From vision to impact: Can zero-defect manufacturing balance worker well-being, environmental sustainability, and fulfillment resilience?

The manufacturing sector is grappling with significant challenges, including concerns about worker well-being, sustainability, and the resilience of production systems. These core concerns drive the shift toward advanced manufacturing paradigm, where a suite of advanced technologies has been deployed to prioritize human-centric, sustainable, and resilient production practices. This paper develops a stylized competition model to investigate whether an inferior manufacturer suffering from unstable yield will strategically adopt relevant technologies to achieve zero-defect manufacturing. While zero-defect manufacturing intuitively promises better resilience, we find that its desirability becomes conditional if all three goals are taken into account. We introduce three performance indexes: worker well-being, environmental sustainability, and fulfillment resilience. One result worth noting is that zero-defect manufacturing does not always improve workers’ well-being, as it might increase workloads without proportional wage compensation. Regarding environmental sustainability, an interesting “green dilemma” is identified when the focal manufacturer has either a low or a high qualified yield level. Nevertheless, our analysis identifies feasible conditions under which the adoption of zero-defect manufacturing enables a multi-win situation for profitability, worker well-being, environmental sustainability, and fulfillment resilience.