Rework Cost Diagnostic

Find out what your rework really costs, and where it starts

The Rework Cost Diagnostic puts a £ figure on every family of repeat problems in your business (remakes, return visits, missing items, supplier errors) then traces each to where it is made and where it should have been caught. It takes three weeks and ends with a containment plan. It is for UK businesses that quote, deliver and install, and know rework costs money but cannot say how much.

Best when: Margin is slipping on jobs you priced correctly, and nobody can say where it's going.

What you get

A £ figure on every repeat failure: the cost to make it, the cost to fix it and the cost of the remedial visit.
Each repeat error traced to where it is made and where it should have been caught.
A short, ranked list of where fixing the process will save the most.
A containment plan agreed from week three, so the bleeding stops while the real fixes are built.
One agreed, conservative cost per incident, so the board believes the number.

Sounds like your business?

You priced the job right and won it, and the margin still was not there at the end.
You know rework costs money, but the number is either unknown or a guess.
Different people in the business would give different answers to "how many errors did we have last month?"
Remedial work and rework are absorbed by people who were going to be doing something else.
You want a business case for spending money on quality, and need the figure to build it from.
A board or investor has asked what quality is costing, and the answer is currently "we think..."
Your rework log only sees what costs a delivery; office catches and site fixes are never written down.

What it needs from you

Access to whatever records exist, even if they are messy or in several places.
A couple of hours with the people closest to the work, without their manager correcting them.
Willingness to see a number that may be larger than expected.

How it works

Diagnose

We go to the work. We walk the floor, read your error log, complaints and remedial records, and talk to the people doing the job.
Engineer

We map each repeat error from order to site, so you can see every point where it could have been stopped.
Prove

You get the numbers and the evidence behind them, so the decision on what to fix first is yours and rests on fact.

What each stage involves

Diagnose: Three weeks, and most of it is spent with your records and your people rather than in a meeting room: the warehouse, the office where the quoting and ordering is done, and a live site. We read whatever exists (every failure record, complaint emails, remedial visit notes, credit notes, scrap reports, rework job cards) and group them into families by cause and cost. Where records are thin, we reconstruct from the people who did the work, because they remember what actually happened even when nothing was written down. The aim is a complete list of repeat failures, not a sample.
Engineer: Each repeat failure is then traced from order to delivery and beyond, so you can see every point at which it could have been caught. Most businesses find that the error is made in one place and discovered in another, and that the catching points are inconsistent. Some orders get checked and others do not. This mapping is usually the part that changes what everyone thought the problem was.
Prove: The output is a costed list, ranked so the biggest and easiest savings sit at the top, and a containment plan you can start straight away. It is kept short. A 60-page report would be filed; a ranked list of where the money is going gets acted on. You keep the underlying figures so you can check any number and re-run the calculation yourself as things change.

About our method → What these terms mean →

What this service is not

Not an ISO 9001 gap analysis. That’s the ISO 9001 Readiness service.
Not an audit with a pass or fail. Nothing here is scored against a standard.
Not a software assessment. We are pricing your errors, not your systems.

Who runs this

Euan Pallister

25 years in operational businesses, from production management to fire protection and ironmongery

Proof it works

See the measured results behind this work: doubled assembly output, quote turnaround cut from 150 minutes to 15, and more.

Read the track record →

The approach in practice

An example from the track record

Before

A construction supply business was taking between two and three hours to return some quotes. The delay was not a lack of effort: requests sat unmanaged in a shared inbox, and responsibility was split between five or six people, so nobody owned a quote from start to finish.

What changed

Tracing the process end to end showed where the time actually went: waiting, not working. One person was given ownership of the process from beginning to end, which mattered more than any tool. A tool then generated most of the quote automatically.

Result

Average quote turnaround fell from 150 minutes to 15.

From Reducing quote turnaround from hours to minutes on the track record, anonymised, and achieved before these services were formalised.

More detail

Cost of poor quality calculator

Estimate what repeat errors cost you a year, before you talk to anyone. Enter what you know; the formula is shown so you can check it.