Cost of Quality Calculator
See what quality really costs when you add up prevention, appraisal, and failure, and how much of it is the price of poor quality. Your numbers stay in your browser.
Total Cost of Quality
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How this is calculated
Cost of Quality sorts quality spend into four buckets, then groups them into the money spent to achieve quality and the money lost when quality fails.
Expressed against sales, the totals become a benchmark you can track over time.
CoPQ % of revenue = Cost of Poor Quality ÷ annual revenue × 100
The 1-10-100 rule, and why prevention wins
- 1-10-100. A classic rule of thumb: a defect that costs roughly 1 unit to prevent costs about 10 to catch and correct internally, and about 100 once it reaches the customer as returns, warranty, and lost trust. Catching problems early is dramatically cheaper.
- Shift spend left. Total Cost of Quality tends to fall when you move money from failure toward prevention. A dollar of prevention often removes several dollars of internal and external failure.
- External failure is the costly bucket. Failures that escape to the customer carry the highest true cost and the hardest to measure damage to reputation.
- Buckets vary by definition. Where you draw the line between appraisal and internal failure changes the split. Keep your definitions consistent so the trend is meaningful.
Poor quality shows up as scrap, rework, and lost time. To break out the shop floor piece, use the scrap and rework cost calculator and the first pass yield and RTY calculator. For the improvement system that drives these numbers down, see lean manufacturing.
Turn failure cost into prevention
Harmony connects your machines, quality checks, and paperwork into one real-time operational layer, no rip-and-replace, so problems are caught upstream instead of paid for downstream as scrap, returns, and warranty. Read the CLS case study.
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