ABSTRACT
Whilst Leibert1 and Jenney2 stress the importance of clear and concise objec tives, there has been little comment in the literature on the significance of this. There is little doubt that clarifying the purposes of the exercise at the outset can have a marked influence on the strategy. It is also of critical importance to the suc cess of the project, as it helps to avoid pitfalls and unnecessary work. For example, if the main purpose of the exercise is to identify high-cost problems, coarse scale costs in known problem areas will suffice. If the chief executive officer and mem bers of the senior management team accept that the organization’s quality costs are within the normally quoted range and, as a result, they are prepared to commit resources to improvement activities without the detail, then perhaps there is no point in attempting to refine the data further. If, on the other hand, the purpose is to set a percentage cost reduction target on the company’s total quality-related costs, it will be necessary to identify and measure all the contributing cost elements in order to be sure that costs are reduced and not simply transferred elsewhere. If a quality costing exercise is to be repeated, discipline and con sistency are needed to ensure that the data collected are comparable with previous reporting. Thus the matter of objectives is important, not only from a philosophical point of view, but also from purely practical considerations.
