When prevention and appraisal costs increase, failure costs will fall as the product quality level increases. The total quality cost curve is the numeric sum of the prevention costs, appraisal costs and failure costs. In the traditional quality management mindset, there is an optimum quality level and an optimum cost associated with the lowest point on the total quality cost. In Figure 0.2, you can see the traditional view of quality costs. If we take a look of the curve of the prevention costs, it is believed that it takes a huge amount of money in order to gain a very small reduction of non-conformance rate. Therefore, the perception is that it is not economically advisable to reduce non-conformance to a very low level. Instead, inspection (detection) is used to screen out defectives.
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