Rework has a strange accounting problem: the material and labor to do a job twice rarely gets tracked as its own category. It gets absorbed into "normal" production time, which means most shops genuinely don't know how much of their capacity is going to fixing things rather than making them.
The direct cost is straightforward — material used twice, labor spent twice. The cost that's easy to miss is what it does to the schedule around it: a part that needs rework doesn't just cost the rework time, it costs whatever was supposed to happen on that machine while the fix was happening.
Rework that repeats on the same part, the same machine, or the same shift is a signal, not a coincidence. It usually traces to one of three things: a spec that's ambiguous in practice even if it's clear on paper, a tolerance that's tighter than the process can reliably hit, or a handoff between shifts where the second shift doesn't have the context the first shift had.
The genuinely expensive version of this is rework that only gets caught at final inspection, rather than at the step where the error was actually made — by then, every step in between has been paid for on a part that was never going to pass.
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