The Management of Quality in Construction

J.L. Ashford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9781138607163
• eBook ISBN: 9781135833855
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture Methods & Materials

The quality of a product or service is a measure of its ability to satisfy customer requirements. This satisfaction can be assured by the operation of a quality system which will ensure that specified requirements are met consistently and economically. The Management of Quality in Construction provides the reader with a knowledge of the principles of quality management and an understanding of how they may successfully be applied in the particular circumstances of the construction industry. The areas covered range from an historical review of traditional methods of assuring quality in the industry and how contractual arrangements have evolved, to an interpretation of quality system standards in the context of construction. Examples are given which highlight specific areas, and specialist chapters on organization structures and the techniques of quality auditing are included.

1: THE QUALITY MANAGEMENT PHILOSOPHY

The concept of quality

In everyday usage, the word ‘quality’ usually carries connotations of excellence. When Shakespeare wrote Portia’s speech on the quality of mercy, he described the particular characteristics of the subject which rendered it especially valuable. We speak of ‘quality newspapers’ when we wish to identify those which are known to provide material which will be of interest to an educated and discerning readership. In more class-conscious days, people referred to as ‘the quality’ were those held to be of high social status or of good breeding.

For reasons which will become evident, in this book, ‘quality’ will not be indicative of special merit, excellence or high status. It will be used solely in its engineering sense in which it conveys the concepts of compliance with a defined requirement, of value for money, of fitness for purpose, or customer satisfaction. With this definition, a palace or a bicycle shed may be of equal quality if both function as they should and both give their owners an equal feeling of having received their money’s worth.

Quality, then, is a summation of all those characteristics which together make a product acceptable to the market. It follows that products which are lacking in quality will in the long term prove unmarketable, and that the purveyors of such products will go out of business. This truth applies not just to manufactured articles, it is equally valid when applied to services such as retailing, tourism or the practice of medicine. So the need to promote and control quality is of fundamental importance to any enterprise. Only by providing consistent value for money to their customers can companies hope to generate steady profits for their shareholders and ensure secure livelihoods for their employees. On a wider scale, the same observations can also be applied to nations. Those which have developed a reputation for quality products also have low rates of inflation, low unemployment, stable currencies and high rates of growth.

Paradoxically, the same market forces which in the long term permit the survival only of those who satisfy their customers can also tempt the dishonest or unwary to achieve short term profits by deceiving their customers with sub-standard products. Such practices are insidious and eventually fatal, and their prevention requires management action no less determined and formalized than is customarily applied to the control of money. These determined and formalized management actions are our subject matter.

The achievement of quality

With the meaning of quality which has been selected, it follows by definition that every purchaser of goods or services wishes to maximize the quality of his or her purchases. It also follows that the suppliers of such goods and services, if they wish to remain in business, must also ensure the quality of their products. Harsh experience of life, however, tells us that some suppliers put immediate profits ahead of long-term survival, and it is incumbent on every purchaser to protect himself from the dishonest or negligent supplier. In legal terms this is the principle of ‘caveat emptor’, or let the buyer beware’.

But few organizations are solely either buyers or sellers. Those who sell also buy and those who buy also sell. In the construction industry the client or purchaser of a project has to sell its benefits to his customers, be they tenants, taxpayers or other kinds of consumer. The contractor who sells a project to his client is a buyer of materials, labour and sub-contracts. The consulting engineer or architect who sells design has to buy the services of professional designers and draftsmen. As long as each buyer in the chain is able to obtain an acceptable level of value for money, and as long as the sellers are able to provide that level and still make a profit then the market is able to function.

Chains of buyers and sellers are also to be found within organizations. For example, in a housebuilding company the marketing department supplies information on market requirements to the architects. The architects’ department ‘sells’ drawings and specifications to the construction department. The construction department supplies completed houses to the sales negotiators. Each group relies on one or more internal ‘suppliers’ to provide the information or materials it needs so that it can then in its turn satisfy the requirements of its customers, both internal or external.

What means are available to enable a purchaser to assure the quality of a purchase? In early village economies, it was comparatively easy. The farmer wishing to buy a cart would approach a local cartwright and agree a specification and price. The cartwright would apply traditional skills in design and in the selection of materials. The workmanship would be that of himself or of apprentices under his personal control. Pride of craftsmanship and the need to preserve a reputation in the locality would effectively prevent careless or deliberate flouting of accepted standards. The coming of the Industrial Revolution in the early nineteenth century rendered this relatively simple quality system obsolete. With the development of new sources of power, it became more economic to concentrate production into factories and distribute the products of the factories to the purchasers by canal or railway. Purchasers became separated from suppliers and the imperatives of craftsmanship and the preservation of local reputation lost their power.

Early factories were dirty, dangerous and hopelessly inefficient, but the demands for their products increased rapidly. This was particularly so in America, where swelling consumer demands for manufactured goods coincided with an unending influx of desperately poor, but unskilled, immigrants arriving from Europe and seeking work in the factories. In the 1880s, Frederick W.Taylor (1856–1915) studied the organization of work in factories. His purpose was to make the manual worker more productive, and therefore better paid, and at the same time to relieve him of unnecessary and wasteful labour. His method was to identify and analyse all the operations which had to be performed for a given task and then to optimize the sequence of operations to create the smoothest and most economical flow of work. The consequent development of the techniques of mass production has probably contributed more than any other factor to the increase in the affluence of ordinary people in the last century.

Taylor observed that those who knew what was to be done seldom knew how it should be done. He recognized that planning and doing were separate activities, that the one should precede the other, and that planning would not happen if mixed in with doing. On the other hand if planning were allowed to become entirely divorced from doing, it would cease to be effective and this could become a threat to performance. Unfortunately in all too many cases, this is exactly what happened. So, with purchasers separated from producers and planners separated from doers, what happened to quality? Obviously, it suffered. At first this did not matter very much. The products being made were simple and uncomplicated, and the consumers were easily satisfied—Henry Ford offered them any colour of car they liked, as long as it was black. Nevertheless, it was accepted that some control of quality was necessary and inspectors were appointed for this purpose.

In the United Kingdom, one of the first large scale applications of the Taylor principles was in armaments manufacture during the First World War. A largely female work force, quite unskilled and without any previous experience, was drafted to the ordnance factories. They were taught simple repetitive tasks by the few male craftsmen who remained, and set to work. The craftsmen became inspectors, checking what was produced and rejecting products which were not up to specification. The efforts of the workers were heroic, and the remarkable outputs they achieved were a vital element in the war effort, but the system was neither efficient nor cost effective. Lying at the heart of this inefficiency was the belief that quality could be adequately controlled solely by inspection. This, unfortunately, was not the case.

The inspection of quality

The effect of the Taylor system was to replace the traditional skills of the self-employed and self-motivated craftsman with those of the production engineer. It achieved spectacular increases in productivity, but at a price. Firstly, by separating planning from execution, it deprived workers of the right to decide how their work should be done and at what rate. Secondly, the organization of work into highly repetitive short-cycle activities made the lives of the workers boring, monotonous and devoid of meaning. Inevitably quality suffered.

The response of management was to establish independent internal inspection departments to restore the balance. Inevitably, since they had to be capable of distinguishing between what was satisfactory and what was not, the inspectors were drawn from the more intelligent and knowledgeable members of the work force. This had the immediate effect of diluting the skills of the productive team and at the same time creating a powerful group whose existence could be justified only if it found work which had to be rejected. It is difficult to imagine any arrangement more calculated to de-motivate the productive work force and create friction and bad feeling.

The existence of inspection departments removed any remaining feeling of responsibility on the part of the work force for the quality of their work. The criterion of acceptability changed from ‘Will it satisfy the customer?’ to ‘Will it be passed by the inspector?’. Ways were found to deceive or bypass the inspectors, who retaliated by requiring more frequent and more stringent testing. There had to be enough inspectors to accommodate peaks in workload so as to avoid the inspection department being accused of holding up production. At off-peak periods the inspectors became under-employed and occupied their time by creating bureaucratic procedures to further strengthen their stranglehold on their enemies in the production departments.

An inspector can identify a fault only after it has been committed. He may then order the item to be scrapped or rectified in some way. Whatever the decision, waste will have occurred and harm done which cannot be undone. In many cases the inspector will know the cause of the fault and how it can be prevented, but he has no incentive to pass on this knowledge to those in charge of production. They are on the opposing side and are unlikely to welcome his advice.

Such then, are the problems of attempting to control quality by inspection alone. There has to be a better way, and there is.

The management of quality

After the Second World War the economy of Japan was in ruins. To attain their military objectives, all available resources of capital and of technical manpower had been directed to armaments manufacture, while their civilian economy gained an unenviable reputation for producing poor-quality copies of products designed and developed elsewhere. Unless they were able to raise the quality of their products to a level which could compete, and win, in the international market place they stood no chance of becoming a modern industrialized nation.

To learn how to regenerate their industries, they sent teams abroad to study the management practices of other countries and they invited foreign experts to provide advice. Among the latter were two Americans, J.M.Juran and W.E.Deming, who brought a new message which can be summarized as follows:

1. The management of quality is crucial to company survival and merits the personal attention and commitment of top management.
2. The primary responsibility for quality must lie with those doing the work. Control by inspection is of limited value.
3. To enable production departments to accept responsibility for quality, management must establish systems for the control and verification of work, and must educate and indoctrinate the work force in their application.
4. The costs of education and training for quality, and any other costs which might be incurred, will be repaid many times over by greater output, less waste, a better quality product and higher profits.

These are the basic principles of the management concepts which have since become identified under the generic term of quality management.

The Japanese developed and refined what they had learnt, adapting it to their own environment and to the circumstances of individual companies. They made the management of quality an integral part of the manufacturing process and proved that by reducing the incidence of defective goods, the costs of production can be decreased substantially. Armed with the techniques of quality management, the Japanese proceeded to achieve virtual world domination in a series of key industries. At the time, who would have guessed that thirty years later and with their economy under siege, the Americans would be desperately trying to re-learn the lessons of quality management from their erstwhile pupils?

Meanwhile, back in the United Kingdom, the Ministry of Defence was facing increasing difficulties in the procurement of military equipment. Manufacturers still operated on Taylor principles and despite internal inspection, failures of equipment when in service were at an unacceptably high level. For many years the Ministry had also put its own inspectors into the factories and used the services of third-party inspection bodies, but this did not solve the problem. The presence of external inspectors served to remove the sense of responsibility of the internal inspectors, just as the internal inspectors had removed responsibility from those doing the work. Armaments were becoming more and more complex and in spite of all the inspectors, failures in service were frequent, expensive and dangerous.

In May 1968, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) issued the first edition of an Allied Quality Assurance Publication known as AQAP-1. Entitled ‘Quality Control System Requirements for Industry’, this document specified NATO requirements for quality control systems to be operated by their contractors. These systems were required to serve two purposes: firstly to ensure that goods and services conformed to contract requirements and, secondly, to provide objective evidence of such conformance. When invoked in a contract or purchase order, AQAP-1 had mandatory effect. To assist contractors and manufacturers to comply with its provisions and to guide those charged with evaluating quality systems, NATO issued a further document known as AQAP-2 in September 1968.

In response to NATO requirements the British Ministry of Defence published its own equivalents of the AQAP documents for use in the United Kingdom. The first of these documents was Defence Standard (DEF STAN) 05–08, issued in March 1970, but a more definitive document, DEF STAN 05–21 was published in January 1973. Unlike many subsequent standards, DEF STAN 05–21 was a model of clarity. The concepts upon which it was based are worth quoting:

1. ‘(1)The quality of manufactured products depends upon the manufacturer’s control over his design, manufacture, and inspection operations. Unless a product is properly designed and manufactured it will not meet the requirements of the buyer. Accordingly manufacturers must be prepared to institute such control of quality as is necessary to ensure that their products conform to the purchaser’s quality requirements.
2. (2)Manufacturers should be prepared, not only to deliver products on schedule at an agreed price, but in addition, to substantiate by objective evidence, that they have maintained control over the design, development, and manufacturing operations and have performed inspection which demonstrate the acceptability of the products. The design phase is considered to embrace all activities after the statement of the operational requirement, through to the point at which the requirement has been satisfied.’

These concepts, which incorporated some, but not all, of the principles expounded by Juran and Deming, signified an evolution of the principle of caveat emptor. With the increasing complexity and multiplicity of industrial processes, it was no longer possible to judge the acceptability or otherwise of a product by inspecting it in its finished state or even by a series of stage inspections. Instead, the assurance of compliance with specification that a purchaser legitimately demanded should be achieved by the appraisal, approval and surveillance of the supplier’s management arrangements combined with spot checks and audits to prove that they were being implemented as agreed and were in fact achieving their objectives. To quote again from DEF STAN 05–21:

‘For his protection the purchaser should exercise such surveillance over the manufacturer’s controls, including inspection, as is necessary to assure himself that the manufacturer has achieved the required quality. Such surveillance should extend to sub-contractors when appropriate. The amount of surveillance performed by the purchaser is a function of the demonstrated effectiveness of the manufacturer’s controls and of the demonstrated quality and reliability of his products. In the event that the purchaser’s surveillance demonstrates that the manufacturer has not exercised adequate control the purchaser will have valid reason because of his contract stipulations to discontinue the acceptance of the product concerned pending action by the manufacturer to correct whatever deficiencies exist in his quality control system.’

The introduction of concepts of quality management into defence contracts prompted the British Standards Institution to take action to provide guidance and information on the subject to a wider industrial audience. In 1971 they published BS 4778: Glossary of terms used in quality assurance and followed this in 1972 with BS4891: A guide to quality assurance. Although they were only advisory, these documents served a useful purpose in interpreting the requirements of defence procurement standards in a more general context. The process was completed in 1979 with the publication of the first version of BS 5750: Quality Systems. This served as the definitive standard in the United Kingdom until 1987 and was used as the basis of the International Organization for Standardization’s ISO 9000 series of standards. BS 5750 was re-issued in 1987 in a form identical with the corresponding ISO standards.

These standards introduced the words ‘quality system’ into the language of management. They established that a quality system has to achieve two objectives—first it has to control what is produced to make sure it meets the requirements of the purchaser and, secondly, it has to provide confidence or assurance that compliance has been achieved. This confidence or assurance is needed by both the buyer and the seller, the former so that he knows he is getting what he is paying for and the latter so that he knows his system is working.

Standards and specifications for quality systems are important and their contents are discussed in detail in Chapter 3. Many companies and individuals make their first acquaintance with the subject of quality management when obliged to provide evidence of compliance with a quality system standard before or while tendering for a contract. In such cases, the standards are used to define actions to be imposed by one party on another. It is interesting to contrast this approach to the management of quality with that preached by Juran and Deming and practised to such good effect by the Japanese. The philosophy they propounded required that management should devote its attention to the improvement and maintenance of quality not because someone else might oblige the...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• PREFACE
• 1: THE QUALITY MANAGEMENT PHILOSOPHY
• 2: THE CONSTRUCTION TRADITION
• 3: STANDARDS AND TERMINOLOGY
• 4: THE QUALITY SYSTEM
• 5: DOCUMENTATION
• 6: DESIGN
• 7: PROCUREMENT
• 8: THE CONSTRUCTION SITE
• 9: QUALITY AUDITS
• 10: QUALITY ASSURANCE AND THE CONTRACT
• 11: A STRATEGY FOR SUCCESS
• APPENDIX A: Glossary of terms
• APPENDIX B: Typical quality manual
• APPENDIX C: Typical procedure
• APPENDIX D: Typical quality plan
• BIBLIOGRAPHY