Autor: Carsten Schwab

Due to the global harmonization of product quality it is essential for a firm’s success to pursue a quality strategy that balances the trade-off between customer satisfaction and quality costs. For selecting an appropriate quality strategy it would be necessary to include risk considerations and customer satisfaction into strategy evaluation approaches. However, current methods do not integrate these customer related effects. This article presents an approach for calculating the value added by quality strategies integrating risk considerations and customer satisfaction as a major success factor.

Transparency concerning direct and indirect costs that occur per product variant within the entire supply network is vital for the successful management of high product diversity. The introduction of variant classes and core processes is a promising approach to achieve transparency of costs for each company as well as for the supply network. By means of activity-based costing, the variant costs can be calculated and subsequently analyzed in order to realize an improved planning of product design, business processes and supply network.