Enterprise Quality Management: The 1-10-100 Rule

In the AIA Practice Management Digest of Spring 2009, in the article “The Cost of Quality: Is “An Ounce of Prevention” Really Worth A Pound of Cure?,” author Robert P. Smith, AIA highlights how the construction industry expresses the relationship between quality and operating efficiency. Philip B. Crosby in Quality Is Free[1] presents the case [...]

Enterprise Quality Management: Process Quality Measurement in Construction

In the seminal book The Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy Into Action[1], authors Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton highlight the following seven metrics for process quality measurement:

Process part-per-million defect rates
Yields (ratio of good items produced to good items entering the process)
Waste
Scrap
Rework
Returns
Percentage of processes under statistical process control[2]

The above seven metrics generally relate to the [...]

Three Exciting Things About Using an iPad on Your Construction Job Site

The iPad has arrived, and we love it.  Why?  We’ve already talked about the big game changing things like how it is cheaper, lighter, and the battery will last a long time.  And, after some hands-on time this week with a few iPads at Vela, we have more thoughts to share on why you’ll want [...]

Balanced Scorecard Approach to Enterprise Quality Management

In the seminal book The Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy Into Action, authors Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton emphasize a critical, but in many cases overlooked, point from the internal business process perspective. Kaplan and Norton highlight that “…the process of deriving objectives and measures for the internal-business-process represents one of the sharpest distinctions [...]