Many organizations implementing Total Quality Management (TQM), start with vague directives with little clarity on what to do. Other organizations become victims of their own success. Their initial quality improvement teams may be so successful they rapidly create more teams, without the qualitative organization-wide changes necessary to sustain a permanent effort. Some of these changes are obvious, in that companies must facilitate, recognize and encourage these teams. The structural approach to implementing TQM deals initially and directly with the systems barriers. One option is to emphasize defining the company's goals and objectives, selecting quality improvement projects tied to those goals, training only the members of the process improvement team with just enough training, just before they use it, and providing on-going support of each team's efforts. Disadvantages include the need to be open and honest with employees from the beginning dealing head-on with issues that many in management may have trouble changing: their own management style, their own pay, and their own power
How does a construction firm begin implementing the process?
Setting the stages
How can a construction firm begin the continuous improvement process? Outlined briefly here are the overall target stages for establishing a successful continuous improvement strategy.
Start setting goals, and start meeting the goals you have set.
Use measurements to determine how exact your goals are.
Management indicate complete commitment to Continuous Improvement (CI)
Quality can only be achieved when management gives CI a high priority and a clear need.
Productivity in the construction industry is estimated to be, at best, 50 percent, with some sources
placing it at 35 percent, leaving room for improvement.
Identify stages The objectives of continuous improvement are to reduce waste, reduce costs, and increase productivity. The starting point is simple but radical. The work at any construction site can be sliced into a series of stages. The stages can begin with groundbreaking and end with completion. At each stage, a team goes to the jobsite and accomplishes its own work. When the work is completed, it can be handed over to another crew or another contractor. This chain of events can be identified as a process.
Establish responsibility- The next step is to establish responsibility for the work. If we define what each team does and establish responsibility for who is to accomplish the task, we have defined a product and an owner/customer. This is the heart of the matter with CI: to define the product and the owner/customer. Each team or crew is responsible for providing a first-class product to its owners/customers. The product must be supplied with no hassles, no concealed errors, and no botched work.
Set the datum CI goes well beyond the concept of quality assurance. Merely relying on a quality product is not the only responsibility of management. Traditional quality assurance simply fixes the product; however, it is not enough that supervisors simply accept or reject faulty work. CI maintains that when something goes wrong, we must find the root cause of the error and correct that cause.
What CI means is the setting of a datum so everyone can evaluate his or her work or product by measuring against the datum. CI then becomes everyone working together to improve the way work is actually completed.
Pre-Plan The chain actually starts before breaking ground for the building. It actually starts with an owner/customer who wants the building. We must know what our owners/customers who are going to use the building actually want. We can do this by doing a great deal of pre-planning.
The pre-planning involves creating a team that is capable of doing the project. We have to ensure that the process used to analyze job segments is in place so we can make the right decisions at the right time and that the flow of information needed to make decisions is in place.
A revolutionary idea here is that even the designer can become part of the process of CI from the conceptual stage of the project.
Regard each project as part of a cycle We can learn something from each project when we regard each project as part of a cycle.
How does a construction firm begin implementing the process?
Setting the stages
How can a construction firm begin the continuous improvement process? Outlined briefly here are the overall target stages for establishing a successful continuous improvement strategy.
Start setting goals, and start meeting the goals you have set.
Use measurements to determine how exact your goals are.
Management indicate complete commitment to Continuous Improvement (CI)
Quality can only be achieved when management gives CI a high priority and a clear need.
Productivity in the construction industry is estimated to be, at best, 50 percent, with some sources
placing it at 35 percent, leaving room for improvement.
Identify stages The objectives of continuous improvement are to reduce waste, reduce costs, and increase productivity. The starting point is simple but radical. The work at any construction site can be sliced into a series of stages. The stages can begin with groundbreaking and end with completion. At each stage, a team goes to the jobsite and accomplishes its own work. When the work is completed, it can be handed over to another crew or another contractor. This chain of events can be identified as a process.
Establish responsibility- The next step is to establish responsibility for the work. If we define what each team does and establish responsibility for who is to accomplish the task, we have defined a product and an owner/customer. This is the heart of the matter with CI: to define the product and the owner/customer. Each team or crew is responsible for providing a first-class product to its owners/customers. The product must be supplied with no hassles, no concealed errors, and no botched work.
Set the datum CI goes well beyond the concept of quality assurance. Merely relying on a quality product is not the only responsibility of management. Traditional quality assurance simply fixes the product; however, it is not enough that supervisors simply accept or reject faulty work. CI maintains that when something goes wrong, we must find the root cause of the error and correct that cause.
What CI means is the setting of a datum so everyone can evaluate his or her work or product by measuring against the datum. CI then becomes everyone working together to improve the way work is actually completed.
Pre-Plan The chain actually starts before breaking ground for the building. It actually starts with an owner/customer who wants the building. We must know what our owners/customers who are going to use the building actually want. We can do this by doing a great deal of pre-planning.
The pre-planning involves creating a team that is capable of doing the project. We have to ensure that the process used to analyze job segments is in place so we can make the right decisions at the right time and that the flow of information needed to make decisions is in place.
A revolutionary idea here is that even the designer can become part of the process of CI from the conceptual stage of the project.
Regard each project as part of a cycle We can learn something from each project when we regard each project as part of a cycle.