Quantify the true financial impact of defects by combining internal failure, external failure, appraisal and prevention costs — so leadership can see quality losses in pounds, not percentages.
Enter your values on the left, then press Calculate.
Quality costs split into four buckets. Internal and external failure are pure waste. Appraisal is checking — necessary but not value-added. Prevention is the only category that actually reduces total COPQ when you spend more on it.
Untouched processes often run at 15-25% of revenue in COPQ — most of it hidden in scrap, rework and inspection. World-class operations hold COPQ below 2% of revenue. The gap between those two figures is usually pure profit waiting to be unlocked.
The fastest way to cut COPQ is to invest more in prevention and less in failure response. Every £1 spent on prevention typically saves £4-£10 in failure costs — but only if the prevention spend is targeted at the actual root causes of defects.