eThesis - School of Business electronic theses

This study describes how quality costing is conducted in a multinational consumer goods company, Fiskars group, and how Fiskars employees working with quality and/or quality costing perceive the issues and concepts related to quality and quality costing. The experienced roles, benefits and challenges of quality costing as reported by interviewees are discussed as well and some recommendations for improving quality costing practices in the case company are given.

The study is a qualitative case study, with the data primarily collected using semi-structured interviews, which included a questionnaire on use of quality techniques and tools. Written company materials were used as well to a lesser extent.

The study finds that the present-day state of quality costing in the case company as well as the perceptions described by interviewees have many striking similarities with what has been reported in other similar studies. However, several interesting differences between the case at hand and literature are identified as well. The findings indicate that even though Fiskars is still in its early stages of quality costing utilization, it clearly has potential for developing a more advanced quality costing system. Key recommendations for improvement include creating group-wide definitions for quality costing concepts, gradually harmonizing quality costing practices and procedures, increasing the amount of quality training and creating a plan for improving relevant IT-systems to ensure that they would be better suited for quality costing purposes in the future.