| | Christi, Inc., is using a costs-of-quality approach to evaluate design engineering efforts for a new skateboard. Christi's senior managers expect the engineering work to reduce appraisal,
internal failure, and external failure activities. The predicted reductions in activities over the 2-year life of the skateboards follow. Also shown are the cost allocation rates for each
activity. |
| | Activity | Predicted Reduction
in Activity Units | Activity Cost Allocation
Rate Per Unit |
| | Inspection of incoming materials | 420 | $37 |
| | Inspection of finished goods | 420 | 26 |
| | Number of defective units
discovered in-house | 1,400 | 56 |
| | Number of defective units
discovered by customers | 325 | 75 |
| | Lost sales to dissatisfied
customers | 150 | 103 |
| | Requirements: |
| | 1. Calculate the predicted quality cost savings from the design engineering work. |
| | 2. Christi spent $103,000 on design engineering for the new skateboard. What is the net benefit of this "preventive" quality activity? |
| | 3. What major difficulty would Christi's managers have in implementing this cost-of-quality approach? What alternative approach could they use to measure quality improvement? |