Purpose – Today substantial investments are made to improve the bottom line and cost of quality (CoQ) is a tool that identifies weaker areas where these investments should be directed. In literature, the authors find various CoQ models and their applications but it is deficient in providing a standard format of a “Quality Cost Procedure” for a CoQ program’s company-wide deployment. A procedure was thus developed and its effectiveness was evaluated implementation. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – CoQ program was implemented in the production department of a wood products’ manufacturer using the action research approach. Prevention, Appraisal and Failure Cost model was employed. Data collection was challenging, however, stakeholders were interviewed, data were acquired from Management Information System and various reports were reviewed for cost elements. Findings – Total CoQ as a percentage of sales was found to be 11, while as a percentage of material cost was 15 percent. It was found through the implementation that development of a quality cost procedure is highly iterative in nature and a standard format is proposed in the Appendix. This procedure worked satisfactorily and the company is confident in moving to the next phase of company-wide deployment of CoQ Program. Originality/value – A robust “Quality Cost Procedure” is developed, which not only helped the company but will serve CoQ implementers in their operational as well as tactical levels of management. CoQ implementation prior development of procedure brought conviction and accredited it. Practitioners can mold this procedure as per need, which will further enhance the body of knowledge on CoQ.

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Forty-five displaced femur fractures in children were treated with unilateral external fixation as a standard treatment from March 2007 to March 2009 and the last follow-up was completed in May 2012. The average age of the children at presentation was 9.93 years. Patients were followed up till union, at 1 year, and at an average of 3.5 years after fixation. The fixator was removed at an average of 12.23 weeks. Twenty-one (47%) patients had a minor complication of pin-site infection. One patient had a major complication of refracture. Treatment of uncomplicated femur fractures using an external fixator in children yields satisfactory results. Our series had a longer duration of follow-up and fewer refractures compared with other series.

We p resent a n a lgorithm to e stimate d irection o f a rrival (DOA) of an incoming wave received at an array antenna in the scenario where the incoming wave is contaminated by the additive white Gaussian noise and scattered by arbitrary shaped 3 D s catterer(s). We p resent d ifferent s imulation examples to show the validity of the proposed method. It is observed that the proposed algorithm is capable of closely estimating the DOA of an incoming wave irrespective of the shape o f t he s catterer p rovided t he d ecision i s made o ver multiple iterations. Moreover, presence of noise affects the estimate especially i n the case o f low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) that gi ves a r elatively l arge e stimation er ror. However, for l arger S NR t he D OA estimation is p rimarily dependent on the scatterer only.