Over the past decades, quality management has developed into a comprehensive management system and reflects in its current structure the complexity of globalization in all its facets (Jochem and Menrath 2015). The system architecture is based on the management pyramid as described in ‘The Principles of Scientific Management’ by Frederick W. Taylor from 1911 (Morieux and Tollmann 2015). Here planning and execution are separated; work sequences are also defined in the form of processes. Processes, however, require a repeatability of procedures and thus an almost stable economic environment so that process efficiency can be maintained at a high level. In a dynamic environment, even more data, more planning and more agility do not help, according to the authors' experience, because many of the quality problems have their root cause in the fact that the structures and cultures in the companies are not adapted to the increasingly complex market environment (see Baecker 1999). Therefore, the upcoming digitalization alone cannot solve the problem of under-complexity in structures and over-complicatedness in processes. In the future, companies will have to have more variability and flexibility to adapt to the increasing environmental complexity, as digitization and the growth of complexity take place hand in hand (Menrath and Jochem 2020). For this reason, people and their abilities as complexity managers have to move more and more into the focus of companies despite smart technology. The article provides a general review and argues that digitalization is primarily a social challenge and not a technical problem only.

Martin Menrath

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Quality in the Age of Digitalization – How to Realize the Transformation