Digital Quality Management in Construction

Paul Marsden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429750854
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Professional Practice in Architecture

Much has been written about Building Information Modelling (BIM) driving collaboration and innovation, but how will future quality managers and engineers develop digital capabilities in augmented and video realities, with business intelligence platforms, robots, new materials, artificial intelligence, blockchains, drones, laser scanning, data trusts, 3D printing and many other types of technological advances in construction? These emerging technologies are potential game changers that require new skills and processes.

Digital Quality Management in Construction is the first 'how to' book on harnessing novel disruptive technology in construction quality management. The book takes a tour of the new technologies and relates them to the management of quality, but also sets out a road map to build on proven lean construction techniques and embed technologically based processes to raise quality professionals' digital capabilities. With the mountain of data being generated, quality managers need to unlock its value to drive the quality of construction in the twenty-first century, and this book will help them do that and allow those working in construction Quality Management to survive and thrive, creating higher quality levels and less waste.

This book is essential reading for quality managers, project managers and all professionals in the Architecture, Engineering and Construction industry (AEC). Students interested in new and disruptive technologies will also learn a great deal from reading this book, written by a professional quality manager with nearly thirty years' experience in both the public and private sectors.

1 Introduction

Every generation thinks they are living in an era of unprecedented change but I believe that in the twenty-first century, we really are starting to see an exponential growth not only in technological capabilities but also in the relationship between humans and technology. Technology is becoming genuinely more autonomous through Artificial Intelligence (AI), based upon continual self-learning from initial rules and algorithms provided by humans. The prospect over the coming decades is that we are heading for designs being developed and engineered by AI, with human interventions reduced to aesthetic choices and construction sites building structures using autonomous vehicles and robots. Operations and facilities management will be overseen by AI, with minimal strategic oversight by humans.

When you look around the seeming chaotic nature of muddy sites with materials scattered around and operatives dodging excavators, it is hard to imagine such a scientific approach to construction but aside from the occasional interjection of media stories about construction technology, there is an undercurrent of sustainable momentum for digital modelling, augmented reality, drones, laser scanning, advanced materials and other technologies quietly appearing in the industry around the globe.

The reasons for such changes are fuelled by the industry’s lamentable record in productivity with infamous graphs showing construction flatlining for decades, compared to IT, energy, chemical and manufacturing sectors, such as aerospace and automotive. While virtually all other industries have steadily invested in research and development, the fragmented supply chain, the dog-eat-dog world of contracting and, frankly, the have-their-cake-and-eat-it-too clients have left construction starved of innovation and investment.

A McKinsey report¹ for mega-construction projects of over $1 billion found that the average slippage was twenty months in programme, 80 per cent over budget spend, with a staggering 98 per cent of projects overspent or having taken longer than scheduled. The route to reducing such embarrassing figures is through Digital Quality Management.

A report by Mace² demonstrated that if construction’s productivity had kept pace with manufacturing over the past twenty years, then the UK would have seen an approximate 3 per cent increase in the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) from each construction worker producing £38/hour of economic activity, compared to £25.50. The tax generated by an additional £100 billion of annual economic activity would have produced an extra £40 billion for the government in tax revenue; equivalent to paying for the following projects, with £3.3 billion leftover!

• Terminal 5 at Heathrow (£4.2 billion)

• Crossrail (£14.8 billion)

• Royal Wharf housing development in London(£2.2 billion)

• Queensferry Crossing bridge, north of Edinburgh (£1.35 billion)

• the Mersey Gateway bridge (£540 million)

• Birmingham’s Big City Plan (£10 billion)

• the M4 Relief Road around Newport (£1.3 billion)

• Belfast’s north-eastern quarter plan (£400 million)

• City of Glasgow College (£228.6 million)

• the A14 upgrade (£1.5 billion)

• Liverpool’s triple towers (£250 million)

All those projects could have been paid for if the construction industry had got its act together in the modern age.

A few examples of awful construction project spiralling costs, over-runs and avoidable quality problems are shown in Table 1.1, without going into all the safety and sustainability issues.

In addition, there are examples of the tragic consequences of historic construction failures with root causes of quality management failures:

• 1975, China: Banqaio Dam, 171,000 dead, due to under-designed sluice gates and defective concrete design.

• 1981, the USA: Hyatt Hotel skywalk collapse, 114 dead, due to design change to skywalk steel tie rod connections and drawing version control.

• 1995, South Korea: Sampoong department store collapse, 502 dead, due to substandard concrete mix, original design flaw and air conditioning vibrations.

• 2010, the USA: Deepwater oil rig explosion, eleven dead and environmental catastrophe, due to defective concrete and valve failures.

In the following chapters, I have selected construction projects for a mixture of reasons: iconic status, innovative construction techniques and sheer familiarity and bias upon my part. Those described are not a list of ‘greatest hits’ and many more could have been chosen.

Managing the quality of design and construction has been a skill set for millennia, dating back to the earliest structures when accepting or rejecting the quality of stone and timber, based on long experience of and expertise in raw materials, was vital for the successful building of a house, burial place or citadel. In order to fully understand the future direction of quality management, it is useful to look back in time to the earliest beginnings of construction to see how

Table 1.1 Examples of recent calamitous construction projects

Note
* Due to estimates in three different currencies, costs may vary.

our ancestors around the world developed skills and techniques for controlling quality. Over thousands of years, quality control knowledge and experience acquired informed all levels of construction workers and ‘managers’ and were imbued into their training and supervision.

As quality control steadily gave way to a more strategic approach through, first, quality assurance and then quality management, so the influence of quality professionals grew, until around the turn of the twenty-first century when it seemed that ‘quality’ was merely a fad to be shunted sideways to make way for Six Sigma, business improvement and business excellence.

The test for me these days is asking which offices are closest to the chief executive’s office and usually the response is NOT that of the highest-ranking quality professional. Yet quality management is one key aspect to solving so many challenges that construction management faces in this complex world. If all other disciplines were educated in quality planning, quality control, quality assurance and quality improvement, there would be a significant decrease in overall risk and cost and an increase in quality outcomes of performance.

To achieve a newfound influence within construction businesses, the quality profession needs to raise its game and stop complaining so much. Part of adding value has to be educating others in quality management and how to fundamentally solve problems. Throughout all parts of the construction process, solving challenges is a key skill and yet there is little training and education in appreciating the best tools and the most appropriate circumstances of when to apply those tools. Construction quality professionals need to learn from their counterparts in aerospace and automotive manufacturing and get to grips with quality tools that include not just the basic five Whys, process mapping or the Ishikawa cause and effect diagram, but more sophisticated tools such as 8D investigations, Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA), Design of Experiments (DoE), Probabilistic Risk Assessment (PRA) and the Quality Function Deployment (QFD) or House of Quality. We can learn powerful lessons from likely causes and options to mitigate risk before they occur during design. Quality professionals should have an in-depth knowledge and understanding of these tools in the context of construction to educate and assist other engineering and construction disciplines.

We need to increase the noise levels of how we can help businesses and we need to get into the digital era by becoming its chief protagonists. Digital technology has arrived and is here, whether we like it or not, and quality professionals should be at the forefront of adapting to it and shaping the digital future. Drones are a boon to inspections at height, saving time (and hence money) by creating high resolution images known in three-dimensional space of where precisely they are taken. They provide not just visual representations but also can scan construction components to compare with digital models to check if what has been built is what was designed. Instead of clambering up scaffolding and taking dumb photos, we have the technology at our fingertips to instantly tell the construction manager if the concrete pour, ducting, or brickwork are exactly where they should be and either allow rapid correction or update the design in real time, so that adjustments can be made to associated components. That requires quality professionals to be trained and qualified as drone pilots and pester their managers to purchase drones. We need to then promote the results to demonstrate the improved aspects of quality management, so that senior managers see the discipline in a new light as offering solutions rather than being perceived as complaining.

Digital Quality Management is the new approach to solving problems. It is not about ‘digitising’ quality management but rather placing information management at the heart of our discipline. Using data and information is how we traditionally offer value to construction through quality management systems, audit reports, inspection and test results, levels of non-conformances and best practices. These limited forms of information, which at best can offer only weak added value to executives making decisions, should be extended much further so that we become the assessors of data quality and use AI to ‘audit’ in real time all aspects of activities to identify non-conformances and report back quality issues. Suddenly from being one of the backroom boys and girls in construction, the quality professional is front and centre in business intelligence on the performance of a company or project.

The art and science of construction are taking a design and transforming it into a built environment to hand over to the client, which will satisfy their requirements. It takes people capability using machines and processes to turn materials into the final construction. What the client gets is both a physical environment, of concrete, steel, glass, wood, electrical cabling, mechanical plant and other materials, and information, such as an Operations & Maintenance Manual or a Building Information Modelling (BIM) digital representation of the structure.

The problem is that clients, consultants and contractors sometimes forget what information they are delivering in their excitement at creating the physical structure rising out of the ground. Yet without the right information, there can be deleterious long-term effects that can plague the client for years. Where exactly were those cables placed in the wall? Inevitably, repeatedly, time and money are wasted with those design and construction errors forcing higher lifecycle costs and rework to put right. Thinking from the very beginning across the whole project lifecycle as to the information required, reduces the risk to programme, cost and quality.

My definition of quality is ‘facilitating the performance guarantee’ of the built structure. This goes further than the traditional ‘conformance to specification’ that many in the construction industry seem to vaguely point to when asked about quality. There is likewise only a superficial acknowledgement of ‘customer satisfaction’. Ultimately what construction should be delivering is the required performance of the structure; whether it is the strength in roof beams or aesthetic aspects, say, in an apartment tower block. Quality management cannot guarantee with certainty that the construction will meet these client’s requirements but it should be the mechanism with which to enable the standards to be met that are agreeable to the client, if conducted professionally and with due diligence. However, quality management is not currently implemented with such fastidiousness and becomes a sop to clients and regulators that the business cares about quality and a punchbag for when things go wrong.

Guarantee is used in the same way that your washing machine has a guarantee. It does not mean that 100 per cent of the time all of manufacturer X’s washing machines will work perfectly but it provides a formal assurance that certain performance conditions will be fulfilled, and if something does go wrong that the guarantee can be invoked. It is not in the interests of the supplier of the washing machine for it to break down outside those performance conditions, e.g. it is being installed and used in accordance with manufacturer X’s instructions. How does the manufacturer therefore have a high level of confidence that the formal assurance can be given? It places great emphasis on quality management during design and production to meet the requirements.

When the directors of a construction business are sitting opposite the client’s representatives across the boardroom table, prior to signing a construction contract, the quality management approach to people, processes, machines, materials and information should be their guarantee that it will meet all the aspects of the contract. However, such executives have typically little appreciation of quality management and fail to understand the fundamental advantages of deploying the necessary resources for effective quality management nor providing the business authority needed for quality professionals to be effective. As their business processes are severely disrupted by new technology, now is the time for a radical re-think and embed Digital Quality Management in the heart of how they deliver projects.

Leveraging the technology available to construction will increase productivity but only if there is a deep understanding of the underlying information management required to use that technology, such as drones, BIM, augmented reality, laser scanning, robotics, 3D printing, blockchains, artificial intelligence, data trusts and a diverse list of other exciting technologies. The quality assurance and quality control techniques that we use today in construction are starting to become outdated and inadequate for managing these technologies and technologically driven processes, so that quality management remains not just relevant but adds more value in the future. However, to accomplish that goal, we need Digital Quality Management with information at the heart of it.

This book is not about a far future, trying to guess what may happen in the construction industry and, in particular, quality m...