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QUALITY MANAGEMENT |
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The strongly rising number of defects in buildings of only 15 - 25 years age naturally led to an increased focus on the measures being taken to assure a sufficient level of quality in construction. During the early 1980s extensive studies revealed both basic technical faults as well as severe managerial malfunctions. This led to a combined effort to establish formal procedures to improve the quality of the industry's output. The process is known as Kvalitetssikringsreformen (The Quality Assurance and Liability Reform), whichwas put into force by the Boligministeriet in 1986 as a departmental order. Figure 6 illustrates the basic idea behind the reform, which is to urge the actors of the building process to identify the optimal balance between the total cost for the project, the management cost and the cost of correcting defects. It is widely accepted that the construction process during the previous period had developed into a position far from this point of cost optimisation. The reform applied to all government financed building activities but with the ambition that principles and concepts would also spread into private building activities as well as civil engineering projects. The Kvalitetssikringsreformen is considered as one of the most thorough organisational and managerial state induced chan-ges affecting the working practices of an industry, which is characterised by smaller companies in constantly changing organisational constellations and locations. The reform has been included in the Almindelige betingelser for arbejder og leveran-cer i bygge- og anlægsvirksomhed - AB 92 (General Conditions for Building Works). The reform consists of several elements involving the whole process including suppliers of building materials as well as the end users of the buildings. The main elements were:
Figure 6 – The Philosophy behind the Quality Reform During the design phase additional activities have been introduced emphasising the need for both internal and external design reviews. The idea is to minimise design faults as well as activating the production experience traditionally available at contracting level as early as possible. Formal procedures for the documentation of the level of quality were introduced as being an integral part of the construction process. Each party has to document its conformity with the specified level of quality. The documentation obtained in this process is finally included in the material handed over to the client at the end of the construction period. This particular part of the reform has - due to the often large amounts of paper - been considered time consuming and difficult to handle for a great number of the smaller craftsman-like companies. Trials in the early 1980s showed that the placing of legal responsibility and the obtaining of money to recover the damage proved to be a very lengthy and complex process, often leading to payments only covering a small part of the damages encountered. A major problem in the legal actions was the variations in the periods of responsibility between suppliers, designers and contractors. Ranging from 1 year to 20 years, the involved parties had diverging interests in quality aspects of the finished building. With the proposed unifying of responsibility periods the parties' attitude towards obtaining the presumed quality became at least legally equalised. Based on the above mentioned experiences with the inadequate level of quality in buildings 15-25 years old the Boligministeriet decided to establish an independent non-profit insurance institution called the Byggeskadefonden. The fund works as an insurance pool against defects for all state financed or subsidised building activities. As a part of the construction budget a premium of 1% is paid into the fund, and if defects are discovered within the first 20 years of the building's lifetime the repair costs will be covered by the fund. The fund conducts the 5-year inspections for the insured buildings and the cost of the inspection amounts to half of the paid premium with the other half expected to cover the repairs. A secondary but crucial objective of the fund is to obtain, store and communicate knowledge about building defects in a structu-red manner to the actors of the sector. The fund, however, does not work as a "carte blanche" for building firms, because the fund will legally reclaim its costs by placing responsibility with one or more of the parties involved in the construction of the building. The important difference to the previous situation is that the repair works can be executed immediately after discovering the damage and that the burden of processing legal claims have been released from the tenants' and owners' organisations. In connection with the obligatory 5-year inspection of buildings it is furthermore to be assessed, whether the necessary precautions in the field of care and maintenance have been taken. Manuals covering expected operations in care and maintenance are an integral part of the documentation handed over to the client at the end of the building period. On a company level the ISO-9000 standard has been introduced as a tool to manage the formalised quality procedures. This standard has been implemented in particular among some of the larger general contractors and producers of building materials. The smaller specialised contractors, however, typically use customised quality management procedures developed by their employers organisations. This also covers the situation for the architects and engineers using standardised quality management procedures.
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