Companies today strive to offer high quality at a low price, to meet customer needs, but also to save by controlling production costs. Much of this spending is for quality. These costs must be monitored and optimized, preferably through a measurement system tailored to the respective enterprise.

Cost of quality (COQ) is a comprehensive model that shows how resources are allocated to maintain good quality and what the losses are from managing poor quality. Knowing the sources of losses and analyzing costs allows areas for improvement and investment in quality to be identified.

The course explains how such an analysis is conducted and how the COQ model is applied. The benefit of this tool is that it helps improve management decisions, communication, supply management, customer satisfaction, productivity and quality.

Both the cost of poor quality and inefficient equipment lead to losses. Therefore, the course also considers Overall Equipment Efficiency (OEE). It is a metric from Lean Manufacturing similar to COQ. Behind OEE there is an untapped opportunity and an opportunity cost that can be avoided. In 2020, OEE was included as a new Lean tool in the BOK of the internationally recognized Certified Quality Engineer (CQE) designation.

OEE is measured as a combination of equipment availability, performance and compliance with quality standards. The course explains how OEE can be transformed from an operational to a financial metric. Expressed in money, it shows the effect of optimization and can justify investments in efficiency.

The course also presents a couple of extended case studies which show how the COQ and OEE tools have been implemented in real life by manufacturing companies from two different sectors.