Zero Defect Manufacturing Effect on Sustainability: A Rapid Review

This paper aims to study the effect of Zero Defect Manufacturing (ZDM) on Sustainability by analyzing the state-of-the-art and identifying patterns and gaps within the available literature. Sustainability encompasses three pillars (Triple Bottom Line): social (people), environmental (planet), and economic (profit) pillars. The original ideas of a number of quality gurus such as Deming, who states that quality improves productivity through the reduction of costs caused by non-value added activities, Feigenbaum, who planted the roots for the concept of Total Quality Management (TQM) as we know today, and Ishikawa, who defends company-wide quality, that is, the need for involvement of all employees and the utilization of people’s intelligence, served as leverage for this study. The Sand Cone model proposed by Ferdows and De Meyer in 1990 presents a hierarchy of four concepts in the form of a pyramid that starts with “quality” at its base, succeeded by “dependability,” “speed,” and finally, “cost efficiency.” This productivity theory underlines, as well, the importance of quality management and aims to convey how companies should primarily focus on quality to further improve costs. In this sense, a Rapid Literature Review on papers concerning ZDM, quality management, and Sustainability was conducted, followed by a thematic analysis of the selected documents. The results from the assessment show how ZDM is addressed in several types of studies, such as literature reviews on its technical approach, models, and frameworks in different industries. Nonetheless, the literature is still lacking papers focused on the effects of ZDM on Sustainability, therefore, this study aims to bridge this gap.