Chapter 19 Costing and the Value Chain
Measuring Quality Accounting systems in JIT companies measure quality, as well as costs and cycle times. One widely used measure of production Quality is defect per million units produced. In some companies, defect rate have been reduced to less than one defective part per million units of production. Other measures of quality include merchandise returns, number of warranty claims, customer complaints, and the results of customer satisfaction surveys.
A JIT system does not, in itself, ensure quality. Rather, it establishes striving for quality as a basic goal of the organization.
Total Quality Management and the value Chain
The widespread adoption of JIT techniques demonstrates that current global competitive market condition require firms to compete on quality and costs. The cost of ignoring quality is very high, most notably from lost sales. Companies that are able to compete globally on quality and cost inevitably have well-developed total quality management (TQM) processes. Total quality management includes assigning responsibility for managing quality, providing good quality measure for decision making, and evaluating and rewarding quality performance. Accountants participate in this measurement and repotting process by designing systems that can track quality and assign cost to quality failures.
COMPONENTS OF THE COST OF QUALITY
Four components of quality are typically considered when designing a measurement system to track quality costs:
∙Prevention costs refer to the cost of resources consumed in activities that prevent defects from occurring. Examples include employee training, quality process audits, quality concern issues embedded in target costing processes for new product s, and supplier quality evaluations.
∙Appraisal costs are incurred to determine whether products conform to quality standards. Examples include inspection of incoming supplies and materials, in-process inventories, and finished good; inspection and monitoring of production process; and inspection of testing equipment to ensure quality.
∙Internal failure costs include additional production-related costs incurred to correct low-quality output. Examples include rework, downtime, engineering change orders, scrap, retesting, and reinspection.
∙External failure costs are the largest and most difficult to measure. These costs are incurred because quality failures are allowed to enter the market .They include lost sales, costs due to returns and allowances, warranty cost, product liability costs ,and lost goodwill.
These four types of quality costs are not independent. Obviously, if more time and effort are spent ensuring that defective goods do not leave the firm, lower external failure costs are the likely. In fact, these quality costs trade-offs have been identified and are represented by the graph in Exibit 19-10.
The graph demonstrates that, as more resources are consumed in the prevention and appraisal categories, the costs associated with external and internal failures will decline .Designing processes to product high-quality units though prevention of failure pays off in lower rework, higher customer satisfaction, more repeat business, and lower warranty costs, among other benefits. A focus on prevention occurs during the target costing process described earlier. But prevention also includes earlier. But prevention also includes indentifying high-quality suppliers, as discussed in the section about just-in-time inventory procedures.
The arrows in Exhibit 19-10 show a phenomenon that has been occurring over the past 20 years. Prior to computerized equipment becoming commonplace in manufacturing plants and offices, quality had to be inspected into the product though the consumption of labor resources. Using labor to inspect all incoming raw materials, work in process on the shop floor, and finished goods is very expensive and not as reliable as might be desired. The use of computerized technology to perform quality inspections has reduced appraisal costs and improved appraisal reliability. The reduction in appraisal and improve appraisal reliability. The reduction in appraisal and prevention costs has shifted the cost curves, making high quality a less costly option.
A second, important development leading to the prominence of TQM is recognition
of the interconnectedness of the value chain. If quality is low in one part of the value chain, quality costs can increase for all components in that chain. A supplier providing low-quality inputs can cause the buyer to incur rework and warranty expenses. A retailer that provides low-quality access for the consumer will hurt sales and affect the entire value chain .Therefore, the entire value chain must participate in a total quality management approach.
Case in point
Six Sigma is a complementary process many companies use with total quality management. Six Sigma, a business management strategy originally developed by Motorola, has been described as TQM on steroids. The central idea behind Six Sigma is that if you can measure how many “defect” you have in a process, you can systematically figure out how to eliminate defect getting as close to “zero defect” as possible. In Six Sigma, a defect is defined as any process output that does not meet customer specifications, or that could lead to creating an output that does not meet customer specifications. To achieve Six Sigma quality, a process must produce no more than 3.4 defects per million opportunities (i.e., 99.99966 % error-free).
Many companies use Six Sigma techniques to improve business and manufacturing processes. For example, General Electric Company has made Six Sigma part of its corporate culture because they believe their competitive environment leaves no room for error. However, critics of the approach suggest that it can stifle creativity by focusing too many resources on exiting process rather than on new business opportunities.
MEASURING THE COST OF QUALITY
Quality is a multidimensional concept .Multiple measures are necessary to capture the varied aspects of quality. Most firms begin by creating a cost of quality report base on the four components of quality discussed previously. Exhibit 19-10 show an example of such a quarterly report for Boards and More, Inc.
Simply reporting quality costs is only the first step in managing the associated activities. Twenty thousand dollars in lost sales is a significant non-value-added cost that Boards and More would like to eliminate. In order to eliminate these costs, management must understand and track the activities that created them. In other words, management must determine the