How to empower Quality Engineers to achieve Improved Product Quality, customer delight and long term improvement initiatives (Kaizen)
The whole world is working tirelessly to match the set quality standards and to meet the ever growing customer expectations. Quality has become a most important and as well as the most vulnerable parameter connected to business performance. Companies with a sustained quality approach do way better than others and vice versa.
So let's introspect and figure out how we are placed in the real estate industry. I must say that we have made sustained improvements in this regard but there have been many misses. Hence, it is important to understand the avenues available to us to improve further:
- Quality by design improvement
- Quality assurance and quality control
- Training of supervisory staff and workforce
- Mechanisation
- Empowerment of Quality and Supervision engineers through knowledge and process
Lets focus on the last point as all the stakeholders in almost all companies are taking enough measures in the other areas but the initiatives does not necessarily bear the desired impact due to the last point as mentioned above.
How to empower the team to adhere to quality standards? Lets understand what are the prevailing methods as being followed:
- Well drafted Quality plan and technical specification and standards and make it part of BOQ and contracts
- Strict quality checking mechanism through well defined checklist (Both in process inspection and final product checking)
- Non conformity reports and compliance reports
- Review mechanism of NC Tracker
As stated above, this is a pretty closely knit mechanism but then why it is not achieving desired results. In some cases it may be due to quality of knowledge and commitment of the team but that's not the whole problem. Let’s go deeper and find out what is the process of addressing accountability to ensure that the system works as defined. We have seen that the game changes for the good when accountability is established and can be seen through and the process becomes auditable through data.
Is it possible through the prevailing manual process (of signing documents)? Probably not as the concerned documents are not easily traceable and also not archived for the lifecycle of the product. We have seen many reversible failures being converted into irreversible snags, as the corrective actions were not taken on time. We have also seen that the contractors have got their payments for the faulty activities, as the NC has got no direct connection to the billing methods and is completely 7 dependent on individual conversations and there is no substantial process for the same. We have also noticed many instances where in spite of the best efforts of the supervision team the contractor concerned does not take immediate measures to rectify the same. All these can be solved by connecting the NC to the billing process with necessary checks and balances.
Moreover, considering the enormity of the projects and the associated data, it becomes almost impossible to do analytical studies to identify the recurring fault lines and possible mitigations of the same. These studies can be the base process for identified areas of innovation or invention. These studies allow the company to review the execution process objectively and bring changes wherever required.
Is it time when we should look into the matters with due diligence? I leave it to the readers to judge based on their own state of affairs and their experience.
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