Gold in the mine is a
metaphor
A metaphor is a figure of speech that, for rhetorical effect, directly refers to one thing by mentioning another. It may provide, or obscure, clarity or identify hidden similarities between two different ideas. Metaphors are usually meant to cr ...
for the potential savings in
quality improvement
Total Quality management (TQM), ensures that an organization, product, or service consistently performs as intended, as opposed to Quality Management, which focuses on work process and procedure standards. It has four main components: quality pla ...
efforts. It is essentially a restatement of the
Pareto principle in the context of
quality costs In process improvement efforts, quality costs or cost of quality (sometimes abbreviated CoQ or COQ) is a means to quantify the total cost of quality-related efforts and deficiencies. It was first described by Armand V. Feigenbaum in a 1956 Harvard ...
; digging in the right place can produce great savings, though investigating every possible opportunity is not
economically
Economics () is a behavioral science that studies the Production (economics), production, distribution (economics), distribution, and Consumption (economics), consumption of goods and services.
Economics focuses on the behaviour and interac ...
feasible.
References
Metaphors
Quality control
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