ABSTRACT
The fields of quality management and reliability widely recognize that the later a defect or failure is found in the system development or manufacturing process, the more costly it is to resolve and the more catastrophic the defect or failure can be to either the customer or the system objectives. Most approaches to process and quality improvement have roots in the post-World War II work by pioneers in the field of quality control, such as Deming, Juran, Taguchi, and Shewhart. The following is a partial list of informal and formal process improvement methodologies that have gained popularity over time:
• Benchmarking • Business Process Improvement • Business Process Reengineering • Capability Maturity Model® Integration (CMMI)/Capability Maturity Model • Goal-question-metric • Hoshin Kanri • ISO 9000 • Just In Time manufacturing • Lean manufacturing • Performance improvement • Process management • Process improvement and management • Six Sigma • Theory of Constraints • Total Quality Management • Trillium Model • Twelve leverage points
Today’s highly competitive business environment, in both the commercial and defense industries, requires companies to strive to provide goods and services better, cheaper, and faster than their competitors. To that end, most large to mid-size companies have process improvement initiatives as a core component to doing business. The two most well known of these process improvement methodologies are Six Sigma and CMMI. Motorola developed the former in the mid-1980s and the Software Engineering Institute developed the latter. This chapter provides an overview of the cost of quality (CoQ) and its significance to these methodologies. For most small to mid-sized companies, embarking on any process improvement effort involves a steep initial cost. It is therefore imperative to understand and account for the CoQ as it relates to these efforts.
