Quality-triggered learning effects

Abstract

Learning that happens on the shop floor during production has long been recognized as a major source of process improvements, and economists have captured the relation of unit production costs to output experience in the concept of the ‘learning curve.’ Although obvious, the connection to the topic of quality improvement has rarely been made. In this article, we therefore analyze where, in the process of quality improvement, information is acquired so as to promote learning and process understanding. We depict a typical improvement process as a ‘quality investment cycle’ and identify three learning effects that are due to quality: the output effect, the problem-solving effect and the spill-over effect. All three effects enrich the information basis on which successive quality investments are conducted and reduce the investment's marginal costs.

Keywords:

• Quality improvement
• learning effects
• investment costs

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank the Swiss National Science Foundation for its financial support of this research and S⊘ren Bisgaard for the discussion of the topic.