Factor Analysis of Cost of Quality to Determine the Adoption of Economics of Quality as a Measure of Quality Management Performance in South African Companies

The current disruptive business environment forces companies to constantly search for improved ways of meeting customer requirements. South African companies are not excluded from daily business challenges. This research assesses the adoption of cost of quality practice as the measure of quality management performance. The study uses the snowball sampling approach to identify the target sample members. It collected information from 45 companies around the Johannesburg area. The convergent validity and discriminant validity were used as the measure of study construct validity. The study identifies preventive cost and appraisal cost as two costs of quality categories which receive high attention from South African companies. The failure cost was identified to be in third place. The opportunity cost was identified as the ignored cost of quality (CoQ) category. Hence, it was recommended that the companies start to pay attention to their opportunity cost and it was also recommended that further research should focus on identifying the challenges experienced by companies in the implementation of cost of quality.