Quality professionals see many costs of quality firsthand. These include our salaries and benefits, the equipment used to measure and analyze quality outcomes, and the waste generated by these processes when they fail to meet requirements. Naturally, many quality cost systems are heavily focused on internal issues, since those are most readily visible to the quality professional. These issues may slow production, forcing rapid response and quick remedy. These issues can quickly become high profile within the organization, particularly in lean and build-to-order systems with minimal inventory to take up the slack in delivery. Quantifying these costs is not trivial, but fairly straightforward nonetheless with minimal assumptions.
Traditional quality systems, circa 1950, relied heavily on inspection and audit functions to detect problems. In these systems, production personnel were strictly responsible for getting product out the door, and the quality personnel served as the gatekeeper to detect issues at two critical points in the process: when product entered the facility from the supplier and when product left the facility post-production.