Quality Costs : Facilitating The Quality Initiative

Ideas of what constitute quality costs have been changing rapidly. Whereas only a few years ago the costs of quality (COQ) were perceived as the cost of running the quality assurance department and the laboratory plus scrap and warranty costs, it is now widely accepted that they are the costs incurred in designing, implementing, operating, and maintaining quality management systems, the costs involved in introducing and sustaining a process of continuous and company — wide quality improvement, plus the costs incurred owing to failures of the systems, products and/or services. There is a general consensus that quality dollars expended on prevention and appraisal costs have the greatest return, and organizations spend the largest percentage of quality dollars in these categories. The remaining categories, failure costs (both internal and external), should ideally constitute only a minor percentage of total dollars spent on quality. The remaining category, failure costs (both internal and external), should ideally constitute only a minor percentage of total dollars spent on quality. Contrary to expectations, in many organizations, the highest percentage of the quality dollar is spent on the category with the lowest return, internal and external failures, followed by appraisal costs. Finally prevention costs, which produce the greatest return on investment, typically receive only a little share of the quality dollar

Costs of quality or quality costs

Costs of quality or quality costs do not mean the use of expensive or very highly quality materials to manufacture a product. The term refers to the costs that are incurred to prevent, detect and remove defects from products. There are four categories: internal failure costs (costs associated with defects found before the customer receives the product or service), external failure costs (costs associated with defects found after the customer receives the product or service), appraisal costs (costs incurred to determine the degree of conformance to quality requirements) and prevention costs (costs incurred to keep failure and appraisal costs to a minimum). Cost of quality is a methodology that allows an organization to determine the extent to which its resources are used for activities that prevent poor quality, that appraise the quality of the organization's products or services, and that result from internal and external failures. Having such information allows an organization to determine the potential savings to be gained by implementing process improvements.Web of Science5213

Will Privatization Reduce Costs?

I develop a model of public sector contracting based on the multitask framework by Holmström and Milgrom (1991). In this model, an agent can put effort into increasing the quality of a service or reducing costs. Being residual claimants, private owners have stronger incentives to cut costs than public employees. However, if quality cannot be perfectly measured, providing a private firm with incentives to improve quality forces the owner of the firm to bear risk. As a result, private firms will always be cheaper for low levels of quality but might be more expensive for high levels of quality. Extending the model to allow for differences in task attractiveness, I find that public firms shun unattractive tasks, whereas private firms undertake them if incentives are strong enough.Privatization; public sector contracting; incomplete contracts; contracting out

Will Privatization Reduce Costs?

I develop a model of public sector contracting based on the multitask framework by Holmström and Milgrom (1991). In this model, an agent can put effort into increasing the quality of a service or reducing costs. Being residual claimants, private owners have stronger incentives to cut costs than public employees. However, if quality cannot be perfectly measured, providing a private firm with incentives to improve quality forces the owner of the firm to bear risk. As a result, private firms will always be cheaper for low levels of quality but might be more expensive for high levels of quality. Extending the model to allow for differences in task attractiveness, I find that public firms shun unattractive tasks, whereas private firms undertake them if incentives are strong enough.Privatization; Public Sector Contracting; Incomplete Contracts; Contracting Out

Candidate Quality

We analyze the topical question of how the compensation of elected politicians affects the set of citizens choosing to run. To this end, we develop a sparse and tractable citizen-candidate model of representative democracy with ability differences, informative campaigning and political parties. Our results suggest that primaries, campaign costs and rewards have previously overlooked interactions that should be studied in a unified framework. Surprisingly, increasing the reward may lower the average candidate quality when the campaigning costs are sufficiently high.Politicians' competence; Career concerns; Campaigning costs; Rewards for elected officials; Citizen-candidate models

The Quality Costs

Quality has a cost and this fact cannot be denied. In the same time, it is true that non-quality is more expensive. Quality is considered as being expensive because no one tries to calculate non-quality costs. Out of the final cost of a product, non-quality stands for 20% up to 35%. According to this idea all the economic sectors contain error costs caused by the mistakes made during the production process. To have a real consummation situation, it is necessary to know the cost quantum. The final quality cost is the result of the following costs: prevention costs, necessary to preclude errors; evaluation costs, as results of a final product evaluation, and failure costs, generated by the non – attainment of product’s purpose. The gross of these costs stand for the total quality costs. Nowadays, the problem inheres in how much this quality cost represents out of the final cost.Total Quality Management, quality cost, prevention costs

Correlation between prescribing quality and pharmaceutical costs in English primary care: national cross-sectional analysis

Background Both pharmaceutical costs and quality-indicator performance vary substantially between general practices, but little is known about the relationship between prescribing costs and quality Aim To measure the association between prescribing quality and pharmaceutical costs among English general practices Design and setting Cross-sectional observational study using data from the Quality and Outcomes Framework and the Prescribing Analysis and Cost database from all 8409 general practices in England in 2005-2006 Method Correlation between practice achievement of 26 prescribing quality indicators in eight prescribing areas and related pharmaceutical costs was examined. Results There was no significant association between the overall achievement of quality indicators and related pharmaceutical costs (P= 0.399). Mean achievement of quality indicators across all eight prescribing areas was 79.0% (standard deviation 4.4%). There were small positive correlations in five prescribing areas: influenza vaccination, beta blockers, angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitors, lipid lowering, and antiplatelet treatment (all

Benefits and limits of quality cost concept applied to software industry

Quality Cost approach is important to be implemented for each product or project of any software company, wherever it’s possible, because it provides additional and more accurate information about costs, costs determined by level of product/project quality. In order to minimize the costs of the required quality level in software industry is important to find out a balance between prevention costs and failure costs. But, even if the prevention costs are very high, it doesn’t assure the elimination of all quality problems or it finally drives the product/project to an unacceptable price from the consumer point of view.failure costs, prevention costs, quality cost, software industry.

The costs of accessible quality assured syphilis diagnostics: informing quality systems for rapid syphilis tests in a Tanzanian setting.

OBJECTIVES: To determine the costs of Rapid Syphilis Test (RSTs) as compared with rapid plasma reagin (RPR) when implemented in a Tanzanian setting, and to determine the relative impact of a quality assurance (QA) system on the cost of RST implementation. METHODS: The incremental costs for RPR and RST screening programmes in existing antenatal care settings in Geita District, Tanzania were collected for 9 months in subsequent years from nine health facilities that varied in size, remoteness and scope of antenatal services. The costs per woman tested and treated were estimated for each facility. A sensitivity analysis was constructed to determine the impact of parameter and model uncertainty. FINDINGS: In surveyed facilities, a total of 6362 women were tested with RSTs compared with 224 tested with RPR. The range of unit costs was $1.76-$3.13 per woman screened and $12.88-$32.67 per woman treated. Unit costs for the QA system came to $0.51 per woman tested, of which 50% were attributed to salaries and transport for project personnel. CONCLUSIONS: Our results suggest that rapid syphilis diagnostics are very inexpensive in this setting and can overcome some critical barriers to ensuring universal access to syphilis testing and treatment. The additional costs for implementation of a quality system were found to be relatively small, and could be reduced through alterations to the programme design. Given the potential for a quality system to improve quality of diagnosis and care, we recommend that QA activities be incorporated into RST roll-out