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Across the world, manufacturing is undergoing substantial changes necessitated by fierce competition in an expanding global market. Quality improvement has become a prime concern in this process. However, the effect of quality improvement on a company's short-term profitability is difficult to measure and assess. Furthermore, many managers and accountants continue to use decision-making models which evaluate projects based on measures of short-term profitability. If quality improvement projects are not to be pushed aside, some effort must be exerted to measure the costs and, more importantly, the financial benefits associated with the projects. These can then serve as inputs to decision-making models.This article describes how accountants identify and measure costs associated with product quality. It then develops, from the Taguchi loss function, a method for measuring financial benefits associated with quality improvements. The article also incorporates these measures into a capital budgeting model to produce a decision to invest or not to invest in a particular quality improvement project. Specifically, the project considered is one which reduces process variability.The remainder of this article is organized as follows: a discussion of the development and accounting definition of quality costs; an explanation of the Taguchi loss function; and an extended example incorporating the loss function in a popular capital budgeting technique (net present value). Finally, the article argues that until such time as accountants can develop quantifiable measures for the benefits of quality improvements or qualitative decision-making models, the Taguchi estimation represents a viable addition to current decision-making models. Accounting Definition of Quality CostsManufacturers' concerns about quality, and consequently quality improvement, can be broken down into two components: quality of design and quality of

If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation.Abstract Despite long-standing interest in the quality movement by marketing scholars, marketing managers have not seized opportunities to provide leadership as the quality movement has centered attention on customer satisfaction. Significant corporate investments in quality programs suggest that the recent revision of the ISO 9000 standards to focus on collection and use of customer satisfaction data may provide marketing managers an invitation to meaningfully enter the quality dialogue. Collaboration between marketing and quality management is problematic because the two functions are highly differentiated. This article draws on work in organizational learning and organizational behavior to identify criteria for successful collaboration between marketing and quality management and to propose a process for meeting the new ISO 9000 requirements.

This article presents the results of a survey questionnaire developed to ascertain which of three constituent groups (Superiors, Peers, and Subordinates) in the workplace has the greatest influence on rater compliance with employee performance appraisal guidelines. The research found that superiors had the greatest influence on rater compliance with rating procedures.

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