Quality does not happen by chance. In fact, it is a certain outcome from the intention of intense effort. In construction, business owners and contractors have every bit of intent to deliver the best quality construction services despite the many obstacles popping up along the way that interrupt these plans. One single mistake may trigger a sequence of events that can lead to costly reworks and severe penalties.
Do you pay attention to the quality of your services? Are you giving your best effort to improve construction quality management further? Improving quality management in construction starts in understanding the factors that have a huge impact on quality and safety.
Read this blog to discover some common factors affecting quality management in construction and address them to improve your construction business operation.
Why is Quality Important in Construction?
Probably most critically, construction quality can affect your bottom line. Finishing and completing projects with a higher level of quality can help you win repeat businesses and even protect you from expensive mistakes requiring reworks on the job. On the contrary, low-quality construction projects may damage your reputation, resulting in you losing your business in the future. You may lose both your current clients and anybody else that has heard the poor quality of your work and services.
During the course of a particular project, poor quality may have a negative impact on your capacity to complete closeouts. This issue is very common and widespread in the construction sector, with almost 69% of contractors reporting that they experience issues getting off the job on most of their projects.
Are you facing the same issues recently? It is the right time to focus more on improving the quality of your services and work. Achieving high-quality construction can improve safety and even produce safer finished outcomes as well. These project outcomes often last longer and are more efficient.
Fundamental Factors that affect Quality Management
1. Subcontractor Mishandling
According to a study, over half of the construction defects can be credited to human mistakes. If you hire new employees who are not competent and without the right skills, workmanship errors that can be unnoticeable for years tend to occur. Hence, never fail to train your newly hired employees.
Screening your new subs and other labor providers is also essential to verify and validate if they are supplying skilled workers aware of catching their own mistakes. Whether you are the contractor or the project manager, you have to always follow up with independent audits of your subcontractor’s performance. Doing so will help you discover any issues as early as possible and fix them instantly.
2. Damaged and Low-Quality Materials
Too much sand and water in the concrete mix, improperly graded steel, and lumber cut from undersized trees can result in extensive construction quality issues. Not only do such materials fail early, they can also create safety hazards in construction by reacting unexpectedly during the building process. Your workers can be hurt when sparks are generated or when a structure collapses due to the lack of weight-bearing capacity.
Ensure to make orders from the most trusted construction suppliers. Assign also a quality control officer from one of your crews to check each shipment of materials regularly. Doing all of this can be the only way to validate a project that is properly supplied.
3. Supplier and Vendor Failures
Even when the construction materials are not to blame for any quality issue, problems associated with your vendors and suppliers can happen. If that is the case, it can lower quality levels and even raise costs. Replacing some requested construction materials with other brands that do not offer similar quality may lead to time-consuming rework requests and unhappy clients.
Hence, set your suppliers’ expectations much more precisely and regularly perform random checks to determine if they are still following and adhering to the contract. It’s up to you to find new suppliers or vendors in the middle of the construction project. But bear in mind that the goal is to improve quality management significantly. You have every reason to do whatever it takes to achieve it. Right?
4. Failure to Document Changes and even Practices
Some quality issues are not directly associated with a design change or a specific mistake. It is primarily due to the lack of documentation of that particular change. If the material is already being submitted for another with a different replacement cycle and maintenance, failure to make updates about the final documents may result in improper management from the maintenance team.
Make use of project scheduling software that simplifies tracking and updating project documentation so that there is no reason to delay updates to anything like drawings and other important files.
5. Last-Minute changes
When critical features are still being discussed and engineered during late stages in the construction process, the last-minute changes may lead to some serious quality issues. For instance, a last-minute change in a particular design causes a deadly collapse in one of your projects. It is very important that you are setting deadlines where designs cannot be changed any longer. Ensure to make arrangements to extend the deadlines further and set aside enough time to test and validate any changes to your current designs.
6. Scope Creep
Construction projects usually begin much simpler and smaller compare to the finished projects. Have you handled a project wherein the basic bridge turn out to be a multi-lane highway? And the retail center becomes a three-story mall? Scope creep is the term used for these kinds of unplanned expansions and changes. While it is normal for all construction projects to have many changes within time as new facts are determined, like time constraints, site limitations, and costs, the issue arises when the expansion in the project scope leads to altering corners. This is to stretch the time frame limited budget.
Managing the scope of your construction project ensures that you can maintain the same level of quality over the totality of your work
7. Miscommunication between your Teams
Several studies about the construction sector show that project managers often feel that issues in communication are the number one leading cause of quality problems. As one of the rapidly growing sectors globally, many concerns common to the construction industry today are primarily universal.
As someone who leads the construction team, determine if miscommunication is happening between you and your team members. Miscommunication often leads to the following:
- Misapplication of new tactics
- Mismatched materials of all sorts
- The lack of secondary and final testing that helps in discovering current problems
Make sure to prioritize communication in your working environment. Specialized software tools designed for construction crew management are ideal for improving communication between you and your teams that work together on a particular construction project.
8. Complexity of Designs
The major enemy of high-quality work is unnecessary complexities. Though some level of complexity is inevitable in cutting-edge buildings and commercial construction projects, you have to lessen complex techniques and pointless features as much as possible.
Simplified designs are much affordable, and they offer you a much better profit margin whilst producing higher quality work.
9. Ignored Audits and Testing
Some construction companies often stick strictly to third-party auditing and testing plans but completely ignore the tests’ major results. And what is worst is that they continued despite having some flawed designs and quality issues. Have you done the same thing? Beware of these actions.
You need to have a proper designation for quality control to solve these issues. Having a clear workflow is also helpful, especially when addressing the materials. That is why determine who is accountable in reading and tracking the audit and test reports so that critical information on quality issues is not overlooked.
10. Lack of Project Management Software
A cloud-based project management system helps you to determine the ideal intervals for testing the job completed so far for omissions and errors. Without a detailed plan and a system for quality control and assurance, your construction may be waiting too long to execute necessary checks on every work.
Deploying specialized software based on mobile applications is a faster and flexible way to bring your current construction projects under control.
Start Improving Quality Management Today with Pro Crew Schedule
Quality is for Success. That’s a fact. To be successful in attaining high-quality work, you must know how to work things out. First, know that construction quality involves tons of moving parts, and it is crucial to adopt technologies that can help you manage it seamlessly from start to finish. Deploying the best strategies for assuring, managing, improving, and controlling the quality of your construction projects can set you up for real-time success today and in the future.
Several software solutions can help you optimize and manage your construction quality management and processes. Pro Crew Schedule is the top choice amongst all. The implementation of this cutting-edge technology will be a great solution to inject quality into your work and services.
With Pro Crew Software in operation, you can effectively manage and monitor your quality compliance undertakings and maintain quality standards specific to various areas within your business. Now is the time to prioritize the quality of your work!
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