Cost of Quality: Prevention Costs

Efforts to keep defects from occurring

• Cost of Quality inputs in the Prevention category often deal with focused improvement opportunities.
• Many Prevention activities involve projects that target a specific recurring problem, yielding a solution that modifies how a process will be operated in the future.

Prevention Cost of Quality inputs can be loosely grouped into four categories:

• Training and education
• Preventive maintenance (PM)
• Work on improvement projects
• Process engineering enhancements

Prevention includes activities such as:

• Quality planning
• Training
• Process control
• Mistake-proofing
• Engineering enhancements