World Association of News Publishers


Quality failure costs in newspaper production

Quality failure costs in newspaper production

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Summary

Newspapers are dependent on their customers - readers and advertisers. Therefore newspapers should fulfil their requirements and expectations. It is not enough that the customer interface is in order, the whole value-adding production chain must be efficient and of good quality. In order to achieve the maximum gain/cost ratio, it is possible to either increase the gains or reduce the costs. This report focuses on quality failure costs. They can be reduced by systematic approaches with quality management systems. But this needs money to be invested in organisational structures and personnel training, i.e. this results in costs as well. It is therefore necessary to know whether the ratio between these two cost blocks is positive, i.e. decrease in quality failure costs exceeds the cost of a quality management system. The scope of this project was to find the main reasons for quality failure costs, to present methods to measure them and recommendations to minimise them. The experiences of three case newspapers give ideas how this can be done in practice. The three case newspapers have been chosen because they are leaders in controlling quality and quality failures. They are: Dagens Nyheter (Stockholm, S), Keski-Uusimaa (Tuusula, FIN) and Neue Ziircher Zeitung (Zurich, CH). The basic data for the report originates from visits to and quality failure follow-up at the three case newspapers. The aim of the interviews at the case newspapers was to find possible quality failure types, their reasons and origin in the newspaper production process. During a follow-up period of one month practical information was gathered about quality failures in different departments. The consequent costs have been calculated or estimated based on this and previous data on the case newspapers. This project has been carried out at VTT Information Technology, the Technical Research Centre of Finland. We hope that this project will be of assistance to our members controlling quality failures, which sometimes constitute a very important cost factor in newspaper production.


Date:
1997-02-01
Language:
English
Type:
IFRA Special Report
Number:
6.20
Author:
Fuchs, Boris
Cooperating Institutes:
VTT

Author

Jochen Litzinger's picture

Jochen Litzinger

Date

2001-04-03 00:00

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