Establishing Departmental Cost of Quality - please help!

[S_bozic]

Hello,

I'm supposed to write something about departmental cost of quality for a project, but I just can't seem to find any information about it on the internet (yes, i've done search on this forum) and books (including Mr Juran's Quality Handbook).
I just know that it's analytical method of TQM and nothing else. Can somebody please help me?

Thanks a lot,
Stefan

[Stijloor]

Originally Posted by S_bozic

Hello,

I'm supposed to write something about departmental cost of quality for a project, but I just can't seem to find any information about it on the internet (yes, i've done search on this forum) and books (including Mr Juran's Quality Handbook).
I just know that it's analytical method of TQM and nothing else. Can somebody please help me?

Thanks a lot,
Stefan

Hello Stefan,

Welcome to the Cove Forums!

You stated: "I am supposed to write something......."

Have you determined exactly what it is about the "Cost of Quality" you are going to write about? Without a specific aspect of the COQ, it will be difficult.

You also stated that you have done a search. Have you scrolled down to the bottom of this page? You'll find links there.

Well, there is a lot of information here on The Cove Forums about this topic. But you will not find a finished paper here (if that's what you were looking for). Research and work on your part is expected.

Please come back and if you have a specific question about COQ, please post it here. Specific questions tend to get more responses from my Fellow Covers.

Stijloor.

[Colpart]

A simple approach to the COQ is to categorise the costs as follows:

• Prevention costs - money you deliberately spend to prevent problems from occurring.
• Appraisal costs - money you spend on checking quality.
• Failure costs - costs you incur because something went wrong. These can be further broken down into internal failure and external failure.

In most businesses without formal quality systems in place, they spend more on failure costs rather than prevention. Good companies with strong quality systems spend enough on prevention to enable them to reduce appraisal costs and cut failures. Well, that's the theory

[gard2372]

Originally Posted by S_bozic

Hello,

I'm supposed to write something about departmental cost of quality for a project, but I just can't seem to find any information about it on the internet (yes, i've done search on this forum) and books (including Mr Juran's Quality Handbook).
I just know that it's analytical method of TQM and nothing else. Can somebody please help me?

Thanks a lot,
Stefan

Stefan,

I just typed Cost of QUality into google and there are over 15 million hits related to Cost of Quality. I'm sure you can find something there.

Also, I found (2) Cove forum posts related to definitions and COPQ subject matter although I'm sure there are more.

http://elsmar.com/Forums/showthread.php?t=10936
http://elsmar.com/Forums/showthread.php?t=23662

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q...=Google+Search

[S_bozic]

First of all, thanks for help! The links are very useful, it's very interesting topic (to me at least). But, I'm still not sure if I got it right: departmental cost of quality = COQ of any department in the company (maybe a stupid question but English is not my mother tongue so I maybe misunderstood something)?

When I said that i should "write something" about departmental COQ - I know that it's vague and confusing but I'm a little bit confused too (as you probably figured out)...

Anyway, thank you all for helping me!

PS The discussion about differences between COQ and COPQ... great

[BradM]

Hello Stefan!

The other posters have done an excellent job on this one.

You state you have been given a project. Surely there is some explanation/details on the part of the instructor. As Stijloor and others suggest, cost of quality is a mighty big area. Too, without a little more clarification, you will get into philosophical differences.

There is the "Quality is free" philosophy. Basically, any expense in quality will be offset by the savings generated.

Too, there is the philosophy that quality is an overhead, the cost of doing business. Many here try to avoid the approach of expensing quality within departments.

There is Activity Based Costing. This is where allocation of costs occurs based on some standard level of activity-square footage, personnel, # of machine hours, etc.

I think Colin is onto something you need to look into. Cost of poor quality is an excellent base for you. I'm pretty sure that is in Juran's handbook. Start there, and see if you can formulate a game plan.

Hope this helps.