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Total Cost of Quality is a very important topic but not well known by a lot of C-level managers. When asked about the total Cost of Quality, a lot of C-level managers simply don’t know or give an industry standard. This reaction is understandable but very striking at the same time. In many industries the estimated costs of quality is in the range of 20%, which is some serious money when you are talking about tens of millions or even hundreds of millions.

Open your eyes

Automation can help companies to get a better feeling for their cost of quality. This starts by providing employees with the tools to record a quality issue. A number of companies claim to have very little issues, only because their issue form is around 6 pages. No one in their right mind is going to fill that up so a lot of issues are not even registered. Providing a mobile app with just 2 or 3 fields and an option to add images lowers the burden significantly to report an issue. This will lead to a bigger influx of issues, which is great.

Pick up the issue

Now that the burden of reporting an issue is out of the window, the real power of automation kicks in. The different stages the issue needs to follow can be predefined with pinpoint accuracy which means that the right person can add information precisely at the right time. A good automation solution allows the option to create a structured actions plan, and distributes the action to the designated owner. This connects the corrective actions to the issue on hand.

The automation allows for the hidden costs to get exposed, for example costs like waiting hours by the team or repair hours required to fix the issue. Multiplying these hours with the internal hourly rate, the company will be able to put a price tag to the lost hours. Furthermore, the solution can give an indication of the costs the administration has cost based on the hours worked on the issue.

Finalize

When all the information required for the incident has been provided, the report can be closed. This way of tracking Total Cost of Quality allows management to get a real-time insight in the actual costs. They can always have a clear overview of what all these issues cost the company. Just check the example.

analyse issues

Dashboard

In the end it is very important to get a grip on your total cost of quality and clearly see where the company is bleeding money in order to fix this. You can only take this step when everybody in the company is able to file an issue easily. Have fun increasing your efficiency.

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