Philip Crosby’s quality management maturity model includes five categories, moving from Stage 1 (Uncertainty) to a mature organization at Stage 5 (Certainty) as indicated in Table 1.  In the model, the cost of quality metric is a key indicator and supports an organization to advance from Stage 1 to Stage 5 by measuring and controlling its costs; thereby promoting efficient process improvement.  Table 1 indicates that a Stage 1 company does not know or report its quality costs, and that actual quality costs as a percentage of sales may be as high as 20%.  As a company matures, its’ attempt at the measurement of quality costs improves until the reported and actual cost of quality is equal, indicating that a mature company accurately measures and reports the metric; and uses it for quality improvement and informed decision making.