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Measuring quality costs has been emphasized as an important part of quality improvement since the early 1950s. A chapter on quality costs seems to be almost compulsory in every book pertaining to total quality management, business process improvement, and similar topics. There is no doubt that measuring quality costs is useful in order to direct improvement efforts; the problem is that the concept is not as valid today as it used to be. While customer requirements and production systems have changed considerably during the last decades, quality cost measurement is advocated in nearly the same way as it was 40 years ago. This work presents a new customer and process focused poor quality cost model that enables the provider of a product or service to focus on elements that really matter to his customers. The input to the model is customer requirements and the output is expected poor quality costs estimated through the Taguchi loss function. Quality function deployment is used to translate the voice of the customer to key process parameters, that is process parameters having a direct influence on the fulfilment of customer requirements. The quality function deployment matrix is also used to estimate intangible costs. Traditional cost categories have been altered, and the expected loss for each cost category is estimated based on actual process performance and stepwise quadratic loss functions with multiple intervals. The intended use of the model is as a top management decision‐making tool able to link quality improvement to customer satisfaction and loyalty.

The two quality management concepts of benchmarking and poor quality cost measurement have been developed completely separate from each other and without any interaction between them. Both have also experienced some shortcomings that to some extent have limited their use and results. This paper explores these shortcomings and demonstrates how benchmarking and poor quality cost measurement in some ways are similar and in other ways complement each others’ weaknesses. An integrated framework that combines the two concepts into a powerful approach for assisting an organization’s quality management work is presented. Different points of intersection between the two concepts in this integrated framework are discussed, and it is demonstrated how they support and enhance each other. Such enhancements occur throughout all phases of the benchmarking process, while benchmarking provides an extra dimension to the use of the poor quality cost measurements.