Study of the relation between types of the quality costs and its impact on productivity and costs: a verification in manufacturing industries

Abstract

Quality management aims to create a high-quality, high-performance product or service that meets and exceeds the customers’ expectations. This research seeks to highlight the concept of quality control (QC) and quality costs as essential elements which are the rudiments controlling the survival of organisations in the marketplace. This requires spending on two types of quality costs, prevention costs (PCs) and appraisal costs. These costs aim at the reduction of two types of quality costs, internal failure costs (IFCs) and external failure costs (EFCs). It also takes account of the investment in QC team IFCs and EFCs. This research is tailored towards clarifying the nature and the relationship between types of quality costs and total quality costs. Moreover, it seeks to measure the impact of quality improvement on productivity and costs, hence creating a practical opportunity for improvements for organisations. The study collected data from a textile company's records in Iraq. The field cohabiting method was followed by the researcher to highlight the main results of this study. Technological obsolescence led to an increase in the proportion of products requiring re-work or scrapping, thereby increasing costs and decreasing the levels of quality and productivity. The results also indicate that there was a PCs weakness in maintenance and protection programmes affecting quality and productivity.

Keywords:

• total quality management
• total quality costs
• productivity

Acknowledgements

The author hereby acknowledges support from members of staff of the textile Industry. Also, the invaluable contributions of Dr Andrew K. Campen at Arvia technology Ltd, UK for the feedback on earlier versions of this paper is appropriately acknowledged.