Development of Quality Performance Indicators for Quality Management in Construction Projects

The growing competitions among companies intensified by the rapid changes in business environments are forcing them to adopt a new managerial paradigm. The traditional production-oriented management focusing on higher productivity has transformed into the customer-oriented management aiming at achieving customer satisfaction. Under these circumstances, quality management is one of the critical concepts for innovating corporations and improving their competitive edge. Despite the companies’ recognition of the significance of quality, most of them do not have a solid basis for quality management and substantial action programs. In the construction industry, there have been many attempts to adopt quality management as a tool for continuous improvement. They include Six-Sigma which has already been proven to be very useful for fostering quality innovation in the manufacturing industry. But these kinds of efforts are not sufficient enough to achieve organizational goals in quality management. It is essential to also take into consideration the root causes of inefficiency in the quality management. The low level of construction quality is mainly caused by the result-oriented quality management owing to the fact that quality problems can be detected only after they occur. Also, few systems provide the quality managers with numerical objectives or tangible goals. This study suggests a data-based quality management as a solution to the foregoing problems and discusses the methods of measuring and analyzing the performance related to quality in a construction company. It establishes the quality indicators to measure quality performance objectively. The management objectives and CSFs are defined according to the three management levels: strategic level; project level; and operational level, and then the indicators to measure and manage them are listed. The indicators are assigned to each quality management level and the level of quality is expressed with Sigma values. Through this quality performance management, managers will be able to improve the construction quality by monitoring the major indicators of construction project success and ultimately increase the competitiveness of overall construction organization.