A Comprehensive Study on the Quality Cost Implementation Status of Taiwan Top 500 Manufacturing Companies and an Empirical Case Study of a Household Tissue Manufacturer

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Graduate Institute of Industrial Engineering National Taiwan University Title: A Comprehensive Study on the Quality Cost Implementation Status of Taiwan Top 500 Manufacturing Companies and an Empirical Case Study of a Household Tissue Manufacturer Name: Yun-Hsuan Kan Advisor: Ming-Tzong Wang, Ph.D. Month/Year: July, 2001 During the 1980s Japanese industries have demonstrated their capabilities of providing quality products in all most every industrial sectors, especially coupled with the Toyota’s lean production system concept. Around the 1990s total quality management has become recognized as one of the key strategies for American and world-wide organizations to improve their productivity and international competitiveness. Once adopted, the quality program needs to be planned and controlled by management. One of the most important performance strategies of the advocated quality programs is the implementation of cost of quality (COQ). The understanding of quality costs and the use of such information as a management tool can provide valuable benefits to a firm’s quality program, including improved quality, higher productivity and better management of cost. In this study, the implementation status of quality cost of Taiwan manufacturing companies has been explored in two different ways: a comprehensive survey and an empirical case study. The first way covers a whole spectrum of Taiwan top 500 manufacturing companies listed on the famous Taiwan “CommonWealth” magazine. This comprehensive survey addresses several issues regarding the implementation status of COQ system and its related concepts. A household tissue manufacturer has been selected to conduct the empirical case study in this study and secondary data analysis has bee adopted., The same questionnaire has been applied to the case company and the Taiwan top 500 manufacturing companies in order to obtain the results of the COQ implementation status of Taiwan manufacturers together with the industry -to- company comparison with the case company. The main findings of this study are summarized as follows: 1.The Implementation status on the quality cost of Taiwan top 500 manufacturing companies. 2.Because of that it is still lacking of a perfect system to introduce and implement quality cost, it makes the inconvenience of the COQ concept’s popularization and dissemination. 3.The lack of external inducement, such as the establishment of ISO-9000 certification or the encouragement and improvement of the government authority, also makes the insufficient dissemination of the COQ system 4.In the case company, the Pareto’s analysis of quality cost illustrates that a few important quality cost items usually account for the majority of the total quality cost. The top five quality cost items, which include wear and tear, shutdown loss, preventive maintenance cost, cost of returns, and on-the-spot examination cost. 5.Each performance of COQ implementing level is lower than the Industry. Among them, “The Prevention and Appraisal Costs of Chief Support Costs”, “The Appraisal Costs of Research, Production and Marketing”, “External Failure Cost” and “The Failure Costs of Research and Development” are statistical significant lower than the average of Manufacturing Industry. It indicates that the case company’s recognition of the COQ application is still in the rudimentary introducing stage. 6.The staff of the case company has higher recognition than the Industry on the COQ implementing effectiveness. It indicates that the staff of the case company can comprehend the importance of total quality management. They believe that the corporate management class promotes his ability on the quality management can improve the competition advantage of the corporate productions.