ABSTRACT
Every time we fail to meet the needs of our internal or external customers it costs money to replace, rectify, pay warranties or recall products. As stated earlier, it is not uncommon for these costs to represent some 20% of turnover. This is entirely lost profit, hence the important principle of getting things ‘right first time’.64–66 Not until recently have companies really attempted to determine the true cost of quality, mainly due to the lack of effective cost-control systems. The main problems of quality can be summarised as follows:
most office and manufacturing processes produce defect levels around 20%;
twenty per cent is accepted as the norm;
no organised effort is made to change the situation until a ‘real’ quality problem is found;
all efforts are then expended to solve the problem and return to the previously acceptable level.
