Safety in a commodity comes with a price – Explain.

Absolute safety is never possible  to attain and safety can be improved in an engineering product only with an increase in cost.

On the other hand, unsafe products incur secondary costs to the producer beyond the primary (production) costs, like warranty costs loss of goodwill, loss of customers, litigation costs, downtime costs in manufacturing, etc.

Figure indicates that P- Primary costs are high for a highly safe (low risk) product and S-

Secondary costs are high for a highly risky (low safe) product.

If we draw a curve T=P+S as shown, there is a point at which costs are minimum below which the cost cannot be reduced.

If the risk at Minimum Total Cost Point is not acceptable, then the producer has to choose a lower acceptable risk value in which case the total cost will be higher than M and the product designed accordingly.

It should now be clear that ‘safety comes with a price’ only.