Quality cost

Quality cost measurement measurement

under activity-based costing
Wen-Hsien Tsai
National Central University, Chung-Li, Taiwan, Republic of China 719
Received March 1996
Introduction Revised March 1998
Many companies in the world gradually promote quality as the central
customer value and regard it as a key concept of company strategy in order to
achieve the competitive edge (Ross and Wegman, 1990). Measuring and
reporting the cost of quality (COQ) is the first step in a quality management
program. Even in service industries, COQ systems receive considerable
attention (Bohan and Horney, 1991; Carr, 1992; Ravitz, 1991). COQ systems are
bound to increase in importance because COQ-related activities consume as
much as 25 percent or more of the resources used in companies (Ravitz, 1991).
COQ information can be used to indicate major opportunities for corrective
action and to provide incentives for quality improvement.
Traditional cost accounting, whose main functions are inventory valuation
and income determination for external financial reporting, does not yield the
COQ information needed. While most COQ measurement methods are
activity/process oriented, traditional cost accounting establishes cost accounts
by the categories of expenses, instead of activities. Under traditional cost
accounting, many COQ-related costs are lumped into overheads, which are
allocated to cost centers (usually departments) and then to products through
predetermined overhead rates. For example, among various COQ-related costs,
the rework and the unrecovered cost of spoiled goods caused by internal
failures are charged to the factory overhead control account which accumulates
the actual overhead costs incurred (Hammer et al., 1993, pp. 155-64). The
predetermined overhead rates should be adjusted to incorporate the normal
levels of various COQ-related costs, and excess COQ-related costs will be buried
in overhead variances.
The cost accounting treatment described above cannot satisfy the needs of
COQ measurement. Thus, Oakland (1993, p. 210) claims that “quality related
costs should be collected and reported separately and not absorbed into a
variety of overheads”. Prevention-appraisal-failure (PAF) approach and
process cost approach are two main approaches to measuring COQ. However,

The author wishes to thank the anonymous referees for many helpful comments and suggestions
about this paper. The author also wishes to thank the authors of references cited in this paper,
especially the authors, Barrie G. Dale and James J. Plunkett, of the book, Quality Costing, and the
author, Peter B.B. Turney, of the book, Common Cents: The ABC Performance Breakthrough – International Journal of Quality
& Reliability Management,
How to Succeed with Activity-based Costing, from which this paper quotes a lot of COQ and BC Vol. 15 No. 7, 1998, pp. 719-752,
concept. © MCB University Press, 0265-671X
IJQRM these approaches still cannot provide appropriate methods to include
15,7 overhead costs in COQ systems. Accordingly, many quality cost elements
require estimates and there is a prevailing belief in COQ literature. It is a
danger that managers become too concerned with accuracy in COQ
determination – a number-crunching exercise that will consume resources
disproportionately (Oakland, 1993, p. 197). In addition, most COQ
720 measurement systems in use do not trace quality costs to their sources
(O’Guin, 1991, p. 70), which hinders managers from identifying where the
quality improvement opportunities lie. Nevertheless, these deficiencies could
be easily overcome under activity-based costing (ABC) developed by Cooper
and Kaplan of Harvard Business School (Cooper, 1988; Cooper and Kaplan,
1988). ABC uses the two-stage procedure to achieve the accurate costs of
various cost objects (such as departments, products, customers, and
channels), tracing resource costs (including overhead costs) to activities, and
then tracing the costs of activities to cost objects.
The purpose of this paper is to present a conceptual framework for
measuring quality costs under ABC. First, the present approaches to measuring
COQ are reviewed; second, the two-dimensional model of ABC and activity-
based management (ABM) is explained; third, COQ approaches and ABC are
compared and an integrated COQ-ABC framework is presented; fourth, COQ
measurement, COQ reporting, and uses of COQ information under ABC are
discussed; finally, a hypothetically simplified example is presented to illustrate
how to measure COQ under ABC.

Approaches to measuring COQ

Since Juran (1951) discussed the cost of quality, many researchers have
proposed various approaches to measuring COQ. Reviews of COQ literature can
be found in Plunkett and Dale (1987) and Porter and Rayner (1992). In this
section, we will briefly review the approaches to measuring COQ.

PAF approach
After Feigenbaum (1956) categorized quality costs into prevention-appraisal-
failure (PAF), the PAF scheme has been almost universally accepted for quality
costing. The failure costs in this scheme can be further classified into two
subcategories: internal failure and external failure costs. Oakland (1993,
pp. 186-9) describes these costs as follows:
• Prevention costs: These costs are associated with the design,
implementation and maintenance of the total quality management
system. Prevention costs are planned and are incurred before actual
operation.
• Appraisal costs: These costs are associated with the supplier’s and
customer’s evaluation of purchased materials, processes, intermediates,
products and services to assure conformance with the specified
requirements.
 • Internal failure costs: These costs occur when the results of work fail to Quality cost
reach designed quality standards and are detected before transfer to measurement
customer takes place.
• External failure costs: These costs occur when products or services fail to
reach design quality standards but are not detected until after transfer to
the customer.
721
Quality cost elements. In order to calculate total quality cost, the quality cost
elements should be identified under the categories of prevention, appraisal,
internal failure and external failure costs. BS 6143: Part 2 (1990) and ASQC
(1974) have identified a list of quality cost elements under this categorization.
These lists just act as a guideline for quality costing. Most elements in these
lists are not relevant to a particular industry, while many elements identified by
practitioners are peculiar to an industry, or a company (Dale and Plunkett, 1991,
p. 28). Some typical COQ elements are shown in Table I. In the initial stages of
the quality costing exercise, some companies put emphasis on just identifying
the costs of failure and appraisal activities. The methodology usually used is for
each department, using a team approach, to identify COQ elements which are
appropriate to them and for which they have ownership. Several techniques,
such as brainstorming, nominal group technique, Pareto analysis, cause and
effect analysis, fishbone diagrams, and forcefield analysis, can be used to
effectively identify COQ elements (Dale and Plunkett, 1991, p. 41; Johnson,
1995). The quality cost measurement system developed will improve with use
and experience and gradually include all quality cost elements.
Economics of quality-related activities. One of the goals of total quality
management (TQM) is to meet the customer’s requirements with lower cost.
For this goal, we have to know the interactions between quality-related
activities associated with prevention, appraisal, internal failure and external
failure costs. It will help in finding the best resource allocation among various
quality-related activities. In the literature, there are many notional models
describing the relationships between the major categories of quality costs.
Generally speaking, the basic suppositions of these notional models are “that
investment in prevention and appraisal activities will bring handsome
rewards from reduced failure costs, and that further investment in prevention
activities will show profits from reduced appraisal costs” (Plunkett and Dale,
1988). Plunkett and Dale (1988) classify these notional models into five
groups, which are further aggregated into three by Burgess (1996). After a
critical review, Plunkett and Dale (1988) conclude that “many of the models
are inaccurate and misleading, and serious doubts are cast on the concept of
an optimal quality level corresponding to a minimum point on the total
quality-cost curve”. Besides, Schneiderman (1986) asserts that, in some
circumstances, if enough effort is put into prevention, no defects at all would
be produced, resulting in zero failure costs and no need for appraisal (also
given in Porter and Rayner (1992)). Thus, in these circumstances, the only
optimal point is “zero-defects”.
IJQRM Categories COQ elements
15,7
Prevention Quality control and process control engineering
Design and develop control equipment
Quality planning by others
Production equipment for quality – maintenance and calibration
722 Test and inspection equipment – maintenance and calibration
Supplier quality assurance
Training
Administration, audit, improvement
Appraisal Laboratory acceptance testing
Inspection and test
In-process inspection (non-inspectors)
Set-up for inspection and test
Inspection and test materials
Product quality audits
Review of test and inspection data
On-site performance testing
Internal testing and release
Evaluation of materials and spares
Data processing, inspection and test reports
Internal failure Scrap
Rework and repair
Troubleshooting, defect analysis
Reinspect, retest
Scrap and rework: fault of supplier
Modification permits and concessions
Downgrading
External failure Complaints
Product service: liability
Products returned or recalled
Returned material repair
Warranty replacement
Loss of customer goodwill a
Loss of sales a
Table I. Note: a Intangible external failure costs (not included in BS 6143: Part 2)
Typical COQ elements Source: BS 6143: Part 2 (1990) (also given in Dale and Plunkett (1991, p. 71))

However, Burgess (1996) integrated the three types of quality-cost models,

derived from reducing Plunkett and Dale’s categories (1988), into a system
dynamic quality-cost model displaying dynamic behavior consistent with
published empirical data. According to the simulation results, Burgess
concludes that the simulation provides support for the classic view of quality-
cost behavior that an optimal level of quality exists only in certain time-
constrained situations. If the time horizon is infinite, or above a particular cut-
off value, then spending on prevention can always be justified, i.e. the modern
view prevails.
 Drawbacks of the PAF approach. Although the PAF model is universally Quality cost
accepted for quality costing, there are a number of criticisms of it (Oakland, measurement
1993, pp. 200-1; Porter and Rayner, 1992), described as follows:
• It is difficult to decide which activities stand for prevention of quality
failures since almost everything a well-managed company does has
something to do with preventing quality problems.
723
• There are a range of prevention activities in any company which are
integral to ensuring quality but may never be included in the report of
quality costs.
• Practical experience indicates that firms which have achieved notable
reductions in quality costs do not always seem to have greatly increased
their expenditure on prevention.
• Original PAF model does not include intangible quality costs such as
“loss of customer goodwill” and “loss of sales”.
• It is sometimes difficult to uniquely classify costs (e.g. design reviews)
into prevention, appraisal, internal failure, or external failure costs.
• The PAF model focuses attention on cost reduction and ignores the
positive contribution to price and sales volume by improved quality.
• As mentioned above, the classic view of an optimal quality level is not in
accordance with the continuous quality improvement philosophy of TQM.
• The key focus of TQM is on process improvement, while the PAF
categorization scheme does not consider process costs. Therefore, the
PAF model is of limited use in a TQM program.
Alternatives to the PAF approach. The alternatives to the PAF categorization
scheme are divisions of quality costs into conformance and nonconformance,
tangible and intangible, controllable and uncontrollable, discretionary and
consequential costs, and so on.
Crosby (1984, p. 86) divides quality costs into two categories:
(1) the price of conformance (POC), including the explicitly quality-related
costs incurred in making certain that things are done right the first time;
and
(2) the price of nonconformance (PNOC), including all the costs incurred
because quality is not right the first time.
Crosby’s POC includes prevention and inspection costs and his PNOC includes
internal and external failure costs (Shank and Govindarajan, 1994, p. 6). In
Xerox, quality costs are classified into three categories:
(1) the cost of conformance (prevention and appraisal);
(2) the cost of nonconformance (failure to meet customer requirements
before and after delivery); and
(3) the cost of lost opportunities (Carr, 1992).
IJQRM The first two categories are analogous to Crosby’s POC and PNOC respectively.
15,7 Xerox measures lost opportunities as the profit impact of lost revenues. It
occurs when a customer chooses a competitive product over a Xerox product,
when a customer cancels an order because of inadequate service, or when a
customer buys Xerox equipment that is inadequate or unnecessary and
switches to another brand.
724 Juran claims that both prevention and appraisal costs are inevitable and are
not worth including in quality costs (Juran et al., 1975). Juran advocates a
categorization of quality costs including:
• tangible factory costs, which are measurable costs such as scrap, rework,
and additional inspection;
• tangible sales costs, which are measurable costs such as handling
customer complaints and warranty costs;
• intangible costs, which can only be estimated, such as loss of customer
goodwill, delays caused by stoppages and rework, and loss of morale
among staff (also given in Porter and Rayner (1992)).
Juran’s categorization scheme focusses on the costs of product failures and
emphasizes the importance of intangible quality cost elements, which in the
long term are of greater importance than cost reduction.
Another alternative, proposed by Dale and Plunkett, is to consider the
activities relating to supplier, company (in-house) and customer under the PAF
categorization. This approach has the merit of new categories which closely
relate to the business activities while retaining the advantages of the PAF
categorization (Dale and Plunkett, 1991, pp. 26-7).

Process cost approach

It seems that the identification of quality cost elements in the PAF approach is
somewhat arbitrary. It may focus on some quality-related activities which
account for the significant part of total quality cost, not on all the interrelated
activities in a process. Under the philosophy of process improvement in TQM,
analysts should place emphasis on the cost of each process rather than an
arbitrarily defined cost of quality (Goulden and Rawlins, 1995). In view of this,
the process cost approach, described in the revised BS 6143: Part 1 (1992), is
proposed. It recognizes the importance of process cost measurement and
ownership. The process cost is the total of the cost of conformance (COC) and
the cost of nonconformance (CONC) for a particular process. The COC is the
actual process cost of providing products or services to the required standards,
first time and every time, by a given specified process. The CONC is the failure
cost associated with a process not being operated to the required standard
(Porter and Rayner, 1992). According to this definition, we know that the
content of this categorization (COC and CONC) is different from that of Crosby’s
(POC and PONC) and Xerox’s (COC and CONC) mentioned previously.
 The process cost model can be developed for any process within an Quality cost
organization. It will identify all the activities and parameters within the process measurement
to be monitored by flowcharting the process. Then, the flowcharted activities
are allocated as COC or CONC, and the cost of quality at each stage (i.e. COC +
CONC) are calculated or estimated. Finally, key areas for process improvement
are identified and improved by investing in prevention activities and process
redesign to reduce the CONC and the excessive COC respectively (Oakland, 725
1993, pp. 201-7; Porter and Rayner, 1992). The British Standards Institution has
included this methodology in the revised BS 6143: Part 1 (1992). Dale and
Plunkett (1991, p. 43) state that this will help to extend the concept of quality
costing to all functions of an enterprise and to non-manufacturing
organizations, and that it also gets people to consider in more detail the
processes being carried out within the organization.
A process modelling method, IDEF (the computer-aided manufacturing
integrated program definition methodology) (Ross, 1977), can be used to
construct the process cost models for the processes within an organization
(Marsh, 1989). This method utilizes activity boxes with inputs, outputs, controls
and mechanisms to depict the activities of a process. However, the IDEF method
is developed for use by experts for system modeling. It seems to be too complex
if departmental manager and staff were to be responsible for identifying the
elements of process costs. Thus, Crossfield and Dale (1990) develop a more
simple method called quality management activity planning (Q-MAP) for the
mapping of quality assurance procedures, information, flows and quality-
related responsibilities. In addition, Goulden and Rawlins (1995) propose a
hybrid model to overcome the limitations of the IDEF method for process
quality costing. It constructs integrated or functional flowcharts to represent
the processes by using information from a three-level hierarchical model
(function-department-activity), where the lowest level is an activity defined as a
task with a single output. This will reduce the level of complexity of the IDEF
type models.

Other COQ approaches

There are some approaches to measuring COQ in addition to the PAF approach
and the process cost approach. For example, Son and Hsu (1991) proposed a
quantitative approach to measuring quality costs, which considers both
manufacturing processes and statistical quality control. Statistical terms of
quality are translated to dollar terms in this approach. However, the quality cost
model presented in their paper is restricted to a simplified manufacturing
system which consists of only a machining area (with in-process sampling
inspection) and a final inspection area (with 100 percent final inspection).
Besides, Chen and Tang (1992) present a pictorial approach to measuring
COQ, which is patterned after that used in a computer-based information
system design. The COQ variables considered in this approach include direct
COQ variables (PAF costs and quality-related equipment costs) and indirect
IJQRM COQ variables (customer-incurred costs, customer-dissatisfaction costs and
15,7 loss of reputation). It includes two major steps:
(1) specifying the COQ variables as well as the significant relationships
among the variables, and mapping the variables and relationships into
an “influence diagram” showing the structure of a COQ system; and
726 (2) converting the structure into a well-defined “entity-relationship
diagram” showing the input-output functions and their associated
properties.
The influence diagram used in the pictorial approach can provide an easy-to-
understand COQ system for quality management practitioners, and the entity-
relationship diagram can provide an effective framework for maintaining and
modifying the COQ system.

Quality cost collection

Fundamentally, the PAF approach, the process cost approach and even Chen
and Tang’s pictorial approach need first to identify the quality cost elements.
For the PAF approach, COQ elements are identified under the cost categories of
the selected categorization scheme. Most of COQ elements relate to quality-
related activities. For the process cost approach, the cost elements of COC and
CONC for a process are derived from the flowcharted activities of the process.
Most cost elements of COC do not relate to quality-related activities of
traditional COQ view.
After identifying the quality cost elements, we should quantify the elements
and then put costs (dollar values) on the elements which have been identified
(Dale and Plunkett, 1991, pp. 40-1). In COQ literature, many authors pay
attention to why COQ information is important and what should be included in
a COQ system, and seldom discuss how to measure and collect quality costs.
However, Dale and Plunkett give lots of guidance on quality cost collection,
including objectives and scope, approaches, sources of data, ease of collection,
level of detail, accuracy of data, and people involved (Dale and Plunkett, 1991,
Ch. 3, pp. 36-51). Besides, Thorne (1990) recommends some relatively
uncomplicated methods for calculating COQ, i.e. collecting quality costs by
account, by defect type, by whole person, by labor hours, and by personal log
(also given in Johnson (1995)).
Dale and Plunkett state that “the collection and synthesis of quality costs is
very much a matter of searching and shifting through data which have been
gathered for other purposes” (Dale and Plunkett, 1991, p. 38). Some of quality
costs are readily available from a cost accounting system (e.g. scrap and rework
costs); some can be derived from the data of activity reports (e.g. repair and
inspection costs). Nevertheless, a large portion of quality costs should be
estimated by some ways. For example, the opportunity costs of lost customer
goodwill and lost sales, which are intangible external failure costs (similar to the
third category of Xerox’s COQ system), can be estimated by Taguchi’s quality
loss function (Albright and Roth, 1994). Other examples are the costs of
producing excess inventories and material handling due to suboptimal plant Quality cost
layouts, which are indirect failure costs and can be estimated by expertise. In measurement
addition, calculating prevention costs needs the estimates of apportionment of
time by indirect workers and staff who do not usually record how they spend
their time in various activities.

Deficiencies of most COQ systems 727

Generally speaking, there are the following deficiencies in measuring COQ
among most COQ systems:
• The aspect of overhead allocation in calculating COQ is seldom discussed
in the literature. In practice, some companies add overheads to the direct
cost of labor and material on rework and scrap, while other companies do
not. If they do, “rework and scrap costs become grossly inflated
compared with prevention and appraisal costs which are incurred via
salaried and indirect workers” (Dale and Plunkett, 1991, p. 45).
• Most of COQ measurement systems in use are not (there are some
exceptions) intended to trace quality costs to their sources (O’Guin, 1991,
p. 70) such as parts, products, designs, processes, departments, vendors,
distribution channels, territories, and so on. Accordingly, the COQ
information derived from these systems cannot be used to identify where
the quality improvement opportunities exist.
• “It is the general lack of information about how people, other than direct
workers, spend their time which presents a considerable obstacle to the
collections of quality costs” (Dale and Plunkett, 1991, p. 112).
The deficiencies mentioned above will decrease the accuracy of quality costs
and limit the usefulness of a COQ system. However, these deficiencies can be
easily solved under ABC (Cooper, 1988; Cooper and Kaplan, 1988), developed by
Cooper and Kaplan of Harvard Business School, together with other techniques.

Two-dimensional model of ABC

Evolution of ABC
The main shortcoming of traditional cost accounting is to distribute overhead
costs over products by using volume-related allocation bases such as direct labor
hours, direct labor costs, direct material costs, machine hours, etc. It will not
seriously distort the product cost in the conventional manufacturing environment
where overheads are just a small portion of product cost. In the modern
manufacturing environment, however, the overheads will grow rapidly as
manufacturers increasingly promote the level of automation and computerization,
and the cost distortion of traditional cost accounting will be significant (Brimson,
1991, p. 179). The main reason is that many overhead costs vary with volume
diversity, product diversity, and volume-unrelated activities (e.g. set-up and
scheduling activities), not with the volume-related measures. For example, high-
volume products consume more direct labor hours than low-volume products, but
IJQRM high-volume products do not necessarily consume more scheduling cost than low-
15,7 volume products. Therefore, traditional cost accounting will overcost high-
volume products and undercost low-volume products.
In view of this, Cooper and Kaplan suggested using ABC to improve the
accuracy of product costs. In early ABC systems (Turney, 1991, pp. 77-80),
overhead cost is divided into various cost pools, where each cost pool contains
728 the cost of a group of related activities consumed by products in approximately
the same way. Each cost pool is distributed to products by using a unique factor
that approximates the consumption of cost. This unique factor, called an
allocation basis in traditional cost accounting, could be volume-related (e.g.
direct labor hours and machine hours) or volume-unrelated (e.g. number of
orders, set-up hours, and number of parts).
Early ABC systems focus on the accurate assignment of overhead costs to
products. They do not provide direct information about activities and do not
consider the costs outside the plant. Thus, a two-dimensional model of ABC is
proposed as shown in Figure 1. This ABC model is composed of two dimensions:
cost assignment view and process view described in the following two subsections.

The cost assignment view of ABC

The detailed cost assignment view of ABC is shown in Figure 2. ABC assumes
that cost objects (e.g. products, product lines, processes, customers, channels,

Cost Assignment View

Resources

Resource
Drivers
Process View

Cost Performance
Drivers Activities Measures

Activity
Drivers

Cost
Objects
Figure 1.
Two-dimensional model
of ABC
Source: Adapted from Turney, (1991, p. 81)
 Resources
Quality cost
Resource
measurement
Drivers
First
Stage Activity
Center Activity &
Activity Cost Pool
729
Cost Element

Second Activity
Stage Drivers

Figure 2.
Cost Objects Detailed cost
assignment view of
ABC
Source: Adapted from Turney, (1991, p. 97)

markets, etc.) create the need for activities, and activities create the need for
resources. Accordingly, ABC uses two-stage procedure to assign resource costs
to cost objects. In the first stage, resource costs are assigned to various
activities by using resource drivers. Resource drivers are the factors chosen to
approximate the consumption of resources by the activities. Each type of
resource traced to an activity becomes a cost element of an activity cost pool.
Thus, an activity cost pool is the total cost associated with an activity. An
activity center is composed of related activities, usually clustered by function
or process. We can create activity centers by various ways according to
different information needs. In the second stage, each activity cost pool is
distributed to cost objects by using an adequate activity driver which is used
to measure the consumption of activities by cost objects (Turney, 1992). If the
cost objects are products, then total cost of a specific product can be calculated
by adding the costs of various activities assigned to that product. The unit cost
of the product is achieved by dividing the total cost by the quantity of the
product.
The resources used in manufacturing companies may include people,
machines, facilities, and utilities, and the corresponding resource costs could be
assigned to activities in the first stage of cost assignment by using the resource
drivers time, machine hours, square footage, and kilowatt hours respectively
(Brimson, 1991, p. 135). For the manufacturing activities, there are the following
categories of activities (Cooper, 1990):
• unit-level activities (performed one time for one unit of product, e.g. 100
percent inspection, machining, finishing);
IJQRM • batch-level activities (performed one time for a batch of products, e.g.
15,7 sampling inspection, set-up, scheduling);
• product-level activities (performed to benefit all units of a particular
product, e.g. product design, design verification and review);
• facility-level activities (performed to sustain the manufacturing facility,
730 e.g. plant guard and management, zero defect program).
The costs of different levels of activities will be traced to products by using the
different kinds of activity drivers in the second stage of ABC cost assignment
view. For example, machine hours is used as the activity driver for the activity
machining; set-up hours or the number of set-up for machine set-up; and the
number of drawings for product design (Tsai, 1996b). Usually, the costs of
facility-level activities cannot be traced to products with the definite cause-
effect relationships and should be allocated to products with appropriate
allocation bases (Cooper, 1990). The information achieved from ABC cost
assignment view is usually used for the decisions of pricing, quoting, product
mix (Tsai, 1994), make versus buy, sourcing, product design, profitability
analysis, and so on (Turney, 1992).

The process view of ABC

The process view of ABC is composed of three building blocks: cost drivers,
activities and performance measures. It provides information on why the
activities are performed via cost drivers and on how well the activities are
performed via performance measures. Cost drivers are factors that determine
the workload and effort required to perform an activity (Turney, 1991, p. 87), i.e.
factors that cause a change in the cost of an activity (Raffish and Turney, 1991).
For example, the quality of parts received by an activity (e.g. the percent that
are defective) is a determining factor in the work required by that activity,
because the quality of parts received affects the resources required to perform
the activity. Cost drivers identify the cause of activity cost and are useful
because they point people to take action at the root cause level, i.e. they reveal
opportunities for improvement. An activity may have multiple cost drivers
associated with it.
Performance measures are used to indicate the work performed and the
results achieved in an activity (Raffish and Turney, 1991). They tell us how the
activity is meeting the needs of its internal or external customers. There are five
fundamental elements of activity performance:
(1) the quality of the work done;
(2) the productivity for the activity;
(3) the cycle time required to complete the activity;
(4) the cost traced or allocated to the activity; and
(5) customer satisfaction (Miller, 1996, pp. 94-5; Turney, 1991, pp. 88-9).
Performance measures differ from one activity to another and from one Quality cost
company to another. Performance measures may be financial or nonfinancial. measurement
The process view of ABC places emphasis on processes. A process is a series
of activities that are linked to perform a specific objective. A business process
often runs across artificial organizational boundaries, departments or
functions. Because of the interdependency of activities in a process, the work of
each activity affects the performance of the next activity in the process. 731
Accordingly, performance measures for one activity may become cost drivers
for the next activity (Turney, 1991, p. 190). For example, performance measures
for designing new tools may include the number of change in specifications and
the number of new drawings, and these performance measures are just the cost
drivers for the succeeding activity, manufacturing new tools. This tells us that
merely identifying activities without consideration of their relationship to other
activities in the process will result in overlooking many improvement
opportunities (Lawson, 1994, p. 35).
The information achieved from the process view of ABC can be used to aid in
process/activity improvement. The potential improvement opportunities can be
located by performance measurement and value analysis. First, the areas where
the improvement is needed can be identified by comparing this period’s
performance with performance goals or with best practices of comparable
activities inside or outside the company. The latter comparison is called
benchmarking (Turney, 1991, p. 111). Second, the areas where the improvement
is needed can be identified through the categorization of activities as value-
added or non-value-added. An activity is value-added if it is judged to contribute
to customer value or satisfy an organizational need; otherwise, it is non-value-
added. For the non-value-added activities, improvement initiatives should be
directed toward eliminating or minimizing the activities. For the valued-added
activities, improvement initiatives should be directed toward streamlining,
improving what is being done, and optimizing performance (Miller, 1996, pp. 92-
3). However, the potential improvement opportunities should be prioritized by
Pareto analysis. We can rank the activities in descending order of cost achieved
from the cost assignment view of ABC, and determine the significant activities
that will provide the greatest opportunities for improvement. Usually, we will
find that 20 percent of the activities cause 80 percent of the cost. Thus, these
significant activities are worth improving in the first place.
After the top-priority areas of improvement are recognized, cost driver
analysis can be used to examine, quantify, and explain the effects of cost drivers
of the significant activities mentioned above. This will help direct improvement
efforts to the cause of cost and avoid treating the symptom (Miller, 1996, p. 93).
For example, inspecting the incoming material is a non-value-added activity and
its cost driver will be the quality of material received from suppliers. If we have
sufficient confidence in the quality of material received from suppliers, we may
conduct sampling inspections, even no inspections for incoming material.
Otherwise, we may need 100 percent inspections. Therefore, the best way to
reduce the efforts of incoming material inspections is to choose the suppliers
IJQRM that provide the high-quality material or to help our suppliers establish the
15,7 quality control/assurance systems.

Activity-based management
Using ABC to improve a business is called activity-based management (ABM).
As defined by the consortium for Advanced Manufacturing International
732 (CAM-I) (Raffish and Turney, 1991), ABM is a discipline that focuses on the
management of activities as the route to improving the value received by the
customer and the profit achieved by providing this value. This discipline
includes cost driver analysis, activity analysis, and performance measurement.
ABM uses the cost and nonfinancial/operational information acquired from
ABC in various analyses. For example, ABM uses the cost information of
activities, products, customers, and other cost objects, supplied by the cost
assignment view of ABC, to perform strategic decision analysis (such as
pricing, product mix, sourcing, customer profitability analysis), activity-based
budgeting, life-cycle costing and target costing. In addition, ABM uses the
information provided by the process view of ABC to support cost reduction,
downsizing, process/quality improvement, benchmarking, business process
reengineering (BPR), and total quality management (TQM). This paper focuses
on COQ measurement and continuous quality improvement under ABC.

Comparison between COQ approaches and ABC

The PAF approach of COQ is activity-oriented, the process cost approach of
COQ is process-oriented, and ABC is activity-oriented for the cost assignment
view and process-oriented for the process view. Accordingly, the PAF approach
of COQ regards COQ-related (or PAF-related) activities as improvement objects,
and the process cost approach of COQ and ABC regard processes/activities as
improvement objects. A summary comparison between COQ approaches and
ABC is given in Table II.
As for activity/cost categories, COQ approaches and ABC have the following
classifications:
• PAF approach – prevention, appraisal, internal failure, and external
failure;
• process cost approach – conformance and nonconformance;
• ABC – value-added and non-value-added.
Some authors classify prevention and appraisal costs as the cost of
conformance, and internal and external failure costs as the cost of
nonconformance. However, the content and meaning of conformance and
nonconformance costs of the PAF approach are different in nature from that of
the process cost approach. Under the ABC perspective, only prevention costs in
the PAF approach (Ostrenga, 1991) and only some of conformance costs in the
process cost approach are value-added, and their relationships are shown in
Figure 3. Thus, the cost of nonconformance either in the PAF or in the process
 COQ
Quality cost
Aspects of Process measurement
comparison PAF approach cost approach ABC

Orientation Activity-oriented Process-oriented Activity-oriented (cost assignment view)

Process-oriented (process view)
Activity/cost Prevention Conformance Value-added
733
categories Appraisal Nonconformance Non-value-added
Internal failure
External failure
Treatment of No consensus method to allocate Assigning overhead to activities by
overhead overhead to COQ elements under using resource drivers in the first stage
current COQ measurement systems of ABC cost assignment view
and traditional cost accounting
Tracing costs No adequate method to trace Tracing activity costs to cost objects by
to their sources? quality costs to their sources using activity drivers in the second stage
of ABC cost assignment view
Improvement COQ-related Processes Processes/activities
objects activities activities
Tools for Quality circle Process/activity value analysis
improvement Brainstorming Performance measurement
Nominal group technique Benchmarking
Cause and effect analysis Cost driver analysis
Fishbone diagram
Forcefield analysis
Information The cost elements The COC and The costs of activities and processes
outputs of PAF categories CONC elements The costs of value-added and non-value-
Total quality cost of the processes added activities and their percentages of
and the costs of investigated various bases
PAF categories/ Total process Accurate costs of various cost objects
elements and their cost, COC, and (e.g. product, departments, customers
percentages of CONC of the and channels)
various bases processes Activity-based performance measures
investigated and Cost drivers of activities
their percentages
of various bases
Table II.
Related TQM ABM Comparison between
management COQ approaches
technique and ABC

PAF approach ABC Process cost approach Figure 3.

Prevention Value-added Conformance The relationship
between activity/cost
Appraisal
categories of COQ
Internal Failure Non-value-added Nonconformance approaches and ABC
External Failure
IJQRM cost approach would be eliminated or minimized through investment in
15,7 prevention activities. The cost of conformance in the process cost approach
would be reduced by streamlining or redesigning the process.
As for information outputs, the fundamental cost information outputs
achieved from the PAF approach are the costs of PAF-related activities; from the
process cost approach and ABC are the costs of activities and processes. While
734 all these three methods will provide the costs of activities, ABC will create a
variety of information outputs.
From the discussion above, we can see that there are many similarities in
process perspective between the process cost approach and ABC. In addition,
the similarities between these two methods also can be found in the steps of
process improvement by the process cost approach and by ABC/ABM, as
shown in Table III. In this Table, the corresponding steps are in the same rows,
where we will find that these two methods deal with the same thing by using
different terminology.

Integrated COQ-ABC framework

From the explanation in the previous sections, we know that ABC can supply
various cost and nonfinancial information to support COQ programs. Moreover,
ABC can provide more accurate costs of activities and processes than
traditional cost accounting, which make COQ information more valuable for
TQM. Hence, it is better to integrate COQ approaches with ABC. Figure 4
shows an integrated COQ-ABC framework. In this framework, we may adopt
the PAF approach or the process cost approach for COQ measurement. Strictly
speaking, COQ-related activities for the PAF approach or flowcharted activities
for the process cost approach should be incorporated into the building block
“activities” of ABC model. That is, ideally, ABC and COQ blocks in this
framework should be merged as one. Furthermore, there are the following
characteristics in the integrated COQ-ABC framework:
• ABC and COQ systems should share the common database in order to
avoid data redundancy and inconsistency.
• The related management techniques of ABC and COQ are ABM and
TQM, respectively.
• ABC system can provide cost and activity/process-related information
for ABM, COQ/TQM, and business process reengineering (BPR).
• BPR is another management technique for process improvement. The
major difference between BPR and ABM/TQM is that BPR overthrows
and improves current business processes in a fundamental and radical
way. This can be seen from the definition of BPR: “BPR is the
fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to
achieve dramatic improvements in critical, contemporary measures of
performance, such as cost, quality, service, and speed” (Hammer and
Champy, 1993).
Process cost approach ABC/ABM Quality cost
measurement
1. Choose a key process to be analyzed 1. Define critical business processes and specify
2. Define the process and its boundaries key and significant activities
3. Construct the process diagram: 2. Select process owners
(1) Identify the outputs and customers 3. Define the process boundaries
(2) Identify the inputs and suppliers 4. Form and train process improvement teams 735
(3) Identify the controls and resources 5. Flowchart the processes
4. Flowchart the process and identify the 6. Analyze activities:
process owners. The process owners (1) Define activity outputs/measures
form the improvement team (2) Identify the customer/user of activity
5. Allocate the activities as COC or CONC outputs
6. Calculate or estimate the quality (3) Perform value-added analysis
costs (COC + CONC) at each stage. (4) Identify cost drivers
Estimates may be required where the (5) Determine activity performance measures
accounting system is unable to and goals
generate the necessary information (6) Define other activity attributes:
7. Construct a process cost report • Primary versus secondary activities
8. Prioritize the failure costs and select • Core, sustaining, and discretionary
the process stages for improvement • Cost behavior: fixed or variable, direct
through reduction in costs of or indirect, avoidable or unavoidable
nonconformance (CONC). This should (7) Gather activity data required for
indicate any requirements for activity/cost object costing and for
investment in prevention activities. activity/process improvement
An excess cost of conformance (COC) 7. Perform activity/process cost assignment
may suggest the need for process 8. Summarize processes and costs for
redesign. management
9. Review the flowchart to identify the 9. Draw up the process improvement plan:
scope for reductions in the cost of (1) Locate the potential improvement
conformance. Attempts to reduce COC opportunities by performance
require a thorough process measurement and value analysis
understanding, and a second flowchart (2) Prioritize the improvement opportunities
of what the new process should be by Pareto analysis and select the
may help significant activities that will provide the
10. Monitor conformance and greatest opportunities for improvement
nonconformance costs on a regular basis, (3) Design and select the improvement
using the model and review for further alternatives by cost driver analysis,
improvements (i.e. continuous process redesign, new process design
improvement) (process innovation), and others
10. Implement the process improvement plan
11. Monitor the process improvement results by
installing performance measurement and
feedback control systems to ensure that the
desired results are achieved and to provide
feedback for continuous improvement
Sources: Table III.
1. Steps of process/quality improvement by the process cost approach come from Oakland Steps of process
(1993, pp. 201-3). improvement by the
2. Steps of process improvement by ABC/ABM are synthesized from Beischel (1990); Harrington process cost approach
(1993); Miller (1996, pp. 69-98); O’Guin (1991, pp. 306-13); Ostrenga and Probst (1992). and ABC/ABM
 Missions
IJQRM
To profitably improve the value To increase the equity owned
15,7 received by the customer by the shareholder

Objectives
To promote To eliminate To reduce To reduce To improve
productivity waste throughput time cost quality

736 Goal
Continuous Process/Activity/Quality Improvement

Tools
Cost Driver Analysis Forcefield Analysis

Fishbone Diagram
Process/Activity Value
Analysis Business Process Cause and Effect Analysis
Reengineering

Nominal Group Technique

Performance Measurement
A T
Brainstorming
B Q
Benchmarking
M Quality Circle M

Cost Assignment View PAF Approach

COQ-related Activities
Resources
Prevention

Resource Appraisal
Process Drivers
View Internal Failure

External Failure
Cost Activities Performance
Drivers Measures
OR
Process Cost Approach

Activity
Flowcharted Activities
Drivers of Processes

COC
Cost
Objects
CONC

Figure 4.
Integrated COQ-ABC Activity-Based Costing COQ Approach
framework Common Database

• The common goal of ABM, TQM, and BPR is continuous improvement

by using various respective tools. In fact, all these tools can be used in
ABM, TQM, and BPR.
• The common objectives of ABM, TQM, and BPR are to promote
productivity, to eliminate waste, to reduce throughput time, to reduce
cost, and to improve quality.
 • The ultimate missions are to profitably improve the value received by the Quality cost
customer and to increase the equity owned by the shareholder. measurement
COQ measurement under ABC
As mentioned before, there is no consensus method to allocate overheads to
COQ elements and no adequate method to trace quality costs to their sources
under current COQ measurement systems and traditional cost accounting. 737
These deficiencies can be overcome easily by using the cost assignment view of
ABC (as shown in Figure 1), either in the PAF approach or in the process cost
approach. Overhead costs are traced to activities by using resource drivers in
the first stage of ABC cost assignment view. Then, activity costs are traced to
their sources (i.e. cost objects) by using activity drivers in the second stage of
ABC cost assignment view.

COQ measurement
For the PAF approach, the activities of the ABC model would be COQ-related
activities (prevention, appraisal, internal failure, and external failure) and COQ-
unrelated activities. In the first stage of ABC cost assignment view, resource
costs (including overhead costs) of the company are traced to various COQ-
unrelated and COQ-related activities (as shown in Table I) by using resource
drivers. The resources used by COQ-related activities may be people,
computers, equipment, material (parts), supplies, facilities, energy, and so on. If
a resource is dedicated to a single COQ-related activity, so the resource cost is
directly traced to that COQ-related activity. If a resource supports several COQ-
related and/or COQ-unrelated activities, the resource cost must be distributed
among these activities by using a appropriate resource driver. The resource
driver of people-related costs (salaries and benefits) will be time. If a COQ-
related activity uses a worker’s partial time, this COQ-related activity will
receive the worker’s salary and benefit according to its usage percentage of the
worker’s time. For another example, the resource driver of energy costs will be
kilowatt hours. The cost of any specific COQ-related activity will be achieved
by adding all the resource costs (i.e. activity cost elements) traced to that COQ-
related activity. Therefore, each of the four components of total COQ can be
obtained respectively by accumulating the costs of all the activities related to
that COQ component. Finally, total COQ is the sum of the four components’
costs. Accordingly, total COQ, four COQ components, and the costs of detailed
COQ-related activities can be achieved from the first stage of ABC cost
assignment view.
For the process cost approach, the activities of the ABC model would be
the flowcharted activities of various processes, including COC-related and
CONC-related activities. The method of tracing resource costs (including
overhead costs) to activities is the same as described above. The results
achieved in the first stage of ABC cost assignment view would be the costs of
flowcharted activities, total process costs, COC, and CONC of various
processes.
IJQRM The treatment of overheads in ABC is different from the practice of including
15,7 full overhead costs in direct labor charges to quality-related costs. It will
produce accurate quality costs and solve the usual problem in current COQ
systems: double-counting.
Another deficiency, mentioned before, of a combination of current COQ
systems and traditional cost accounting is the lack of information about how
738 indirect workers, whose costs are one part of overhead costs, spend their time
on various activities. This deficiency make prevention the most difficult of the
categories to cost because it depends heavily on the estimates of percentage of
time spent by indirect workers and staff (Dale and Plunkett, 1991, p. 44). In
practice, these estimates are often derived from information gathered from
interviews or questionnaires (Turney, 1991, p. 277). Nevertheless, the
information acquired from interviews and questionnaires may be under
suspicion because “the way that people actually spend their time, after all, can
often be quite different than the way they think that they spend it” (Miller, 1992).
To overcome this deficiency, Tsai (1996a) suggested using work sampling to
estimate the percentage of the indirect worker time spent on each activity. Work
sampling (Richardson, 1976), which utilizes the random sampling techniques,
allows one to understand the characteristics of a process by collecting data on
portions of a process rather than the entire process. This technique is
particularly useful in the analysis of nonrepetitive or irregularly occurring
activities. With the aid of computer software (Lund, 1990), it is feasible to use
work sampling to provide more accurate data of first stage resource drivers for
indirect workers in the integrated COQ-ABC systems.

Tracing COQ to its sources

We can trace COQ to its sources (such as parts, products, designs, processes,
department, vendors, distribution channel, territories, etc.) through the second
stage of ABC cost assignment view. If we, under the PAF approach, need to
know the COQ information by departments or products, then we could regard
departments or products as cost objects and trace the various COQ-related
activity costs to departments or products by using appropriate activity drivers
in the second stage of ABC cost assignment view. Most activities related to
prevention costs are sustaining activities and their costs are not easy to be
traced to departments or products. It is because of no explicit cause-and-effect
relationship between prevention activities and departments (or products). On
the other hand, cause-and-effect relationships do exist between departments (or
products) and most activities related to appraisal, internal failure, and external
failure costs, so these costs could be traced to departments or products
appropriately. Similarly, we could trace external failure costs to distribution
channels or territories (used as the cost objects).
For the process cost approach, the elemental information achieved from the
first stage of ABC cost assignment view are the COC and CONC elements of
flowcharted activities of processes. For the purpose of this paper, we want to
trace the cost of CONC-related activities to their sources. This also can be
achieved by using appropriate activity drivers in the second stage of ABC cost Quality cost
assignment view. measurement
COQ reporting under ABC
From the above discussion, we know COQ reports for the PAF approach can be
easily prepared under ABC in the following ways:
• COQ reports associated with detailed COQ-related activities for the 739
whole company.
• COQ reports associated with activities related to appraisal, internal
failure, external failure costs by departments, products, or product lines.
• COQ reports associated with activities related to external failure costs
by distribution channels or territories.
These are just some illustrative COQ reports. These COQ reports usually
provide monthly costs, year-to-date costs, variances to budgeted costs, and a
comparison with the previous years’ cost data. These COQ reports may include
the COQ percentage of various bases such as sales revenue, manufacturing cost,
units of product, and so on (Simpson and Muthler, 1987). In addition, trend
analysis can be used to compare present COQ data with historical COQ data in
order to know how COQ changes over time.
In order to prepare the above COQ reports, we could use activity centers to
group the related activities under ABC. There may be hundreds of activities in
a company. Activity centers allow us to easily locate activities with identical
characteristics. If we group the company's activities by processes, then we will
have the COQ activity center and several other activity centers. Within the COQ
activity center, four nested activity centers can be established, i.e. prevention,
appraisal, internal failure, and external failure activity centers (as shown in
Figure 5). Again, we could, within a sub-activity center, set up a nested activity
center on demand. This will create hierarchies of COQ information and give us
the different levels and breadths of COQ information. This will form a multi-tier
COQ reporting system. We could use attributes, which are labels describing the
type of activity, to create activity centers on demand in the integrated COQ-
ABC information system (Turney, 1991, pp. 271-3). If the COQ activity center is
divided according to the company’s organizational structure, then we could, by
adopting the concept of responsible accounting, provide department managers

COQ

Preventing Appraisal Internal External Figure 5.

Failure Failure COQ activity center and
its nested activity
centers
IJQRM with the COQ information and related nonfinancial information which are
15,7 specific to them. The COQ responsibility reports will help responsible
managers identify the major costs of nonconformance incurred in their
departments and actuate improvement projects to eliminate or reduce these
costs.
For the process cost approach, the COQ reporting method is the same as
740 described above except that PAF-related activities are replaced with COC-
related and CONC-related activities.

Uses of COQ information

Under the integrated COQ-ABC framework, the quality system and the ABC
system must be integrated to produce COQ information and the related
operational information of activities and processes. The information achieved
can be used in various aspects (Dale and Plunkett, 1991, pp. 59-68; O’Guin, 1991,
pp. 71-5). Some of the important uses of COQ information are described as
follows.

To identify the magnitude of the quality improvement opportunities

ABC, together with other techniques such as work sampling, can trace resource
costs (including overhead costs) to various activities in a rational way which
avoids double-counting. Thus, ABC can create the accurate costs of PAF-related
activities for the PAF approach and of COC- and CONC-related activities for the
process cost approach. The prime purpose of the quality improvement is to
gradually eliminate or reduce the cost of poor quality, i.e. to improve the
activities related to the appraisal and failure costs for the PAF approach and to
the CONC for the process cost approach. ABC will tell management the accurate
cost of poor quality and indicate which activities are the most expensive
through Pareto analysis. Accordingly, management can identify the directions
and magnitude of the quality improvement opportunities. This information is
useful in the investment justification of the quality improvement alternatives
such as investment in prevention activities or equipment.

To identify where the quality improvement opportunities exist

By integrating the ABC system and the quality system, the cost of poor quality
can be traced to its sources. Hence, the integrated system can identify where the
quality improvement opportunities exist and provide the following benefits
(O’Guin, 1991, p. 72):
• By tracing quality losses to product attributes, parts, processes,
engineering, and vendors, management can take corrective actions
toward the right direction.
• By tracing and costing vendor returns by vendor and parts, purchasing
managers will understand the true costs of buying from particular
vendors. This will avoid forcing purchasing managers to buy strictly on
price.
 • If scrap costs result from worker errors, the scrap costs are assigned to Quality cost
the process’s overheads. This will provide management with clear measurement
pictures of who is causing defects and how much they cost.
• The integrated system arms the quality department with defect and
rework cost information. Some defects are more costly than others and
some mean much more to the customers than others. Thus, the system
can tell the quality department where to concentrate its quality 741
improvement efforts.
• By tracing warranty and return costs to their products, it will eliminate
the tendency for product managers to rush a product through testing, or
ship defective goods to achieve their sales targets.
Before tracing quality costs to their sources, we should dig out their root causes
by using the cost driver analysis of ABC process view in order to direct
improvement efforts to the cause of cost and avoid treating the symptom. Table
IV gives a list of some possible cost drivers of four COQ components. For
example, the root causes of the internal failure rework could be design error,
defective purchased material, deficient tooling and maintenance, and worker
error. If we find out the real root cause of excessive rework cost is defective
purchased material, then we could effectively solve the problem by helping
improve the supplier’s quality system or searching another supplier. For
another example, if excessive in-process inspections are due to complex design,
then we can encourage designers to simplify the design by using the number of
different part numbers as a performance measure or activity driver.

To plan the quality improvement programs

A quality improvement program should depict quality improvement actions,
improvement targets, and quality cost budgets. Improvement targets may be set

COQ components Cost drivers

Prevention Investment in reducing overall COQ-related activities

Appraisal Set-up frequency
Tight tolerance activities
Complex design
Internal failure Design error
Defective purchased material
Machine reliability
Tooling age and conditions
Worker error
External failure Order entry errors
Incorrect assembly instructions
Product failure Table IV.
Worker error Some cost drivers
Source: Adapted from Ostrenga (1991, p. 43) of COQ components
IJQRM after quality improvement actions are evaluated and selected. Under this
15,7 circumstance, improvement targets are set and quality cost budgets are
prepared according to the savings of required activity driver quantities for each
quality-activity of the selected quality improvement actions. On the contrary,
quality improvement actions may be worked out according to improvement
targets set by management just like the approach of target costing. In this
742 scenario, management may establish quality improvement targets for every
unit of the organization. Management may request purchasing to reduce vendor
quality costs by 20 or 40 percent in a year. The amount of rework, which is the
activity driver of rework activity, may be targeted to be cut by 30 percent.
Target quality costs are derived from the quality improvement targets under the
present operational conditions. Then, various quality improvement actions are
evaluated one by one till the ones, whose budgeted quality costs are not greater
than target quality costs, are found. In either case, quality cost budgets are
constructed incorporating improvement targets by using the budgeted activity
driver quantities based on improved activities and the moving average rates (or
the last period’s rate) of activity drivers. This method can be applied in either
the PAF approach or the process cost approach (Sharman, 1996).

To control quality costs

Since management establishes quality improvement targets for every unit of the
organization, management can then track actual performance to these targets
after one period’s operation. If improvement targets are not met, the variances
between actual and budgeted quality costs will emerge. The variances may
represent unanticipated quality loss. The variances force management to exploit
what is causing the variance and encourage management to eliminate the source
of quality loss. This feedback allows management to continuously plan the
quality improvement programs and control quality costs (O’Guin, 1991, p. 74).
The method described above is the budget control of quality costs. It may
report quality costs monthly. However, it is not fit for daily operation control.
Turney (1991, pp. 197-9) demonstrated how ABC was used for total quality
control by utilizing daily COQ reporting in a printed circuit board (PCB) plant.
The ABC system was used to prepare a report on the cost of poor quality for
each activity immediately after each of the three daily shifts and to show
graphically the trend in physical defects and cost. The report allows
management to focus immediately on the quality problems with the biggest
cost impact. The ABC system also prepared daily a top ten offenders list that
reports the ten products with the highest cost of poor quality on the previous
day. It pinpointed the poor quality products and provided the greatest potential
for redemption. When a product unit on this list was scrapped, a report, which
showed the cause of the problem as well as the cost, was prepared and sent to
the person most likely to correct the problem. This use of ABC made quality
problems visible within a matter of hours, or even minutes. Turney suggested
linking ABC with computer-integrated manufacturing (CIM) to prepare COQ
reports for real-time and cost-effective control.
An illustration of COQ measurement under ABC Quality cost
As an illustration, a hypothetically simplified example is presented in this measurement
section. A department in a manufacturing company produces two products,
Product A and Product B. This company adopts the PAF approach to measure
COQ. The workers in this department carry out nine distinct activities. The
related information of these activities is shown in Table V, including required
resources, activity levels, PAF categories, value-added or non-value-added, and 743
activity drivers. Some of these activities are PAF-related activities, and some are
not. There are six workers in this department. The hourly labor cost for each
worker is $10 calculated on the basis of wages and benefits. Four of the workers
carry out five activities, machining, rework, warranty repair, inspection, and
package. These workers spend most of their time in direct work, and they will
record how they spend the time by using time cards. The other two workers
carry out four activities, scheduling, maintenance, set-up, and material
handling, which are indirect works. Work sampling is used to estimate the
percentages of time spent on these four activities for two indirect workers. For
the machining activity, assume that Product A and Product B can be processed
in two general-purpose machines. The hourly machine cost for each machine is
$20 calculated on the basis of the costs of machines and their tools. The
activities, rework and warranty repair, are also carried out in these two
machines. For the inspection activity, Product A needs two tests, while Product
B needs only one. In addition, assume that there are 20 work days in a specific
month with eight work hours per day and that the production quantities of
Product A and Product B are 225 and 350 respectively in the month. Now, the
department manager wants to calculate COQ and unit product costs.

Value-added (VA)
Required Activity PAF or non-value- Activity
Activities resources levels categories added (NVA) drivers

Machining People, machines, tools Unit – VA Machine hours

Rework People, machines, tools – Internal failure NVA # of reworks
Warranty
repair People, machines, tools – External failure NVA # of warranty
repairs
Inspection People, test equipment, Unit Appraisal NVA # of tests
tools, supplies
Package People, tools, supplies Unit – VA # of units
Scheduling People Batch – Gray a # of batches
Maintenance People, supplies Facility Prevention VA Machine hours
Set-up People, tools Batch – NVA # of set-ups
Material People, moving Batch – NVA # of moves Table V.
handling equipment Activity-related
Note: a Gray: Activities of no value to customers, but that may be essential to the functioning of information for
the department the illustration
IJQRM Resource cost assignment
15,7 In the first stage of ABC cost assignment view, resources are traced to activities.
For the labor resource, the labor hours of the workers spent on various activities
and their percentages are shown in Table VI. Note that the labor hours of the
worker #1 to #4 spent on the first five activities are acquired from time cards
and that the percentages of time of the workers #5 and #6 spent on the last four
744 activities are estimated from a work sampling study (Tsai, 1996a). Total labor
costs traced to activities are shown in the last column of Table VI. For the
machine resource, the machine hours of the machines used in the activities,
machining, rework, and warranty repair, are recorded and shown in Table VII.
Total machine costs traced to activities are shown in the last column of Table
VII. For the other resources consumed by activities, their costs can be directly
traced to activities. Therefore, various resource costs and total activity costs
traced to activities are shown in columns (1)-(4) of Table VIII.
From column (4) of Table VIII, the department manager knows that the four
high-cost activities are machining ($6,416), inspection ($2,088), set-up ($1,920),
and Package ($1,840). Inspection and set-up are non-value-added activities,

Total Total
Workers labor labor
Activities #1 #2 #3 #4 #5 #6 hours $/hour costs

Machining 99.2 100.8 200.0 10 $2,000

(62) (63) (20.8) (20.8)
Rework 24.0 16.0 40.0 10 400
(15) (10) (4.2) (4.2)
Warranty repair 16.0 19.2 8.0 8.0 51.2 10 512
(10) (12) (5) (5) (5.3) (5.3)
Inspection 8.0 120.0 11.2 139.2 10 1,392
(5) (75) (7) (14.5) (14.5)
Package 9.6 16.0 128.0 153.6 10 1,536
(6) (10) (80) (16.0) (16.0)
Scheduling 8.0 12.8 20.8 10 208
(5) (8) (2.2) (2.2)
Maintenance 12.8 32.0 44.8 10 448
(8) (20) (4.75) (4.7)
Set-up 96.0 64.0 160.0 10 1,600
(60) (40) (16.7) (16.7)
Material handling 32.0 35.2 67.2 10 672
(20) (22) (7.0) (7.0)
Idle 12.8 14.4 16.0 12.8 11.2 16.0 83.2 10 832
(8) (9) (10) (8) (7) (10) (8.7) (8.7)
Table VI. Total 160.0 160.0 160.0 160.0 160.0 160.0 960.0 10 $9,600
Assigning labor
resource costs (100) (100) (100) (100) (100) (100) (100) (100)
to activities Note: Figures in parentheses are labor hours indicated as a percentage
 Total Total
Quality cost
Machines machine machine measurement
Activities #1 #2 hours $/hour costs

Machining 108.8 112.0 220.8 20 $4,416

(68) (70) (69.0) (69.0)
Rework 20.8 14.4 35.2 20 704 745
(13) (9) (11.0) (11.0)
Warranty repair 14.4 16.0 30.4 20 608
(9) (10) (9.5) (9.5)
Idle 16.0 17.6 33.6 20 672
(10) (11) (10.5) (10.5) Table VII.
Total 160.0 160.0 320.0 20 $6,400 Assigning machine
(100) (100) (100) (100) resource costs to
Note: Figures in parentheses are labor hours indicated as a percentage activities

which provide the greatest opportunities for improvement. In view of this, the
department manager requests quality engineers and industrial engineers to
investigate the feasibility of changing 100 percent inspection to sampling
inspection and to develop the methods of reducing set-up time. In addition, total
cost of the PAF-related activities, inspection ($2,088), warranty repair ($1,120),
rework ($1,104), and maintenance ($530), accounts for 27.36 percent
($4,842/$17,696) of total manufacturing cost excluding direct material cost; the
first three PAF-related activities are non-value-added and their cost accounts for
24.37 percent ($4,312/$17,696). This indicates that there are great opportunities
for reducing quality costs and that there is an emerging need to identify where
the opportunities lie, illustrated in the next subsection.
Note that the company in this example separates idle capacity costs from
activity cost calculation. This is not for external financial reporting and just for
internal decision making. It will let managers know how much idle capacity
costs, push managers to deploy the unused resources, and avoid distorting
product costs.

Activity cost assignment

In the second stage of ABC cost assignment view, activity costs are traced to
cost objects. ABC uses activity drivers to measure the consumption of activities
by cost objects. In this example, products are used as the cost objects. This can
trace COQ-related and COQ-unrelated costs to products. For this example, the
following data are shown in columns (5)-(10) of Table VIII:
• the activity driver quantities of various activities consumed by Product
A and Product B;
• the costs per activity driver of various activities; and
• the activity costs of various activities traced to Product A and Product B.
 costs to products
Assigning activity
Table VIII.

746

15,7
IJQRM
Activity costs ($) Activity driver quantity $/activity Activity cost assignment ($)
Labor Machine Others Total Activity Product A Product B Total driver Product A Product B
Activities (1) (2) (3) (4) drivers (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) (10)

Machining 2,000 4,416 6,416 Machine 124.2 96.6 220.8 29.06 3,609.00 2,807.00
hours (32.13) (28.88)
Rework 400 704 1,104 # of 43 32 75 14.72 632.96 471.04
reworks (5.63) (4.85)
Warranty repair 512 608 1,120 # of warranty 20 12 32 35.00 700.00 420.00
repairs (6.23) (4.32)
Inspection 1,392 696 2,088 # of tests 450 350 800 2.61 1,174.50 913.50
(10.45) (9.40)
Package 1,536 304 1,840 # of units 225 350 575 3.20 720.00 1,120.00
(6.41) (11.52)
Scheduling 208 208 # of batches 18 8 26 8.0 144.00 64.00
(1.28) (0.66)
Maintenance 448 82 530 Machine 124.2 96.6 220.8 2.40 298.13 231.87
hours (2.65) (2.39)
Set-up 1,600 320 1,920 # of set-ups 6 2 8 240.00 1,440.00 480.00
(12.82) (4.94)
Material handling 672 294 966 # of moves 9 14 23 42.00 378.00 588.00
(3.36) (6.05)
Idle 832 672 1,504 – – – – – – –
Total 9,600 6,400 1,696 17,696 Total activity cost 9,096.59 7,095.41
(80.97) (72.99)
Direct material cost 2,137.50 2,625.00
(19.03) (27.01)
Total product cost 11,234.09 9,270.41
(100) (100)
Production quantity 225 350
Unit product cost 49.93 27.77
Notes:
1. Formulas for calculation: (4) = (1) + (2) + (3); (7) = (5) + (6); (8) = (4)/(7); (9) = (5) × (8); (10) = (6) × (8);
2. The percentages within parentheses of columns (9) and (10) are the percentages of total product cost
This Table includes total activity cost, direct material cost, total product cost, Quality cost
and unit product cost for each product. By using the resulting data shown in measurement
columns (9) and (10), the department can prepare a product cost analysis report
as shown in Table IX. This report portrays product costs by direct material cost
and activity costs, which is completely different from traditional cost report.
This example report gives the department manager the following implications:
• For the overall figures, total non-value-added cost accounts for 32.05 747
percent of total manufacturing cost; total COQ accounts for 21.56
percent. Thus, there will be great opportunities for improvement.
Product A incurs more non-value-added cost/quality cost than product B.
• For two high-cost activities, inspection and set-up, Product A incurs
more cost than Product B, especially for set-up. Thus, reducing set-up
time for Product A has the first priority in improving the set-up
activity.

ABC Company
Department: XYZ
Product Cost Analysis Report
Product A Product B Total

Unit produced 225 350

Direct material cost ($) 2,137.50 (19.03) 2,625.00 (27.01) 4,762.50 (21.21)
Activity costs ($)
Machining (VA) a 3,609.00 (32.13) 2,807.00 (28.88) 6,416.00 (28.57)
Package (VA) 720.00 (6.41) 1,120.00 (11.52) 1,840.00 (8.19)
Maintenance (VA/COQ) 298.13 (2.65) 231.87 (2.39) 530.00 (2.36)
Inspection (NVA/COQ) 1,174.50 (10.45) 913.50 (9.40) 2,088.00 (9.30)
Rework (NVA/COQ) 632.96 (5.63) 471.04 (4.85) 1,104.00 (4.92)
Warranty repair
(NVA/COQ) 700.00 (6.23) 420.00 (4.32) 1,120.00 (4.99)
Set-up (NVA) 1,440.00 (12.82) 480.00 (4.94) 1,920.00 (8.55)
Material handling (NVA) 378.00 (3.36) 588.00 (6.05) 966.00 (4.30)
Scheduling (Gray) 144.00 (1.28) 64.00 (0.66) 208.00 (0.93)
Total activity cost 9,096.59 (80.97) 7,095.41 (72.99) 16,192.00 (72.10)
Total product cost ($) 11,234.09 (100) 9,720.41 (100)
Idle capacity cost 1,504.00 (6.70)
Total manufacturing cost 22,458.50 (100)
Unit product cost 49.93 27.77
Total value-added cost 4,627.13 (41.19) 4,158.87 (42.78) 8.786.00 (39.12)
Total non-value-
added cost 4,325.46 (38.50) 2,872.54 (29.55) 7,198.00 (32.05)
Total COQ 2,805.59 (24.97) 2,036.41 (20.95) 4,842.00 (21.56)
Total COQ per unit 12.47 5.82
Notes: Table IX.
aVA = value-added; NVA = non-value-added; COQ = cost of quality Product cost
Figures in parentheses indicate a percentage analysis report
IJQRM • For the non-value-added and failure-cost-related activities, rework and
15,7 warranty repair, Product A incurs more cost than Product B.

Conclusions
While most COQ measurements methods are activity/process oriented,
traditional cost accounting establishes cost accounts by the categories of
748 expenses, instead of activities. Thus, many COQ elements should be estimated
or collected by other methods. The main deficiencies of most COQ systems in
measuring COQ are:
• no consensus method to allocate overhead costs to COQ elements;
• the failure to trace quality costs to their sources; and
• the lack of information about how indirect workers spend their time on
various activities.
These deficiencies can be easily overcome under ABC together with work
sampling. Based on the similarities of COQ approaches and ABC, this paper
proposes an integrated COQ-ABC framework. Ideally, ABC and COQ systems
should be merged as one and share the common database in order to supply
various cost and nonfinancial information for the related management
techniques, ABM, TQM, and BPR. In addition, the integrated COQ-ABC
information system should be integrated with the existing company accounting
system eventually in order to reduce the resources required to manage the
system (Goulden and Rawlins, 1995) and to avoid data redundancy and
inconsistency.
Under ABC, quality costs are achieved in the first stage of ABC cost
assignment view and then traced to their sources in the second stage of ABC
cost assignment view. ABC uses nested activity centers to create a multi-tier
COQ reporting system to meet various management’s information needs and
to support COQ responsibility accounting. The cost and nonfinancial
information achieved from the integrated COQ-ABC system can be used to
identify the magnitude of the quality improvement opportunities, to identify
where the quality improvement opportunities exist, and to continuously plan
the quality improvement programs and control quality costs. The long-term
goal of the integrated COQ-ABC system is to eliminate non-value-added
activities, which are related to appraisal and failure costs for the PAF approach
and CONC and some COC for the process cost approach, and to streamline
value-added activities/processes. Moreover, the ultimate goal will be to
continuously improve processes/activities/quality so that no defects at all are
produced and quality cost measurement ultimately becomes unnecessary.

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Appendix: Glossary of ABC/ABM terms mentioned in this paper (Raffish and Quality cost
Turney, 1991)
Activity. 1.Work performed within an organization. 2.An aggregation of actions performed within
measurement
an organization that is useful for purposes of activity-based costing.
Activity analysis. The identification and description of activities in an organization. Activity
analysis involves determining what activities are done within a department, how many people
perform the activities, how much time they spend performing the activities, what resources
are required to perform the activities, what operational data best reflect the performance of the 751
activities, and what value the activity has for the organization. Activity analysis is
accomplished by means of interviews, questionnaires, observation, and review of physical
records of work.
Activity attributes. Characteristics of individual activities. Attributes include cost drivers, cycle
time, capacity, and performance measures. For example, a measure of the elapsed time
required to complete an activity is an attribute.
Activity cost pool. A grouping of all cost elements associated with an activity.
Activity driver. A measure of the frequency and intensity of the demands placed on activities by
cost objects. An activity driver is used to assign costs to cost objects. It represents a line-item
on the bill of activities for a product or customer. An example is the number of part numbers,
which is used to measure the consumption of material-related activities by each product,
material type, or component. The number of customer orders measures the consumption of
order-entry activities by each customer. Sometimes an activity driver is used as an indicator
of the output of an activity, such as the number of purchase orders prepared by the purchasing
activity.
Activity-based costing (ABC). A methodology that measures the cost and performance of
activities, resources, and cost objects. Resources are assigned to activities, then activities are
assigned to cost objects based on their use. Activity-based costing recognizes the causal
relationships of cost drivers to activities.
Activity-based management (ABM). A discipline that focuses on the management of activities as
the route to improving the value received by the customer and the profit achieved by providing
this value. This discipline includes cost driver analysis, activity analysis, and performance
measurement. Activity-based management draws on activity-based costing as its major
source of information.
Best practices. A methodology that identifies an activity as the benchmark by which a similar
activity will be judged. This methodology is used to assist in identifying a process or
technique that can increase the effectiveness or efficiency of an activity. The source may be
internal (e.g. taken from another part of the company) or external (e.g. taken from a
competitor). Another term used is competitive benchmarking.
Cost driver. Any factor that causes a change in the cost of an activity. For example, the quality of
parts received by an activity (e.g. the percent that are defective) is a determining factor in the
work required by that activity because the quality of parts received affects the resources
required to perform the activity. An activity may have multiple cost drivers associated with it.
Cost driver analysis. The examination, quantification, and explanation of the effects of cost
drivers. Management often uses the results of cost driver analyses in continuous improvement
programs to help reduce throughput time, improve quality, and reduce cost.
Cost element. An amount paid for a resource consumed by an activity and included in an activity
cost pool. For example, power cost, engineering cost, and depreciation may be cost elements in
the activity cost pool for a machine activity.
Cost object. Any customer, product, service, contract, project, or other work unit for which a
separate cost measurement is desired.
Non-value-added activity. An activity that is considered not to contribute to customer value or to
the organization’s needs. The designation “non-value-added” reflects a belief that the activity
IJQRM can be redesigned, reduced, or eliminated without reducing the quantity, responsiveness, or
quality of the output required by the customer or the organization.
15,7 Pareto analysis. The identification and interpretation of significant factors using Pareto’s rule that
20 percent of a set of independent variables is responsible for 80 percent of the result. Pareto
analysis can be used to identify cost drivers or activity drivers that are responsible for the
majority of cost incurred by ranking the cost drivers in order of value.
Performance measures. Indicators of the work performed and the results achieved in an activity,
752 process, or organizational unit. Performance measure may be financial or nonfinancial. An
example of a performance measure of an activity is the number of defective parts per million.
An example of a performance measure of an organizational unit is return on sales.
Process. A series of activities that are linked to perform a specific objective. For example, the
assembly of a television set or the paying of a bill or claim entails several linked activities.
Resource. An economic element that is applied or used in the performance of activities. Salaries
and materials, for example, are resources used in the performance of activities.
Resource driver. A measure of the quantity of resources consumed by an activity. An example of
a resource driver is the percentage of total square feet occupied by an activity. This factor is
used to allocate a portion of the cost of operating the facilities to the activity.
Value-added activity. An activity that is judged to contribute to customer value or satisfy an
organizational need. The attribute “value-added” reflects a belief that the activity cannot be
eliminated without reducing the quantity, responsiveness, or quality of output required by a
customer or organization.
Value analysis. A cost-reduction and process-improvement tool that utilizes information collected
about business processes and examines various attributes of the process (e.g. diversity,
capacity, and complexity) to identify candidates for improvement efforts.