Tools
Process Improvement ROI Calculator
Enter your organization’s operational data and get an estimated annual cost of your current-state process problems — the waste that doesn’t appear labeled as waste on your P&L.
Cost of Poor Quality Estimator
What is operational waste actually costing you?
These inputs are estimates — precision matters less than order of magnitude. The purpose is to surface the number that’s been hiding in your operation. Most organizations are surprised how large it is.
Full-time equivalents who touch this process
Include salary, benefits, overhead. Typically 1.3–1.5x base salary.
Percentage of work that must be corrected, repeated, or escalated
Include labor to fix plus regulatory and downstream consequence costs
Errors, exceptions, or defects per month in this process
Applies an industry risk multiplier based on regulatory and downstream cost patterns
Your estimate appears here.
Fill in the fields and click Calculate. Most organizations find the number larger than expected — typically 15–30% of total process labor cost.
The point isn’t precision. The point is making the waste visible. You can’t fix what you haven’t measured.
This calculator estimates:
- ✓Rework and correction labor cost
- ✓Error and exception cost
- ✓Industry-specific risk multiplier
- ✓Annualized total cost of poor quality
About This Estimate
What this calculator does — and doesn’t — tell you.
This tool estimates the annual cost of poor quality using a simplified model based on four inputs: staff count, salary, rework rate, and error volume. It’s designed to surface an order of magnitude, not a precise figure. The point is to make visible a cost that most organizations have never directly quantified.
What it doesn’t capture: opportunity cost, customer attrition driven by poor quality, regulatory penalty exposure, and the strategic cost of leadership attention consumed by operational fires. A formal Measure phase quantifies all of those. This calculator starts the conversation.
In our experience, most organizations that run a formal cost-of-poor-quality analysis find the number is 15–30% of total process labor cost — before downstream consequences. For a 25-person department at $90K fully-loaded cost per person, that’s $337K–$675K per year in a single process. Across a 500-person operation, the number is usually in the millions. Our documented results — $6.9M insurance carrier, $6M university health system, $4M+ commercial mortgage servicer — reflect exactly that pattern at scale.
How We Measure and Document Impact →The estimate surprised you. Now let’s fix it.
Tell us which process you ran through the calculator. We’ll tell you what a DMAIC engagement would look like — and what a realistic improvement means for that number.
Start a Conversation →