Measuring Quality Performance on EPC Projects
Total Quality Management principles are becoming more widely communicated, understood, accepted and implemented by companies in the U.S. construction industry. CII members, and the industry in general, now openly discuss such subjects as owner/contractor trust, team building, alliances and partnerships, and quality itself—concepts that only a few years ago would have been viewed as incompatible with the traditional owner/contractor relationship.
Further progress in applying TQM principles in the execution of engineer-procure-construct (EPC) projects requires a structured process for aligning and measuring performance against the goals of the key principals in a project—the owner (often represented at different organizational levels), the engineer, and the construction contractor. This publication describes just such a process—The Blueprint.
The Blueprint: A Process for Measuring Project Quality (CII Publication 36-2), a product of the Quality Performance Measurement Research Team, provides the methodology for a project-oriented process that the project team can integrate into its normal execution procedures. The process includes the design, production and analysis of measurements during project execution to identify areas for improvement and positively influence the outcome. Publication 36-2 can become an important part of the tool box a project team uses to create a win-win environment in the execution of a successful project.
Use of the process will accelerate industry&##8217;s continuous improvement thrust by:
- Sharing best practices for measuring project quality in a predictive manner
- Serving as a starting point for companies just getting into quality management
- Reducing cycle time of planning and monitoring of projects
- Facilitating the quality measurement process in increasingly decentralized owner engineering organizations
- Supporting the benchmarking effort
