Hi,

Your question looks a bit multi-various. Do you require a quality cost improvement process or a complete construction project management initiative for contractors and subs management?

Greg Akhibi
Clearwaters Consulting Ltd

Thank you for your reply. First I would like to stimate quality and non-quality costs. I am trying to write a matrix with all the costs but I am not sure what quality indicators are the most suitable to control defects and costs in construction. I should be greatfull if you could help me  (I am trying to find some technical papers and books but the information I got is not clear). After this I would like to know could I integrate this in a complete project management initiative for contractors and subs management as you say.

Fernandez,
Civil Engineer.

Quality cost (Cost of Quality, COQ) refers to the total cost of all efforts put into meeting quality requirements of a project. These include cost of testing, quality inspections, manpower, and in some cases quality necesitated delays. Any other cost is non-quality cost.

If your quality improvement plan is working well, the COQ should be dropping with time in an operations setting, however since construction projects are usually time-bound and quality requirements for different phases are not often the same, such trending is not possible.

The only way out is to benchmark between similar phases of similar projects, either from your own organisation or your competitors.

While COQ is a good indicator of quality performance, a more immediate indicator is the number of Non-Conformance Requests, NCRs, generated. Quality improvement effort is not intended to identify faults but rather to prevent faults from occuring during project execution, if more NCRs are being generated, it is an indication that you have to go back to the drawing board.

Greg Akhibi
Clearwaters Consulting Ltd

First of all thank you. I agree with you but I think I have a problem with non-conformance requests. I am trying to make a classification of non-conformances and I am looking for all the causes during the process of construction that can cause defects. The problem is how to quantify some of them like waste of time or sales lost by poor quality. I would like to find indicators suitable for measuring all this. Have you got any idea?

Yours faithfully,

Fernandez,

Causes for NCRs are not really generic, they depend on the scope of work and quality requirements, so its is really up to you to look deep into your project and determine what can lead to NCRs and setup systems to prevent their occurence (ie Quality Assurance).

I would'nt consider "waste of time" or delays difficult to quantifying; if a deliverable is towned-down at quality control, the time spent from then on till it finally passes quality control is the delay.

Copy and paste the following link in your browser and read the PDF file hope it helps.

cee.uiuc.edu/elrayes/Time-Cost-Quality.pdf

Greg Akhibi
Clearwaters Consulting Ltd

Thank you very much for the link. I should be greatfull if you could tell about more links. I was thinking to suscribe to ASCE journal becouse it is the only way for getting the papers they publish but I don´t know if it could solve my problem. I will read this paper and I will tell you my opinion.

Thank you very much again.