Quality means understanding customer wants, designing projects or services to deliver those features and delivering outcomes conforming to requirements.
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Satisfying the Customers' Quality Requirements
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Quality can be fundamentally defined in several ways; from simply “conformance to requirements” (Philip Crosby), to the more detailed “the degree to which a set of inherent characteristics fulfils requirements” (ISO 9001), we can see that quality always has a customer element.
In construction, we look at quality in two ways:
Conformance to requirements
Customer satisfaction
As it is the customer who specifies the requirements, quality is what the customer expects and will be satisfied with. Therefore, quality on a built environment project must mean; understanding what the customer wants, designing the project to deliver these requirements and delivering an outcome that conforms to the customers’ requirements.
Whether it is a house or a bridge; expensive or inexpensive; the representative definition of quality stays the same.
Simply put, the customer expects the project to be completed on time, in full, within budget, to expectations and without defects. That is delivering quality.
The process of quality management means what your organisation does to ensure that your products or services satisfy your customer’s quality requirements; comply with any regulations applicable; enhance customer satisfaction and achieve continual improvements.
The School can provide you with some tools to enable you to take quality way beyond ISO 90001 and continually manage your delivery.
What is the real cost of error?
A look at the the different types of error that arise in the construction industry, and the real cost of those errors as revealed by research by the Get It Right Initiative.