Working Toward Quality Standards in Construction
As a civil engineer and a licensed professional engineer, I found your article “Rethinking Wrench Time” to be of great interest. I also have a master's degree in industrial engineering, specializing in quality control, and am a longtime member of the American Society for Quality.
For many years, I have been promoting the application of quality-control principles to construction work, and I think this article gives an example of how it may be accomplished. To its credit, the [New York City Transit Authority, or NYCTA] now requires contractors to provide a quality-control manager on major projects. I have personally served as a quality-control manager on two NYCTA projects in recent years, including a $40-million bus maintenance and office facility in Maspeth, Queens, for Granite Construction.
To paraphrase your concluding paragraph, just as with safety, applying quality-control principles to construction is a team approach and will take some leadership for government agencies to push forward.
Allen Parmet
Principal
Parmet Engineering LLC
Springfield, N.J.
Great, but one problem...short of building a Nuclear Power Plant, there is no such thing. The AIA, Owners & Developers write this into General Conditions & it is all talk.<br/><br/>Real...
Reality Check - the fact remains it is always about the schedules & the monthly billings, front loading the payments for work not yet performed. QC Programs are all lip service and ar eonly used for the GC to get their foot in the door & get the Contract.
They plug a ridiculously low number and none of the major players ever fund the positions or departments on any large project, including the multi-billion dollar ones.
When they get nailed for false claims, fraud, iver-billing etc, they always find a pawn or fall guy & guess what - the the QC Mngr takes the rap.
Have you seen one comment here since August? Heck no & the above is the reason why. The same holds true for mist Safety Programs...they're all about liability & who shall pay what. The fact is, the trades are always pushed like dogs and OSHA typically shows up only after the dead body is reported, then the blame game begins.
Reagan once quipped - Quality is a 7-letter word & that is about as far as any major project gets with that. It is all smoke & mirrors and everyone in the racket knows this - except this guy and ENR who wasted the space on a meaningless article.
