ABSTRACT
Quality costs are those economic factors that relate to achieving, or in many cases not achieving, acceptable levels of quality in the product or service supplied. They provide a quantitative way of looking at what is happening in the business and are, therefore, a form of measurement. These are strictly financial measures and, as such, most advocates recommend that they are collected, analysed and reported by the finance function of the organization. This is intended to create the company culture in which quality is seen as central to the company's operations in the same way that stock costs, depreciation, overheads and similar costs are regularly scrutinized as part of the overall financial monitoring of the health of the business. This is attractive to many chief executives who take the usual sceptical approach to quality and similar initiatives. Their natural reluctance to spend money on these programmes is reinforced by the idea that spending beyond a certain level is not productive.
