Quality Systems - costs and benefits for software suppliers

 

 


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Costs and benefits for software suppliers

Identifying costs

It is generally accepted that the costs of poor quality and poor quality management are much easier to identify and quantify than some of the benefits, particularly as quality management system implementation and software development methods tend to evolve within suppliers' organizations and customers rarely have appropriate benchmarks for comparison.

ISO 9001 includes extensive requirements for the measurement and monitoring of processes and customer satisfaction. Once an organization has implemented these requirements, it will be able to value the cost of quality with a fair degree of precision. These requirements will help any ISO 9001-certificated company to quantify more easily the benefits of their quality activities and their improvement efforts.

Benefits

The benefits of using a quality management system lie in the opportunities it provides for continual improvement, which result in improved product quality and repeatability, increased process efficiencies, a reduction in failure costs, increased employee satisfaction and lower staff turnover.

Failure costs typically comprise:

  • costs of correcting defects, both before and after delivery,
  • cost of overruns against time and budget,
  • unnecessarily high maintenance costs,
  • indirect costs associated with a frustrated workforce,
  • indirect costs that users incur due to poor quality software (such as loss of business due to poor reputation).

Surveys conducted in the late '80s indicated that, for companies without a quality management system, the failure costs could be in the region of 20% of turnover. These same surveys also suggested that, with the repeatability and consistency that resulted from having a well tuned quality management system, up to 50% of these costs could be saved.

Audit-based assessments

The audit-based assessment process in an information technology organization stimulates:

  • improved in-house visibility of software development,
  • better management and control and improvement of the processes,
  • improved software deliverables,
  • improved traceability of processes and controls,
  • objective and independent judgement of processes.

All of these factors generate an increased awareness of quality within the organization.

Certification

The certification of an organization's quality system offers:

  • marketing advantage,
  • reduction in the number (or elimination) of second party audits, due to acceptance by customers around the world of internationally-recognized accredited certification schemes,
  • improved in-house quality management system expertise for assessing potential suppliers.
  • motivation of both management and staff to meet the qualification criteria under the scrutiny of independent qualified auditors.
  • an objective basis upon which to make process improvements.

TickIT provides a framework for achieving the identified benefits

 


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