Quality

Cost of QualityCOQ

The total cost of achieving quality (prevention + appraisal) plus the cost of failing to (internal + external failure).

Cost of Quality (COQ) sums four buckets: prevention costs (training, mistake-proofing), appraisal costs (inspection, testing), internal failure costs (scrap, rework), and external failure costs (warranty, recalls, lost customers).

The strategic insight is that money spent on prevention is far cheaper than money lost to failure — typically the "hidden factory" of failure costs dwarfs the visible inspection budget. COQ makes the financial case for quality improvement.

Put Cost of Quality into practice

SymplProcess turns these concepts into working models, calculators, and templates your whole team can use — no spreadsheets required.

← Browse all glossary terms