in the course of digital transformation.…”

“…The benefits, disadvantages and risks connected to the integration of digital technologies (Mayakova, 2019;Ralea et al, 2019), challenges of the implementation (Kovrigin & Vasiliev, 2020;Sjödin et al, 2018) and key lessons learned (Tabrizi et al, 2019) are also discussed in the scientific literature. Some studies focus on human aspects of digitalisation (Elg et al, 2020;Dengler & Tisch, 2020) and another research has been done on trends and tendencies of digital transformation (Lola & Bakeev, 2020).…”

“…The usage of Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications ensures regulatory compliance and improve work safety (IBM, 2017). The digital transformation is an enabler for the development of new business models based on digital platforms (Prokhin, 2020;Elg et al, 2020). Also, the participation of customers in product design and development directly expressing their needs and expectations adds to the competitive advantages of the companies ensured by digital technologies (Mazzuto & Ciarapica, 2019;Carvalho et al, 2020).…”

“…The role of digital transformation in creation of better customer experience and value is tremendous. With the introduction of 3D technologies customers can take an active part in product development, have access to data via usage of applications and devices, can monitor processes in a real time and change settings (Prokhin, 2020;Elg et al, 2020). Mazzuto and Ciarapica (Mazzuto & Ciarapica, 2019) add that digitalisation allows to include customers more and more in pre-sales and post-sales activities with the usage of Internet platforms, including the potential and prospective customers.…”

Guest editorial

“…For that reason, we adopted a more intra-organisational perspective, especially on an organisation's reactions to digitalisation. Digitalisation comes with many challenges related to using new, extensive data in practical ways (Brinch et al, 2018), with one challenge in operations management being the role that practitioners need to assume to use the results of digitalisation (Elg et al, 2020a). In the article on alignment capabilities, a key lesson is that benefiting from digitalisation requires not only new IT capabilities but also a range of other organisational capabilities to be able to identify and realise potential value in a specific context.…”