Abstract
Any project regardless of how well planned and controlled may experience a certain degree of error or nonconformity in its outcome. This may sometimes be overlooked and thus undermining the desired outcome of the project.
This made way for the emergence of quality management and assurance. This concept as a discipline was first seen in the United States in the 1920s. At the time, it was simply intended to regulate and limit the escape of defective items in the industrial processes. The earliest was the idea to inspect the output of a manufacturing process to sort defective product from good product. Joseph & Susan (1951).
As quality control continued to make advances, better approaches and refinements of the process occurred. They reasoned that sorting the good product from the bad was not the most effective way of maintaining quality. A more efficient management philosophy might focus on actions to prevent defective product from ever being produced.
Comparison among Various Quality Systems
In this paper, I chose to take up a construction project. This involves a company that assembles all the necessary facilities required by developers to bring up buildings and related structures from the ground and sell it as a single package. Quality management in this industry presents unique challenges. Poor quality raises costs unnecessarily and may lead the firm to incur great losses. However, there are several Quality Systems that have been formulated with the sole purpose of managing the quality of items produced by a firm.
The first is The International Organization for Standardization (ISO). The overall body of standards is generically referred to as ISO9000, which is made up of several subparts. It is charged with creating and maintaining international standards. Robert (1994). It does so through a developed set of technical standards for quality management which add value to the final products and promote good business practice through efficient manufacture and supply. With these, they make trade between countries easier, safer and fairer, while safeguarding users and consumers.
The second is Six Sigma. The Six Sigma approach to quality management is all about helping one identify what they don’t know as well as reinforcing what they should know, and taking action to reduce the errors and rework that wastes a lot of valuable time, money, opportunities, and customers. It translates that knowledge into opportunities for business growth. It measures a process in terms of defects which in turn indicates the degree of deviation from perfection. Achieving Six Sigma refers to a point when your processes are delivering only 3.4 defects per million opportunities (DPMO). This is taken to be a close to perfect situation.
The final quality standard is the plan-do-check-act (PDCA). It is a four step management method that is used for improving performance, processes and products. The four steps are: Planning- which involves establishment of objectives, Doing- which encompasses implementation of the plan, Checking- which is a comparative study of the actual results against the targeted results and Acting- which is the application of corrective actions. They include analysis of the difference in the obtained results, to determine their root causes.
In my opinion, the best quality system for a construction company is the ISO9000. Quality assurance is important in the engineering and construction sector being a high risk industry. Emphasis on quality of structures is heavily laid since any errors may result in a catastrophic. Six Sigma is ruled out since it deals with the measure of defects. In this case, we are trying to prevent any defects from occurring. The plan-do-check-act also involves comparison and application of corrective measures in its final stages which is contrary to what should be done in a construction project where there should be no errors at all and thus no corrections required.
I feel that the easiest quality system to implement is the ISO9000. This is because it does not include any corrective measures. It is designed to ensure that the product formed is of superior quality as per a specified standard. This saves time since the desired result is attained much faster.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the role of quality systems can neither be undermined nor overlooked and it is essential to ensure products compliance to the stipulated expectations and requirements.
References
Joseph Berk & Susan Berk, (1951), Quality Management for the Technology Sector, page 171.
Robert .W, (1994), ISO 9000 Handbook, Peach, CEEM Information Services.
