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Quality Costs in a Garment Industry
A proper understanding of the cost of quality (COQ) is vital for
a garment industry to develop quality
conformance as a useful strategic business tool to improve
quality. Quality costs are the costs associated
with preventing, finding, and correcting defective work.
Research shows that the costs of poor quality
can range from 15%-40% of business costs. Many of these costs
can be significantly reduced orcompletely avoided.
There are four types of quality costs: prevention costs,
appraisal costs, internal failure costs, and
external failure costs.
1. Internal Failure Costs: Costs from product defects prior to
shipment to customer. These includescrap, rework, retest, downtime,
etc.
2. External failure costs: Costs associated with defects found
after shipment to customer. Theyinclude complaint adjustment,
returned material, warranty charges, allowances, etc.
3. Appraisal Costs: Costs associated with discovering the
condition of products and raw materials.They include incoming
material inspection, inspection and test, maintain accuracy of
test
equipment, materials and services consumed, evaluating of stocks
etc.
4. Prevention Costs: The costs of all activities to prevent poor
quality of products. These includequality planning, new products
review, training, process control, quality data acquisition and
analysis, quality reporting, improvement projects etc.
The figure below depicts the percentage of quality cost elements
in a typical Indian garment factory.
Total Cost of Quality
Total Cost of Quality is the sum of four types of costs i.e.
Prevention Cost + Appraisal Cost + Internal
Failure Cost + External Failure Cost.
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In today's business environment reduction of total cost of
quality increases the competitiveness and
facilitates survival and further growth of a garment
industry
The figure below shows depicts the obstacles to improve quality
in garment companies
A. The system of the organization (like policy, rules and
procedures)B. The internal working environmentC. Lack of
consistency in the action being takenD. Fear and resistance of the
managementE. Lack of the required knowledge and skill
The figure below shows depicts the cause of poor quality
products in Indian garment industries
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A. Poor quality of raw materials delivered from suppliersB.
Inadequate training of workers in the companyC. Lack of top
management commitment to qualityD. Low quality awareness of workers
in the companyE.
Unavailability of proper technology
Self Assessment
The model of the European Quality Award is divided into two
parts: enablers and results. The
enablers are leadership, people management, policy and strategy,
resources and processes. These
five aspects steer the business and facilitate the
transformation of inputs to outputs. The results are
people satisfaction, customer satisfaction, impact on society
and business results which are the
measure of the level of output attained by the organization. The
model consists of nine primary
elements which are further divided into a number of secondary
elements as shown in the figure
below
