Abstract:

Quality is one of the features successful organizations thrive to improve continuously. Having good quality products and services is one of the prerequisites to achieve a competitive advantage. However, another prerequisite is the cost that is associated with achieving the level of quality. According to the related literature, many organizations have been implementing quality costing as a means to find the tradeoff between the quality of their deliverables and the associated cost. However, this is not the case in the Kingdom of Bahrain as very few studies have been conducted on this topic.

Quality Costing has been found to be slightly adopted by Bahraini organizations (Ramadhan and Bucheery, 2005). This creates an urge to investigate this concept in one of the Bahraini organizations. Hence, a service department in one of the governmental organizations in the Kingdom of Bahrain, that is the Electricity and Water Authority (EWA), was selected to carry out this investigation. In addition, this study focused on exploring the potentials of using quality costing to identify and prioritize various improvement opportunities and initiatives.

The Illegal Water Connections Control process is one of various processes that operate within the Illegal Connections Group (ICNRC) that is within the Electricity and Water Authority at the Kingdom of Bahrain. There are different tools that can be used to assess this process as well as any other process. This study was conducted to investigate the quality costs of the Illegal Water Connections Control Process with the objective of identifying process improvement opportunities that would most likely benefit the process if they were implemented.

This study started with the analysis of the current process and the development of a cross functional diagram of the process by conducting focus group discussions with the process’s owners. Next, the activities which had major impact on the overall process performance were selected from the whole set of identified activities for further study. Using the Process Cost Model, the activities were classified as either conformance or nonconformance activities, followed by collecting data using time sheets to estimate the average cost of each activity and to identify the causes of nonconformities’ occurrence. The study identified the requirements that were expected by the ICNRC’s different stakeholders using unstructured interviews.

The study identified 26 major conformance activities, and 8 major nonconformance activities. In addition, it identified 23 opportunities to improve the conformance activities, and 17 opportunities to eliminate the nonconformance activities as much as possible.

Keywords: Quality Costing, Service Sector, Process Improvement, Administrative Process.