The Pursuit of Excellence
A Manager's Guide to Quality 		Reaching New Heights


One way to establish a value for K, in terms of the direct cost to the manufacturer, would be to use the cost of scrapping a non-conforming item.

Say that an item which falls below the lower specification limit cannot be reworked and must be scrapped, and that the cost of scrapping a piece once it has been produced is £10. This means that when x is equal to the lower specification limit, K (x - t)2 = £10. The value of K can therefore be calculated as:


or more generally as:


where the particular value for x is the point at which the product must be scrapped.