Management in the manufacturing industry has often used different types of quality improvements to reach a “near zero” perfection in product and process development is often strategic objectives. Manufacturing of complex products with a large number of components, often have high probability of detective output product. Philosophies like Six Sigma, Lean i.e. are excellent to target these strategical goals and make improvement in production. Statistical tools and data collection are indicators that may improve the quality; however a growing amount of data, “internet of things” (IoT) and cyber physical systems (CPS) have led to development of complex manufacturing systems, today mentioned as Industry 4.0.

Documented “Best Practices” is necessary to understand the interoperability. The author has harvested results from EU-project “Intelligent Fault Correction and self-Optimizing Manufacturing Systems” (IFaCOM), with focus on Zero Defect Manufacturing (ZDM).The project used a beyond Six Sigma approach and by structuring the TQM in a process map and transformed it to a ZDM Guideline. Process steps and quality methods which have been used with the ZDM philosophy is not only statistical methods, but also steps that can give benefit to process optimization, combination of quality methods as contribution to rework of products, less waste of material and improvement of financial conditions.