Quality and Construction

May 24, 2023

Quality is Free. This is the title of a book written by Philip Crosby in the 1970’s that delves into the benefits of quality in the manufacturing industry. Although construction and manufacturing are by no means the same thing, I believe the same principles can and should be applied to construction companies of all types. In this blog post I’m going to explain why “quality is free” for construction companies, and then will dig into some methods you can use to implement quality in your construction company.

Why is quality free? Intuitively, it seems like quality costs money. Higher quality materials are more expensive. Producing a higher quality product takes more time. Providing high quality customer service will require more time as well. Taking shortcuts on quality should save you time and money. If you take a step back and look at the costs of low quality and the benefits of high quality, it starts to become more clear that the positives will far outweigh the negatives of implementing high quality at your construction company.

Let’s start with some of the costs of low quality:

• More callbacks
• More rework
• Negative effects on reputation
• Bad customer reviews

While customer reviews and negative effects on reputation are legitimate costs of low quality, it can be a little difficult to quantify their effect on your bottom line. Callbacks and rework, however, are very straightforward. How much does one call back cost you? A typical situation might have you taking a trip to assess the situation, scheduling a crew to go out and resolve it, maybe some additional fabrication in your shop to replace the defective parts or workmanship, etc. Once callback will wipe out the money you saved by not emphasizing quality very quickly.

On the other hand, what are some benefits of high quality?

• Fewer callbacks/reworks
• Happy customers
• Great reputation/Credibility
• Good customer reviews
• More referrals

If investing a little more into the quality of your customer service could lead to even one more customer referral a month, why wouldn’t you? The investment will pay for itself.

It should be noted that just like with all things, there will always be diminishing returns on investing in quality. If you already have someone going over each part that comes out of your shop with a fine-toothed comb, adding a second person might not pay off. Would they catch things the first person missed? Theoretically, yes, but in the real world maybe not often enough for it to be worthwhile. That being said, the vast majority of companies are probably not going to be at a point where they are going to see significant diminishing returns from investments in quality.

So how can you invest in quality at your construction company? One of the first things you can do is start developing a culture of quality. Tell your people that quality is important, and encourage them to not ignore quality issues. Issues tend to have a compounding effect the longer they go ignored or unnoticed. Teach your people to catch and deal with issues when they come up, not when they become a problem. One thing to keep in mind here is that you do not want this to devolve into a blame game. Focus on catching and resolving issues, not who caused them.

Another thing you can do is implement systems for ensuring quality. This could be things like doing a walkthrough before leaving every job site to check for issues, or inspecting all the materials that come out of your shop before you bring them to the site and install them. Again, the earlier an issue is caught, the less it will cost to resolve.

You could also implement a system like 5S (which we wrote a little about in this blog post about Lean Construction), which will go a long way toward improving your quality: a cleaner, more organized work site will be more efficient, and defects will be more obvious.

Hopefully I’ve convinced you that emphasizing quality at your construction company will not only save you money, but will also help you make more money by improving your reputation and getting you more referrals. I’ve also tried to give a few practical approaches to start improving quality at your company. If you are not convinced, let me know, and I’ll have to rewrite this post to make it more effective.