Quality costing: A study of manufacturing organizations. Part 1: Case studies and survey

A four-stage investigation into the use of quality costing in the small and medium manufacturing industry has been made and is reported. The first stage looked at previously published work, noting the opinions of the quality experts (the so-called 'gurus') and identifying a pattern in the various methods of implementing quality costing. The next stage looked at how the existing methods had been used or adapted in local small manufacturing companies with actual case studies. This raised some questions about the company attributes that aff ected the use of quality costing which, in turn, led to the third stage of a pilot survey of the small/medium manufacturing companies in the North East of England. This yielded some interesting trends in how the use of quality costing was related to the extent and sophistication of quality management in the companies. The final stage was a large survey conducted using a stratified sample of 1000 manufacturing organizations in the North East of England region and the development and results of this are reported in Part 2.