Managing and measuring the costs of Quality

Hi all,

Part of my continuous improvement plan is to monitor quality costs. I'm just curious how others handle this task. How deep do you guys dig when monitoring costs of quality? Does anyone have any templates they can share? I'm just trying to get an idea of the industry standards. Thanks in advance.

(A little background info, we are a new company producing CPET food trays.We are recently BRC certified.)

Hi Ashleyjongkind,

For us, quality costs generally are an extension of plant needs and situations, so I have done tracking on general supply costs for what we need to run our lab. I have done supply costs for what we purchase for production (utensils and etc., metal detectable pens, testing needs). For testing that we do in-house for specific customers, I forward invoice fees associated with purchasing to customer. For lab testing done outside of our lab (micro and more advanced testing) as requirement by customer, I forward invoice fees to customer. Products placed on hold have associated costs as well. You can also calculate overtime hours, and labor costs for managing new products and additional tasks outside of your day-to-day duties.

I don't really have a template that I can share with you, as I don't know that there is a "one size fits all" template for managing costs. As far as continuous improvement is concerned, if we can reduce non-conformances, QA costs are theoretically reduced since there is a lot less handling of corrective actions and preventive measures.

Costs of quality has many areas. These can help you:

https://asq.org/qual...cost-of-quality

https://goleansixsig...r-quality-copq/

My opinion is that's a rather large question.
What metrics are you exactly trying to measure?

Labor cost for QA employees.
QA duties and how they directly affect quality.

Direct correlation of QA (or quality in general) to the safety of the product?

Ability of "quality" to directly impact throughput and efficiencies.

My opinion is that functions of quality that improve food safety, drive process improvements (rejects/holds/complaints) are a cost of doing business. It's not something (in your particular scenario, of course), that needs to be tracked, other than from a P&L standpoint. If your focus is providing safe food at a profit margin that benefits your company, it does not really matter what it costs.

Marshall