Quality Management (Archived)

The objective of the Quality Management Task Force study was to identify and quantify the magnitude of rework costs resulting from quality deviations in design and construction, and to present data that will encourage the construction industry to implement systems such as the QPMS to reduce these costs.

The average cost of rework on industrial projects exceeds 12 percent. For the $140 billion U.S. construction industry, this means that we waste in excess of $17 billion annually. These costs can be significantly reduced through better quality management. Design deviations (changes, errors, and omissions) accounted for roughly 80 percent of the increased costs, while construction deviations accounted for only about 20 percent.

A Quality Performance Management System (QPMS) has been developed that can be used as a management tool to identify and reduce deviation costs. 

The following conclusions can be drawn concerning the cost of quality aspects of the design, construction, and startup of engineered projects:

1. Defining quality as conformance to established requirements provides an objective basis for measuring the costs of quality, provided the requirements are clearly stated.
2. Quality management activities can be adequately tracked using a small number of categories. 
3. Omitting from the current system certain impact costs associated with deviations, the costs of correcting deviations can be adequately tracked using a small number of categories.
4. Existing work package breakdown structure (WBS) cost coding systems can be easily adapted to include the major categories involved in the cost of quality. 

The QPMS costs little to implement, and provides a simple, cost-effective method for tracking and analyzing the cost of quality in the construction project process. This provides management with the potential for a significant improvement in benefit-to-cost ratio through utilization of the QPMS. The cost of quality should be tracked on all engineered projects.