In one of the interviews the famous Quality Guru Philip Crosby (author of the book ‘Quality is Free’- published in 1979) says, “Conventionally, quality is always looked at as goodness, as gold-plating. Quality is viewed as an expense, a trade-off, something that you have to spend money on. But you can't manage with goodness as your definition of quality. Quality is conformance to carefully thought-out requirements. So quality is free because it is already built-in. The expense of quality is nonconformance.”​

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The cost of nonconformance or ‘COPQ’ have two parts - direct & indirect. Normally managers look at direct quality costs like - Customer complaints, supply of replacements, reworking, compensation claims, scrap, etc., however they forget the costs of containment actions, telephone calls, consultations, logistics, price reductions, freebies and last but not the least – Image of the Organization. ​

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Acting on Internal & External failures is Reactive, whereas ‘Creating the processes that produce Zero defects’ is Proactive. In the product manufacturing value-chain, the COPQ increases exponentially if the defect/ fault is detected & corrected at downstream. ​

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Auto Quality (Autonomous Quality) is a tool that helps Gemba people to detect & correct the defects/ faults at the point of occurrence so that the Customer (internal/ external) receives a defect free sub-assy or a product. Auto Quality Matrix is a useful tool for making quality problems clearly visible and eliminating them in a process. The line is drawn between the place in which a fault has been discovered and the place in which the fault emerged. ​