But this is hardly something new, some say. Perhaps not, which hardly makes it any better and even more justifies talking about it. Quality failure costs come in many forms and are not necessarily visible to the eye or in the organization's cash drawer. Rework, duplication and non-performance are just a few variants that easily go under the radar in too many contexts.

However, the effects can be much more significant. For the well-being of individuals, for the competitiveness of organizations and for society as a whole.

Doing the right things in the right way

The costs of quality deficiencies can in some cases amount to more than 30 percent of a company's entire turnover due to products, services and processes not meeting the requirements and expectations of various stakeholders. In relation to AB Sweden, we are talking about as much as a thousand billion!

Reducing the cost of quality failure is ultimately about doing the right things in the right way to a greater extent than today. While many of the success factors for this are known, we see signs that many organizations are leaking resources unnecessarily.

• Understanding what creates customer value is more critical than ever. Despite this, SKI's customer satisfaction surveys show a declining trend in results since 2010, fortunately with a slight break in the trend for 2018.
• The ability of leadership to develop sustainable operations where the organization's collective competence is utilized is one of our greatest leadership challenges according to SIQ's latest foresight study.
• Gallup's "state of the global workplace" indicates that only about 14% of Swedish employees are actively engaged in the business and its development.

So is the will, ability or time to improve missing?

A quick and easy way to get an idea of this is to mirror your own business in the Billion Dollar Test.

But be warned, thousands of billions can take a few minutes of your time!

Best wishes,

Michael Westher
Writer at Quality 5.0 Forum and business developer at SIQ