IET Technical Webinar: Digitalization and Quality Management

 The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) organized a webinar named “Digitalization and Quality Management” on 28^th Nov 2020. Hong Kong Society for Quality (HKSQ) was one of supporting organizations.  Dr. Albert Tsang and I were honor to be invited as guest speakers in this event. We took a group photo for memory.

(Left: Dr. Carman Lee (Asso. Professor, ISE, PolyU), Dr. Albert Tsang, Dr. Lotto Lai, Mr. John Chow (Managing Director, Fortune Industrial Products Ltd.) and Dr. Vincent Fung)

Then I took a photo with Dr. Tsang in front of the webinar screen.

Photo with friends

I also gave my new book named “Logic of Innovation: Extenics” to Dr. Carman Lee and Mr. John Chow.

Before the webinar, Dr. Carman gave souvenir to Dr. Albert Tang.

And then presented souvenir to me.

Dr. Albert Tsang (Former Principal Lecturer, ISE, PolyU) was the first speaker and his topic was “Digitalization and Quality Management”.  In the beginning, he explained the different between Digitization and Digitalization.  The former term mean without changing content but only move into digital environment. The Digitalization was digital transformation using digital technologies to change business model.

Then Dr. Tsang briefed some enabling technologies of digitalization including IoT, Connectivity, Cloud Computing, Big Data and Data Science.  And then Dr. Tsang introduced the level of digitalization and its initiative in different post on the x-axis from focus on creating internal efficiency to creating customer value and the y-axis from exploiting available digital solutions to exploring new digital solutions.  Some quality management challenges were discussed. 

After that he mentioned a new technology development such as digital twin and using aircraft engine as example.  Dr. Tsang then introduced from business problems to data mining tasks as follows: Classification and class probability estimation, Regression, Similarity matching, Clustering, Co-occurrence grouping, Profiling … etc. 

Finally, Dr. Tsang discussed big data analytics process using six sigma DMAIC.  Lastly, he mentioned quality professionals’ roles (QP) in data science projects to the business that one of major contributions of QP was to develop and implement of data-driven decision making.

I was the second speaker and my presentation topic named “Digital Quality Innovation: How to be Quality 4.0 Professional”.  My presentation included four parts and they were Introduction of Innovation & Quality, Digitalization, Industry 4.0 and Quality 4.0 professional model.

Firstly, I explained the definition of innovation and identified quality innovation indicated that quality is set and innovation is subset and their common factor is improvement.  Then I introduced the development of quality and innovation tools under four industrial revolutions. 

Then I introduced the digitalization especially in digital disruption that the one who defeats you at this stage is not necessarily an opponent, but a passerby.  That’s why we needed digital transformation.

After that I employed Fraunhofer’s Smart i4.0 Navigator (i4.0 model) to explain how to implement industry 4.0 through four of enablers.  Some examples were discussed such as Smart Certification.

Finally, I quoted Dr. Jim Duarte (Academician, IAQ) about seven newer tools for Quality 4.0 (Q4.0) that most tools were AI and statistics related tools.  It is not easy for quality professional who without strong statistics training to learn.

Lastly, I proposed Certified Quality 4.0 Professional Model for discussion.  There were separated into management system level, management tools level, culture level, advanced technology, industry 4.0 and then to quality 4.0.  I concluded that Quality 4.0 is to integrate Data Science into Quality and Industry 4.0 Culture at the end.

Q&A session

One of online participants asked how to obtain the certified Q4.0 professional.  I said that HKSQ would be developed the body of knowledge (BoK) in coming year. However, we haven’t international recognized standard BoK now.  ASQ was one of leaders in the world to perform Quality 4.0 Summit in 2019 and 2020, respectively. We wished the global alignment of Q4.0 would be created in near future.

Reference:

IET - https://www.theiet.org/

HKSQ - http://www.hksq.org/

Related seminar:

20190927: HKSQ AGM Seminar on Industry 4.0 in Quality Management - https://qualityalchemist.blogspot.com/2019/09/hksq-agm-seminar-on-industry-40-in.html