Question

1. The type of quality coast associated with poor quality initiatives.

2. How does an increment in the costs associated with poor quality result in an improvement of quality initiatives and the company's profit performance?

3. How does a focus on product and process improvement help an organisation become more competitive in this COVID-19 pandemic?

Answer 1

1) The Cost of Poor Quality (COPQ) is referred to or defined as the costs associated with providing poor quality products (goods) or services. There are mainly three categories in these segments, (a) Appraisal costs are costs incurred to determine the degree of any conformance to the quality requirements. (b) Internal failure costs are the costs associated with any kind of defects found before the customer receives the final product or service, and (c) External failure costs are another kind of costs associated with any defects found after the customer receives the final product or service.

2) An increment in the costs associated with the poor quality in products or service results in an improvement of quality initiatives and the company's profit performance by maintaining the quality standards one reduce the rework or further alteration that would be mainly required. This would directly or automatically save direct material cost, labor cost, and additional energy costs. Thus, by improving quality at each and every step would help increase productivity and efficiency. Incremental costs are also used in the lead decision or management decisions to make, buy a product, increase quality, or improve profit performance.

3) The concept of process improvement aims to reduce or eliminate the weak points or bottlenecks in the entire business operations. By identifying those specific weak points, one helps the business to reduce process completion time and improve the process efficiency, the stability of operation, and quality. During the COVID-19 pandemic time, the focus on certain product and process improvement helps an organization to become more competitive by increased productivity, improved quality, lowered costs, decreased delivery times, and reduce employee turnover rates. There are certain methods involved in the process improvement like Six Sigma, to improve the focus on the product.