Student: John Loyd
Student ID: 000329013
Course: QHT1 Business Management Tasks
Task 1
Cost Quality Relationship
Product production comes with many types of costs. Four of the most common costs are prevention costs, appraisal costs, internal failure costs and external failure costs. These four costs are called quality costs and are costs that all businesses that produce products will pay. The amount of money that will go to each cost is dependent on the amount spent on the other costs. In other words, an increase in one type of cost can result in a decrease in another. Businesses need to understand the nature of each cost in order to understand for which cost to budget.
The first type of cost is prevention costs. Prevention costs are the most vital costs in which to invest. Prevention costs are the costs that are acquired when the company prevents the occasions of defects in the first place. Basically, this is the cost of producing quality products. These costs include improvement in the manufacturing methods used to make the product, properly maintain the equipment that is used, maintaining a good relationship with vendors, employee training and more. Any cost that is associated with the lessening of creating faulty products is a prevention cost. For instance, a company that pays trainers to fully train each employee and offers paid training will see a decrease in the human error involved in manufacturing. A company that does not take the time to do this will produce more products that are poor quality because the company’s employees do not know how to properly do their jobs. A potential trade off to preventative costs would be decreased sales. The time to market would be slower. This could result in an inability to keep up with particularly fast-paced markets. By increasing the front-end preventative costs, less product is sold.
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