Štruktúra nákladov kvality a citlivosť podnikov na výkyvy ekonomiky

Authors deals with influence and relations of quality costs with company economy. The article presents a new division of quality costs as fixed and variable quality costs. The new division is helpful to show influence of quality costs on changes in the earnings before interest and taxes (EBIT). Those changes can be defined thanks to known indicator of operating leverage (DOL). Value of this indicator helps to show how the structure of costs affects proportional changes of the EBIT. One of the most important rules in quality management is to minimize total quality costs and to avoid external and internal failures. Minimization of failure costs (variable costs) causes increasing of prevention and appraisal costs (fixed costs). In this situation, management of company must not forget that increasing of fixed costs and decreasing of total revenue causes increasing of company risk at the same time and near future. That is the reason why managementmust concentrate on the improvement of company processes. The improvement is possible thanks to minimization not only failures but also prevention and appraisal losses. Thanks to minimization of prevention and appraisal losses, the company can minimize prevention and appraisal costs as fixed costs. Company (by the improvement actions) is able to change the structure of quality costs which has direct influence on the EBIT. The level of EBIT has important role in the level of tax which company has to pay and also decides about decisions of further quality improvements. We can not forget that those quality costs changes lead to decrease of operation risk level of which have important role and position in situation of economic crisis, or fluctuation of economy, in general.