Question

Describe the relationship between the four (4) main costs of quality and how are they are related.                                                                                                         

Answer 1

Four main costs of quality are:

- Prevention cost: These are the expenses that a company bear to ensure that quality is maintained in the system and there is no glitch, for this purpose costs such as expenses on training is done, previous lessons are analysed and meaningful insights are implemented, and also the capability of the processes are accessed.

- Appraisal cost: These are the inspection costs that may relate to people and processes expenditure, Goods and manufacturing units are inspected from every angle at various stages to see any default or shortcoming.

- Internal failure: There could be lot of issues while manufacturing such as wastages could be there, a lot of material can be scrap, there could be chances of delays resulting in cost and also the downtime hence all these costs that a company bear comes under internal failure.

- External failure: These are something which are not directly controlled by the company such as customer returning the product, the quality score going down, and repair of goods for free and also the customer number going down.

These costs are interrelated such as customer number would go down when the internal quality is low and the final product sold is not as per the expectations, for this it is to be ensured that inspection and quality measures are in place and hence the final output depends on how strong and robust the process is.