The Correlations among the Categorized Quality Cost Factors on SMEs (Small & Medium-sized Enterprises)

중소 제조기업의 품질비용 행태에 관한 실증 연구

The successful and sustainable growth of SMEs depends on their ability of strengthen their competitiveness in quality and cost and service more than anything else as a fundamental of operation. Among these key competitive factors of SMEs, quality is the most critical factor in manufacturing business fields. Because quality strongly influence cost and service performance on this manufacturing business field. There are many different ways to improve the quality performance but it needs proper management decision to choose the best way what can maximize outputs with minimum inputs. And it needs effective measurement methods and some indicators to analysis the quality performance properly. The quality cost is one of the simplest key indicators to measure the quality performance and the effectiveness of quality related management decisions. The major purpose of this study is to diagnose the categorized current level of actual quality cost of local SMEs to maximize their quality management effectiveness through comparing their level with others what's expressed in early studies. In this study, through survey on local SMEs, we found that their average annual quality cost ratio versus turnover - Total amount of annual quality cost divided by annual turnover - is around 3.69% excluded some SME's performances what have different quality control measures with others. And we found some results what corresponded with the early studies on the correlations between those categorized quality costs factors and some discrepancies between some of the literature model and the early case study results as follows. There were negative correlations between the Prevention costs and the External failure costs, and the Appraisal costs and the External failure costs, and there was positive correlation between the Appraisal costs and Internal failure costs same as early studies. But, we couldn't found any strong negative correlations between the Cost of control - Preventive costs & Appraisal costs - and the Cost of Failure of control - Internal & External failure costs -. It reveals not only the lack of effectiveness on their preventive or appraisal activities but also it can reveal there were so many effective ways to prevent the failure costs properly such as some innovative investment on Factory automation includes Error Proofing and more preventive actions to improve the effectiveness of the typical management methods likes CE (Concurrent Engineering), APQP (Advanced Product Quality Planning), FMEA (Failure Mode & Effect Analysis) etc.