The only way one should see this as a burden is if they have no idea of the consequences. Yes, QA/QC might cause you to rework, may cause delays, re-designs, failure analysis, retesting, downtime and lack of flexibility but imagine losing everything due to a simple error that could have been prevented during QC/QA. What if this error was due to an out of spec material that one acquired from a different company to complete a product?
Also, having QC/QA department does not mean your company won’t run into issues.
http://www.investopedia.com/slide-show/car-recalls/
Some of the biggest car recalls and these were not due to the companies not having QC/QA department
1. Chrysler recalled 13,000 Dodge chargers due to anti-lock brakes
2. Toyota out of control gas pedal 2009 & 2010
3. Ford failure to park recall 1980.
A company should invest in a quality team that will reduce the amount of incidences that occur within a company. The company should also invest in quality equipment’s/software. In 1990 a single line of buggy code causes 75 million AT&T missed phone calls and 200,000 lost airline reservations over a period of 9 hours. In 2005 Airbus A380 had a software oversight that led to wiring on each half of the plane being completely incompatible with the other half (estimated cost to fix issue $ 6 billion). The provided examples prove that QC/QA is a necessary requirement but also quality of personal should be taken into consideration when building a team.
http://www.developer.com/mgmt/slideshows/quality-assurance-failures-and-solutions.html