Regardless of the industry, a good quality plan is essential to any business strategy. It can make or break your project’s success. A quality plan can help businesses set and adhere to high standards for their services, products, and methods.
General contractors or project managers can create a detailed quality plan to ensure that tasks are done well, make customers happier, and increase total success.
In this article, let us discuss why an efficient and effective quality plan is essential, its importance, its parts, how to make one, and how to monitor and improve it over time.
What Is a Quality Plan?
Knowing why quality is vital in building and what it means is essential. Good construction is not just the domain of construction businesses. It is critical to ensure that the quality of the project is of the highest standard and it is built according to the plans and specifications. It includes checking the quality of work done by building companies, suppliers, and subcontractors. It also includes importing the tools, materials, and machinery used on-site.
Construction quality control can be divided into two main groups: quality assurance and quality compliance. Quality assurance concerns the product or service quality, while quality compliance involves following current laws and rules.
The Importance of A Quality Plan in Construction
The construction industry is complicated, involving thousands to millions of moving parts. As a result, quality has always been an integral part of managing construction. It means always giving customers goods and services that meet or exceed their expectations.
In today’s market, where competition is constantly growing, many companies aim for excellence and dedication to customer satisfaction to stay ahead. A quality plan gives you a structured way to reach your goals and ensure your actions are always the same.
Benefits of Having A Good Quality Plan
All team members must communicate and collaborate to create and implement a quality plan. Setting quality goals, creating efficient plans, and ensuring they fit the general business strategy is critical.
Because the construction business is so regulated, quality management is critical. It also helps ensure the building is safe, works well, and is finished on time and budget. A quality plan must also include setting up solid processes and systems to monitor, evaluate, and control quality across the company. This includes regular checks, audits, and reviews to find and fix deviations from the rules. It also means spending money on training and development programs for workers to improve their skills and knowledge to help deliver quality.
Some of the benefits you can realize are the following:
- Help lower the risks, especially the risks of harm or crashes.
- Make sure the job stays on track and stays within budget.
- Meet the standards set by the client and the government
How Do You Check The Quality Of Construction?
When it comes to building work, there is no room for error. It can save lives, literally. Every piece of equipment needs to be checked for quality and usefulness to ensure its ability to do its job well.
A construction business’s steps to ensure the quality of their work are called quality control procedures. Following these steps is important because they help improve the building. Depending on the needs of the project and organization, you can create plans and systems that help you keep track of quality every step of the way.
Why Inspections and Quality Control are Essential in Construction
Quality control is achieved through several inspections of different building processes. But it all starts at the very beginning of the building project.
Before the building job starts, all materials and tools must show up where they should and meet all the standards and requirements. One way to lower the chance of getting broken materials or tools is to check the goods before they are sent to you. This can be done with the following four types of quality-checking methods:
- Do a pre-construction inspection to find any quality risks.
- Avoid problems during the construction phase by keeping a close eye on its progress
- Make a post-construction punch list to double all items and rectify as needed
How To Create A Good Quality Plan
When making a good quality plan, several essential things must be considered, which can help you and your team organize and monitor your efforts to create high-quality projects. In this section, let us look at some things you can do to make a quality plan.
Set SMART Goals for Quality
Setting SMART or straightforward, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-based goals is the first step in making a good plan. Your purpose, vision, and strategic goals should align with these goals. Setting doable and realistic goals gives efforts to improve quality a clear direction and helps decide how to use resources most effectively.
Key people from different companies should be involved in setting quality goals. This ensures that the goals are broad and consider the wants and needs of everyone who matters.
Finding Out Your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Key performance indicators, or KPIs, are valuable tools for tracking how well a business meets its quality goals. You can use these indicators to monitor progress, find areas for improvement, and make informed choices. KPIs often used to measure quality include customer happiness, defect rates, on-time delivery performance, and the number of hours spent training employees.
Set standards for quality
It is critical to set quality standards to spell out the rules and requirements that must be followed to ensure that goods or services are high quality. It can be the government or someone from within the business or the company. By setting clear standards, companies can ensure everything is the same, make customers happier, and lower the risk of mistakes or not following the rules. When setting quality standards, you should also consider the applicable laws, the best practices in your business, and what your customers expect.
Performing an Evaluation of Quality
Before implementing a quality plan, it is essential to examine how the company currently handles quality issues and find ways to improve. For this assessment, try to evaluate your current processes, gather data, conduct audits, and seek input from people inside and outside the company.
This could mean talking to essential employees, reviewing customer complaints and comments, and reviewing old product or service flaws data. By collecting this detailed information, organizations can find patterns and trends that must be addressed in the quality plan.
Setting Up A Quality Assurance Process
Next, you should create a quality assurance process. This lists the steps and tasks that need to be done to ensure that goods or services meet the quality standards that have been set. It also includes setting up quality control checkpoints, inspecting, testing, and devising ways to deal with problems that don’t meet standards. A robust quality assurance method helps ensure compliance while business activities occur.
Setting Up A Quality Control Systems
In a nutshell, the main goals of a quality control system are to stop mistakes, find deviations from standards, and fix them. This means implementing quality control steps at every service or product delivery stage. Each organization has different needs for quality control, and you must create a system that works for you and your team.
The effectiveness of a quality control method depends on how healthy employees are trained and skilled. You can invest in thorough training programs to ensure that their workers know how important quality is and have the skills to implement quality control measures.
Keeping Track of The Quality Plan
Making a quality plan is something other than something that can be done just once; it must be watched and improved all the time. It should be reviewed regularly to ensure it is still valid, find ways to improve it, and adapt to any changes in the business environment.
Businesses must constantly work to raise their quality standards to be the best. Finding ways to make things better, making changes based on what the data says, and encouraging a learning and innovation culture within the company are all parts of continuous improvement.
What Are Some Common Problems With Quality Control in Construction?
Problems with quality control in buildings can be grouped into three main groups.
Structural Quality Problems
The first group concerns the design of the building or structure. These problems are usually caused by mistakes in structural engineering and design, such as inadequate planning, picking the wrong materials for the job, and bad design.
Material Quality Problem
The second group is concerned with building products and methods. It includes choosing the wrong materials, not checking the quality during production, and putting together parts incorrectly.
Workmanship Quality Problems
The construction business has had problems with lousy work since the beginning, and these issues should always be addressed. Poor jobs and not focusing on quality control in construction can lead to defects that cost a lot of money, such as corrosion, mold growth, plumbing problems, injuries, deaths, and damage to the building or site’s structure.
