• Journal of Distribution Science
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• v.13 no.8
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• pp.27-40
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• 2015

Purpose - Total Quality Management (TQM) has received significant attention and interest from a large number of organizations around the world in various industries. These organizations have tried to embody TQM concepts in areas such as engineering and product design, marketing, R&D, procurement, production, personnel, and product inspection. Research design, data, and methodology - This study presents an overview of the fundamentals of TQM and an in depth review of the obstacles to the successful implementation of TQM. Results - In order to control the cost of manufacturing, the tracking of the cost of quality (COQ) allows companies to capture the actual overall cost incurred in producing a unit of product or service. The study explores the reasons why companies track the COQ and ways to address it. Conclusions - Based on the results, COQ is one of the key performance indicators for making more accurate strategic decisions as well as a critical aspect of TQM. The study also presents a few popular quality improvement tools that have been widely used in organizations successfully implementing TQM.

• Research in Community and Public Health Nursing
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• v.21 no.3
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• pp.362-373
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• 2010

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to evaluate the costs and benefits of individual home visiting health care using secondary data and literature review. Methods: The total number of subjects was 1,008,837. A specific program was classified into disease management, care of infant, child and women, or elderly care. The costs and effects of a program were identified from a societal perspective, and the effects were converted into monetary terms or benefits. The total cost was calculated in the way that medical expenses, travel costs and productivity losses were offset by the decrease in benefits and thus only the program budget was included in the total cost. Results: The total program cost was 47.6 billion won per year and the total annual benefit was estimated at 435.6 billion won. The benefits of arthritis management were the biggest among disease management programs. The net benefit was 388.0 billion won per year and the benefit/cost ratio was 9.16. Conclusion: Home visiting health care was validated to be economically effective. It made a positive contribution to improving the health status of vulnerable populations and reducing medical expenses. These results suggest that home visiting care should be extended more broadly to vulnerable populations.

• Korea Journal of Hospital Management
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.23-35
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• 2009

The objectives of the present study is to examine the validity of Charlson Comorbidity Index(CCI) based on medical record data; to utilize the index to determine outcome indexes such as mortality, length of stay and cost for the domestic patients whose have received total hip arthroplasty. Based on medical record date, 1-year Mortality was analyzed to be 0.664 of C statistic. The $R^2$ for the predictability for length of stay and the cost was about 0.0181, 0.1842. Fee of national health insurance and total cost including the cost not covered by insurance, also had statistically significance above 3 points of Charlson point score(p=0.0290, 0.0472; $p.{\le}0.05$). The 1-year mortality index, length of stay and cost of the total hip arthroplasty patients which was obtained utilizing CCI have a limitative prediction power and therefore should be carefully analyzed for use.

• Research in Community and Public Health Nursing
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• v.32 no.3
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• pp.356-367
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• 2021

Purpose: This study conducted an economic evaluation of hospital-based home care services for the patients who had undergone breast cancer surgery. Methods: A total of 12,483 patients over 18 years of age who had received breast cancer surgery in 26 tertiary hospitals in 2018 were analyzed with the claim data from the Health Insurance Review & Assessment Service using cost-minimization analysis and societal perspectives. Results: There were 156 patients who utilized hospital-based home care services within 30 days after breast cancer surgery, and they received 2.17 (SD=1.17) hospital-based home care service on average. The average total cost was 5,250,028 KRW (SD=1,905,428) for the group receiving continuous hospital-based home care and 6,113,402 KRW (SD=2,033,739) for the group not receiving continuous hospital-based home care (p<.001). The results of the economic evaluation of continuous hospital-based home care services in patients who had undergone breast cancer surgery indicated a total benefit of 953,691,000 KRW, a total cost of 819,004,000 KRW, and a benefit-cost ratio of 1.16 in 2018. Conclusion: Continuous hospital-based home care was considered economically feasible as the total costs for the group receiving continuous hospital-based home care were lower than those of the group not receiving continuous hospital-based home care. Therefore, policy modification and financial incentives are recommended to increase the utilization of hospital-based home care services for patients who had undergone breast cancer surgery.

• Journal of KIBIM
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• v.7 no.3
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• pp.40-48
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• 2017

It only takes one failed project to wipe out an entire year's profit, when the projects are not managed efficiently. Additionally, escalating costs of materials and a competitive local construction market make subcontractors a challenge. Subcontractors have finite resources that should be allocated simultaneously across many projects in a dynamic manner. Significant scheduling problems are posed by concurrent multi-projects with limited resources. The objective of this thesis is to identify the effect of productivity changes on the total cost resulting from shifting crews across projects using a descriptive model. To effectively achieve the objective, this study has developed a descriptive cost model for a subcontractor with multi-resources and multi-projects. The model was designed for a subcontractor to use as a decision-making tool for resources allocation and scheduling. The model identified several factors affecting productivity. Moreover, when the model was tested using hypothetical data, it produced some effective combinations of resource allocation with associated total costs. Furthermore, a subcontractor minimizes total costs by balancing overtime costs, tardiness penalties, and incentive bonus, while satisfying available processing time constraints.

• Journal of Korean Society for Quality Management
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• v.40 no.2
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• pp.117-125
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• 2012

For the highly reliable products, an accelerated degradation test (ADT) is a useful tool which has been employed in industry to obtain reliability-related information within an affordable amount of time and cost. In an ADT, as all other reliability tests, it is important to carefully design the ADT beforehand to obtain estimates of the quantities of interest as precisely as possible. In this paper, optimal ADTs are developed assuming that the constant-stress loading method is employed and the degradation characteristic follows a Wiener process. Under the constraint that the total cost does not exceed a pre-specified budget, the stress levels, the number of test units allocated to each stress level and the number of measurement (termination time) are determined such that the asymptotic variance of the maximum likelihood estimator of the q-th quantile of the lifetime distribution at the use condition is minimized.

• Korean Journal of Construction Engineering and Management
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• v.2 no.2 s.6
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• pp.90-97
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• 2001

The paper considers non-deterministic methods of analysing the risk exposure in a cost estimate. The method(referred to as the 'Monte Carlo simulation' method) interprets cost data indirectly, to generate a probability distribution for total costs from the deficient elemental experience cost distribution. The Monte Carlo method is popular method for incorporating uncertainty relative to parameter values in risk assessment modelling. Non-deterministic methods, they are here presented as possibly effective foundation on which to risk management in cost estimating. The objectives of this research is to develop a computerized algorithms to forecast the probabilistic total construction cost and the elemental work cost at the planning stage.

• Journal of Preventive Medicine and Public Health
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• v.45 no.5
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• pp.291-300
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• 2012

Objectives: We aimed to estimate the annual socioeconomic burden of coronary heart disease (CHD) in Korea in 2005, using the National Health Insurance (NHI) claims data. Methods: A prevalence-based, top-down, cost-of-treatment method was used to assess the direct and indirect costs of CHD (International Classification of Diseases, 10th revision codes of I20-I25), angina pectoris (I20), and myocardial infarction (MI, I21-I23) from a societal perspective. Results: Estimated national spending on CHD in 2005 was $2.52 billion. The majority of the spending was attributable to medical costs (53.3%), followed by productivity loss due to morbidity and premature death (33.6%), transportation (8.1%), and informal caregiver costs (4.9%). While medical cost was the predominant cost attribute in treating angina (74.3% of the total cost), premature death was the largest cost attribute for patients with MI (66.9%). Annual per-capita cost of treating MI, excluding premature death cost, was $3183, which is about 2 times higher than the cost for angina ($1556). Conclusions: The total insurance-covered medical cost ($1.13 billion) of CHD accounted for approximately 6.02% of the total annual NHI expenditure. These findings suggest that the current burden of CHD on society is tremendous and that more effective prevention strategies are required in Korea.

• Journal of Korean Society of Industrial and Systems Engineering
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• v.43 no.3
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• pp.95-100
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• 2020

Machines and facilities are physically or chemically degenerated by continuous usage. One of the results of this degeneration is the process mean shift. The representative type of the degeneration is wear of tool or machine. According to the increasing wear level, non-conforming products cost and quality loss cost are increasing simultaneously. Therefore a periodic preventive resetting the process is necessary. The total cost consists of three items: adjustment cost (or replacement cost), non-conforming cost due to product out of upper or lower limit specification, and quality loss cost due to difference from the process target value and the product characteristic value among the conforming products. In this case, the problem of determining the adjustment period or wear limit that minimizes the total cost is called the 'process mean shift' problem. It is assumed that both specifications are set and the wear level can be observed directly. In this study, we propose a new model integrating the quality loss cost, process variance, and production volume, which has been conducted in different fields in previous studies. In particular, for the change in production volume according to the increasing in wear level, we propose a generalized production quantity function g(w). This function can be applied to most processes and we fitted the g(w) to the model. The objective equation of this model is the total cost per unit wear, and the determining variables are the wear limit and initial process setting position that minimize the objective equation.

• Korean Journal of Construction Engineering and Management
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.12-21
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• 2013

Total Project Cost Management System(TPCMS) was introduced with the purpose of increasing the efficiency of cost control for public construction project in 1994. In this paper, general perception of participants of the public construction project on the TPCMS was examined, and the problems in implementing the TPCMS was figured out through expert interviews and survey. Then better ways to implement the system were drawn based on the problems. To effectively manage the cost of public construction project, basically project cost should be estimated accurately in planning stage and managed based on it to have a project complete within the budget. In addition, the cost need to be managed in more systematic ways in terms of data collection and analysis, and the autonomy in managing the project cost given to the project owner needs to be expanded. Most of all, proper budget should be provided to prevent a project from delay through setting the priority of projects and proper budget allocation based on the priority.