A process can look remarkably efficient when it is allowed to send its mistakes somewhere else. Intake meets its speed target because incomplete orders move forward. Sales records the conversion before operations discovers that the promise cannot be delivered. Billing closes the transaction while service handles the confused customer. Each department reports acceptable performance. The business pays for the same work twice.
Rework rarely appears under one convenient heading. It is distributed across corrected invoices, duplicate data entry, replacement shipments, customer callbacks, schedule changes, expedited orders, additional approvals, and employees searching for information that should have arrived with the work. Much of it looks like ordinary activity because the people performing it have learned how to keep the process moving.
The American Society for Quality classifies rework, waste, failure analysis, complaints, returns, and repeated service among the costs created by poor quality. That framing matters because businesses often treat quality as a production concern. The same economics apply to an office, professional service firm, retailer, or contractor. An incorrect customer record may not create physical scrap, but correcting it still consumes labor and delays everything waiting behind it.
Departmental measures can hide the transfer. A team may reduce its handling time by passing incomplete work downstream. Another may protect its budget by postponing maintenance that eventually becomes an operational emergency. A third may improve its closure rate by labeling repeat contacts as new requests. The metric improves because the cost has crossed an organizational boundary.
This is why the process should be measured beyond the point where one department declares its work complete. The useful questions concern the whole transaction: How many times was it touched? How often did it return to an earlier step? How much time passed between the first request and an acceptable outcome? Which employees performed work that would not have existed if the information had been correct the first time?
A visible rework queue would change many operating conversations. Leaders could see that apparent productivity in one area is creating congestion in another. Teams could distinguish demand generated by customers from demand generated by the company’s own errors. Improvement would become less about asking the correction team to work faster and more about understanding why the work keeps returning.
Stottly Enterprises views rework as an operating signal, not merely an employee mistake. People usually correct what the process permits, rewards, or fails to prevent. A dashboard that counts completed work without counting how much of it came back is not measuring efficiency. It is measuring how successfully the business moved its costs out of view.
Sources
• American Society for Quality, “What Is Cost of Quality?”: https://asq.org/quality-resources/cost-of-quality
• American Society for Quality, “Expert Answers: Cost of Quality,” June 2026: https://asq.org/quality-progress/articles/expert-answers-cost-of-quality?id=8484f9d316b84c949ee8ff1ee1384b7d
• NIST Baldrige Performance Excellence Program, “Operations”: https://www.nist.gov/baldrige/self-assessing/improvement-tools/foundations-successful-business/operations
• APQC, “Scrap and Rework Costs as a Percentage of Sales”: https://www.apqc.org/what-we-do/benchmarking/open-standards-benchmarking/measures/scrap-and-rework-costs-percentage
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