Mätning av kvalitetsbristkostnader - en kartläggning av ett mätsystem

Cost Of Poor Quality (COPQ) can be defined as ”the costs which would be eliminated if a company's products and the processes in its business were perfect”. Measuring the total COPQ is more or less impossible because many costs are not visible in accounting systems or in other reporting systems. It is necessary to estimate the hidden costs to obtain an accurate depiction of how poor quality affects an organization. An organization which does not estimate hidden costs will miss opportunities for improvements and also lead improvements in an inefficient way.In this study a company’s measuring system of COPQ has been surveyed and the costs that are measured can be found in the company’s accounting system. Additional information about lack of quality can be found in the company’s non-conformity system but the costs of these non-conformities are not included in the follow-up of COPQ. The measured COPQ gives a picture of the costs that some quality problems cause but this picture is only a fraction of the total COPQ. The measurements can be useful to follow improvement activities connected to the measurements. However, the result of the measurements does not properly reflect the reality and is therefore by itself not suitable for using when decisions are taken about where to prioritize the improvement activities. Neither do the measured figures by themselves show the whole need for improvements.To obtain a comprehensive picture about the COPQ the author recommends that the company makes a survey regarding its COPQ. The knowledge of the true cost of making failures can motivate employees to avoid failures. For the management it is often helpful to know the true COPQ and the benefits of reducing those costs when spreading motivation for working with the problems. The survey is a prerequisite to decide if the existing measurements are relevant.The starting point of the survey should be the information that is available from the existing measurements. What information that can be found today has already been covered in this essay. In the corporate directives there is some support on what cost information that should be estimated and what costs that should be considered as COPQ. Also the non-conformity system gives an accurate picture of many of the quality problems that should be cost estimated and presented among the other information about COPQ.