After tight comes loose - Too complex for quality?

Cheapest, quickest, best, that are global requirements of markets and customers towards product suppliers. These requirements affect the whole supply chain. Last years' enormous technology leaps and innovations provided many new opportunities. Thus, they also fuelled customer expectations: everything is possible, at once. At the same time, we reached or exceeded the load limit of infrastructures. Even minor disturbances escalade to product failures, process or supply chain disruptions, moreover huge incidents or situations of war, extreme weather events, political sanctions or scarceness of resources. For quite some time we experience quality breakdowns and low availability in important sectors. Plants cannot compensate for the quality breakdowns due to too much complexity via classical quality assurance. They urgently need concepts to reduce complexity. © 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston.