Quality in Construction and Architecture: A Comprehensive Guide

Posted on Sep 18, 2024 in Economy

1. Quality in Construction and Architecture

1.1. Introduction

Definitions

The Royal Spanish Academy defines quality as the property or set of properties inherent in something that allows us to appreciate it as equal to, better than, or worse than others of its kind.

In construction, quality refers to the condition or set of conditions by which a product can meet the needs of a group or population.

Other Definitions:

• QUALITY: The degree to which a set of inherent characteristics fulfills requirements (ISO 9000:2000).
• QUALITY of an entity (product, process, organization, service, etc.): A collection of features that give it the ability to satisfy identified and implied needs.
• QUALITY: The power of a set of inherent characteristics of a product, system, or process to meet the requirements of customers and other stakeholders.

Definitions:

• Features: Distinguishing characteristics.
• Products: The result of a process.
• System: A set of interrelated and mutually supporting elements.
• Process: A system of activities that use resources to transform inputs into outputs.
• Requirements: Needs or expectations that are established, commonly implied, or statutory.
• Customers: People or organizations who receive a product.
• Stakeholders: Groups or individuals with an interest in the success of an organization.
• Organization: A group of people and facilities with a clear definition of responsibilities, authorities, and relationships.

DO NOT CONFUSE QUALITY WITH QUALITY GRADE.

Quality grade is the grade or rank given to the different requirements of the quality of products, processes, or systems that have the same functional use.

Some Aspects of Quality:

• Compliance with requirements
• Customer satisfaction
• Fitness for use
• Competitiveness and future-proofing

Quality Requirements:

Expression of needs or their translation into a set of requirements expressed in quantitative or qualitative characteristics of an entity (product, organization, etc.) enabling its implementation and review. It is important that these requirements reflect the explicit and implicit needs of the client and should be expressed in terms of functional and documented.

Requirements of the Company:

Obligations arising from laws, regulations, rules, codes, statutes, and other considerations (protection of the environment, health, safety, energy conservation, and natural resources). These requirements should be taken into account when defining the requirements for quality.

The industry standard considers that quality has been achieved when the needs of the client, who has previously expressed them, have been satisfied.

Therefore, the parameters to define the quality in every product must possess the following concepts of quality:

• Quality of Design: The result of the activities developed during the preliminary phase of production.
• Manufacturing and Quality Compliance: The extent to which manufactured products conform to design specifications.
• Quality of the Customer or Fitness for Purpose: This should emerge from the previous two.

Spiral of Quality:

Conceptual model of interdependent activities that affect quality along the different stages that start with the identification of needs and end with the assessment of how these have been met.

• Market research
• Initial specifications for design
• Project: Drafting. Review.
• Plans: With the work, safety, quality, and others that might occur.
• Execution of work: Rethinking. Supply and stockpiling of materials. Inspection and testing.
• Delivery provisional. Commissioning. Final delivery.
• Maintenance. Ease of removal.

New Thinking About Quality:

The new thinking on quality in construction is based on two fundamental ideas:

1. Responsibility of owners at each stage of the process.
2. Control of dispersion.

The first brings the whole package of preventive ideas, feedback forms, control at all stages of the process, everyone’s human resources, etc.

The second puts us squarely on the need to dominate statistical techniques to deal with the inevitable spread of the results of any industrial activity. From it are derived all the techniques of control, inspections, technical decisions, rework costs, etc.

The new mentality is understandable as the clash of concepts:

QUALITY – SAFETY
ACCEPTANCE – MANDATORY
POWER – MOTIVATION
LIABILITY – IRRESPONSIBILITY
OVERALL COST – IMMEDIATE COSTS
PREVENTION – IMPROVISATION
COOPERATION – DISTRUST
CONTROL – DISORDER
FEEDBACK – IGNORANCE
DURABILITY – PROVISIONAL
MAINTENANCE – ABANDONMENT

Multiplication in the construction business requires a double exercise: the quest for quality in each and overall quality. An objective which only the promoter is able to achieve. Waiting for the professionalism of each one separately is naive. Each separately can be prepared to do well but act in each particular work under the conditions that the developer has established.
The company has to ensure that the quality and total customer satisfaction will cost as little as possible.

Quality Policy of the Government:

• Actions to promote standardization.
• Development of certification and approval.
• Promotion of laboratory testing and assessment bodies.
• Assisting enterprises to improve their production processes.
• Support for research and grants to innovative projects.
• Support for new materials and technologies.
• Promote training through courses, seminars, or publications.
• User-mentalization to demand quality.
• Prevent the entry of low-quality products that do not meet basic requirements.

Quality in History

The concept of quality emerged in the twentieth century, even before man was born in the estimates on a job well done.
In our time, we are enjoying lower quality in proportion to its technical possibilities.
In every civilization, we develop the procedures necessary to obtain the desired levels of perfection.

In Egypt, there are some reliefs in which workers are seen working on a stone and others measuring it to check its dimensions. In the year 1550 BC the royal cubit was standardized as the unit of measure.

The Code of Hammurabi, the Babylonian king who lived between 1728-1686 BC, includes as a principle of retaliation the penalty of law. In one of the articles, we read that if someone dies in construction because of the builder, the builder shall be sentenced to death.

In the twelfth century, the artisan is the one fixing prices and features and controls what he does. In the quality control, he follows the orders that the craftsman has set or customers have requested.

During the thirteenth century, the craft guilds were provided with a set of standards for materials and products used, regularized practices and working conditions, all through the development of regulations and fixed normalizing the quality of products. Ultimately the unions marked the beginning of Quality Control.

The family business created during the Middle Ages the family secret passed on from generation to generation almost until today.

The French mathematician Blaise Pascal in 1654 developed the theory of probability essential to enable the development of statistics. Also in 1642, he created a device of gears that can perform addition and subtraction.
The industrial revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries rolled the productive fabric of the craft to enter the generalization of paid employment, with the result, critical about the quality of the products, which involves the separation between work and its characteristics.

In the industrial revolution during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, because of continuing social conflict moved from an agrarian society, the growth of factories in which large amounts of manufactured products, they created the role of the supervisor, who was the link between workers and owners. The supervisors were responsible for quality control and are the pioneers in the call quality inspection.

Mass production in the nineteenth century brought the division of labor into simple tasks that keep the worker from having a global vision of the product and, therefore, its characteristics.

In the early twentieth century, Taylor encodes the characteristics of the industry now, establishing itself as an undisputed fact the natural laziness of workers who are motivated only by money, which requires control of production to avoid mistakes. Generally, the worker is considered as an industrial agent whose psychology is irrelevant.

After the Second World War in North America, Quality Control is developing and begins to talk about Quality Assurance.

The challenge now is to get as massive, no minority handicrafts, also necessary for other reasons. The industrial design and mastery of technology has allowed certain sectors to achieve something close to that ideal.

1.2. Quality in Architecture

In architecture, the quality required behavior of all production processes is more selective since it involves a series of processes that combine high technology and ancient manipulations carried out by a virtually unqualified workforce and, in some cases, newcomers to the world of agriculture.

The architect and coordinator of an entire construction process, and especially as the judge responsible for incidents that occur, must define and control the quality of each of the thousands of products that he designs and builds in his projects and, above all, the results of operations on site.

The motor industry, construction, and economic activity of a country do not operate as a general industry (e.g., car). The differences are:

1. Construction moves from one place to another. Therefore the materials and construction processes are different for the same teams.
2. Its products are often unique and personalized.
3. There is no production line. This facilitates the organization and control of work.
4. It is an industry that operates with a traditional and changing workforce.
5. Low-skilled labor, any character, low motivation, affects an effective reduction of the quality of work.
6. The work is usually outdoors, so protection is very difficult.
7. The user has little influence on product quality and conforms more with gifts that require essential.
8. The project usually has ambiguous definitions regarding some issues, causing confusion in the realization.
9. The site management is responsible for the design and execution, but there are almost insurmountable interferences involved in it.
10. The precision with which one works in construction is minimal, causing a decline in the quality of the objects it produces.

Construction is, therefore, a very flexible system that can accept a series of commitments that are hard and that otherwise cause a serious decline in the quality of the objects it produces.

Quality Construction

Essential in Construction

Moreover, according to the current European Directive on construction products, work must meet the following basic quality requirements:

1. Mechanical resistance and stability.
2. Safety in case of fire.
3. Hygiene, health, and environment.
4. Security and use.
5. Protection against noise.
6. Energy saving and thermal insulation.

With these fundamental objectives, technical solutions for meeting the essential requirements will be offered in the form of harmonized standards, non-harmonized standards recognized and European technical documents that are an alternative to offering cutting-edge industry and a mechanism for recognition of compliance based on private third-party certification bodies accredited for granting the CE mark.

Basic Requirements of the Building (LOE)

Concerning Functionality:

• Use: Provision of sufficient space and dimension.
• Accessibility: Willingness to people with disabilities.
• Access to services: Telecommunications, audiovisual, and information according to regulations.

Concerning Safety:

• Structural safety.
• Safety in case of fire.
• Safety in use.

Relating to Habitability:

• Hygiene, health, and environmental protection.
• Protection against noise.
• Energy saving and thermal insulation.

Compared with European legislation forcing, it is essential that all requirements are basic, but not all basic requirements are essential. The reason is that the LOE, to be a law for the building, has to look at specific aspects of the European Directive that it does not have to do. The requirements are the expression of needs and must be translated into product characteristics and units of work, which when present in any medium become specifications.

1.3. Quality Control

Control is testing, inspection, intervention, etc.

Quality is not just about the detection of defects or nonconformities but rather to predict and create techniques to improve the quality of both the product and the production process.

In quality control missions and objectives, there are two main ways:

1. Provide product characteristics to be monitored as indicators of quality.
2. Establish appropriate procedures for production to get the limits within which you want to maintain these characteristics.

The products should last the time for which they were designed.

This is what is called reliability techniques. The electronic and electrical components are set and checked for their homologous life, from this to calculate the life of the systems being mounted.

What is absolutely clear is that any product or material, from the moment of conception until it can be considered suitable for use and consumption, it must meet a series of tests or aptitude tests, concerning the requirements or specifications.

1.4. Architectural Control

Over time, new buildings have been incorporated in a systematic fashion new materials, systems, and techniques to generate a totally different process to the traditional way of construction.

Logically, the implementation of the quality control system began running in the structures, but over time it has been applied to other work units. Standards Testing and Quality controls were first applied, but in reality, these barely existed.

The Direction of the works (the architect director) applied the requirements of the general conditions or projects, usually very vague, which in many cases imposed purely subjective conditions, including: the brick will be the best quality.

Currently seeking processes and modern systems increasingly stringent tolerances, materials that previously could be accepted with a simple visual examination (sensory trials), now need to be analyzed chemically or physically. Moreover, there is the undesirable intervention of foreign elements in the direction of the work itself (property) with ever more power, unfortunately, very difficult decision and control.

Quality control over projects is otherwise much less common but increasingly requires more and more modifications without being paid a fair monetary aspect.

1.5. Quality Satisfaction as a Functional Requirement of the User

The sectors that determine a level of quality are:

• The Administration, with its regulations.
• The promotion with their means.
• The professional training and ability.
• The industry, with materials and construction systems.
• Labor, with its formation.
• The use, with user education.

As built in one place or another, the level of quality will be different, especially the customs and economic resources of each country.

Human Needs

The user, in the development of each activity, needs a space, which according to the relationship that exists between the different elements of the cohabiting group, made independently, or in connection, coalition, or competition.

Psychophysiological Occupancy Requirements

Acoustic Requirements

For the architect, building must be a major concern, thinking about the sound quality of the building, matching the user’s needs, prescribing avoiding exaggerated demands that would lead to waste.

The absolute requirement would not exceed 85 decibels.

Comfort limited to a maximum of:

• Work-domestic: 35-45 dB.
• Work-intellectual: 35-40 dB.
• Daytime rest: 30-35 dB.
• Night rest: 25-30 dB.

On the other hand, it is not recommended that the sound level is below 20 dB.

Hygrothermal Requirements

Logically the microclimate of comfort within reach is determined by the climate zone in which the building is located, the type of housing, and the ethnographic and demographic characteristics of the population.

The determining parameters of microclimate in the parts of a room are:

• Temperature.
• Moisture.
• Air Mobility.
• The temperature inside the rooms.

Air Purity Requirements

There are four elements to consider:

• The action of the powder.
• The gas.
• The microorganisms.
• The smells.

Supported requirements are:

• The concentration of CO₂ must be less than 0.1%.
• The CO concentration must be less than 0.003%.

Safety Requirements

• The property must be protected from unwanted access.
• It must be unsure about weather effects.
• In case of fire, it should be evacuated easily.
• There should be no mechanical hazards, electrocution, suffocation, and explosion.

1.6. Quality and Cost

Concept

Costs incurred to secure and ensure satisfactory quality and confidence to question, and the losses incurred when satisfactory quality is not obtained.

Objectives

• Measure the effectiveness of the quality of the company. The best is that which leads to a cost of lesser quality.
• Identify areas requiring attention and improvement.
• Establishment of sub-targets – quality cost improvement over time.

Costs of Quality

Prevention Costs:

• System of quality management.
• Process control.
• Acquisition of equipment for measuring, testing, etc.
• Staff training and motivational programs.
• Studies and special tests.
• Internal quality audits.

Control Costs of Evidence:

• Material testing and inspection of work. Analysis of results.
• Tare and maintenance costs of test equipment.
• Special research laboratory or on-site.

Failure Costs:

• Disadvantages of materials, products, or defective work units: contraensayos. Materials substitution.
• Deterioration of materials and products stored. Avoidable losses or wear.
• Expenses for claims.
• Immobilization or underutilization of human and material resources.
• Charges or premiums for third parties by inaccuracies in the work itself.
• Penalties for violations.
• Interest expense on securities and guarantees.
• Loss of customers.

The cost of quality is one that is derived from non-compliance, i.e., rejection of materials, products, units of work, services, etc.
Quality costs can be considered as the sum of two concepts:

A. Costs of Compliance with Quality

1. Costs of preventive control or prevention costs, which include commissioning and maintenance of infrastructure to ensure quality and avoid defects. Among them are:
   • Quality management systems: implementation and maintenance.
   • Process control: solving quality problems as they arise and adjusting the quality plan for the future.
   • Acquisition of test and measurement equipment.
   • Staff training and motivation programs of quality.
   • Internal quality audits.
2. Check control costs or appraisal costs related to the production and evaluation of audits to measure compliance of all functions in accordance with the criteria and procedures.
   • Material testing and inspection of work.
   • Tare and maintenance costs of test equipment.
   • Analysis of results and compliance with specifications.
   • Special research laboratory or on-site.

B. Costs of Non-Compliance or Failure

1. Non-quality costs internally.
   • Substitution of materials, products, or defective work units.
   • Disadvantages of materials, products, or defective work units.
   • Deterioration of materials and products stored.
   • Reductions or wear – avoidable.
   • Contraensayos.
   • Immobilization of material while deciding a solution.
   • Price premiums for lack of precision in the workplace.
   • Penalties for violations.
   • Interest expense on securities and guarantees.
2. Costs of non-quality external.
   • Expenses for claims.
   • Loss of customers.

Generally, the lack of quality causes 35% of the claims in the construction industry to rank first among all sectors. The lack of quality involves economic costs of 5% and 10% of the sector’s turnover in a year.

Quality Infrastructure

Accreditation General

ACCREDITATION: Certification of an appropriate and recognized agency of the facilities, capability, objectivity, competence, and integrity of an institution, agency, or person or task force to provide certain services or operations.

• TEDAE: ENAC.
• STANDARDS: AENOR.
• CERTIFICATION:

On Quality

• ENTITY CERTIFICATION: Compliance with standards and technical specifications.
• LABORATORY TEST: Checking compliance through testing.
• CALIBRATION LABORATORIES: Testing traceability and consistency of measures.
• AUDITOR-ENTITY: Audits of management systems and environmental quality.

Safety

• CONTROL AGENCY: Meeting industrial safety regulations.
• Environmental audits: Regulation of the EU eco-management.

1.7. Total Quality

Companies are increasingly interested in providing quality assurance of their products. Not only is it necessary to manufacture compliant products, but it is also necessary to test the company’s ability to ensure continuity in that capacity.

In the system of quality are evident all four levels that make up the evolutionary concept of quality:

1. Quality Control

Is to verify that the implemented product features meet the required specifications.

It employs the classic system of inspection and control in the laboratory or field.

2. Quality Assurance

This term means raising quality to the level of priority for the company’s business, using tools such as the development of Quality Manuals and Procedures Manuals, Quality Audits, and ultimately the acceptance of the need to document and demonstrate quality.

Quality Manual (from an agency or company)

It is the document that sets out the policy and quality, the quality system, and quality practices of an agency or company to obtain the required quality in their products.

Describe all measures taken by the company to obtain the quality of a given product, refer to the Quality Manual and manufacturing standards and inspection, adding the necessary specific measures.

In the construction sector, the scope of a quality plan is that of a work. For that work specifically referenced:

• Operating procedures.
• Resources.
• Sequence of activities related to quality.
• Precise instructions are applicable to always refer to the Quality Manual of the Company.
• Contractual documents to be supplied to the customer.

A company can have several quality plans arising from the implementation of the Quality Policy and Quality Assurance of the company for a certain product.

Procedures Manual

Known as Standard or Standard Production Inspection.

This is the document that defines the entire process, whether manufacturing, assembly, or inspection, specifying the order of operations, specific instructions, acceptance criteria and rejection for inspections, the type of machinery and equipment.

Audit of Quality

Methodical and independent review performed to determine whether the activities and results on quality meet the requirements previously established, and to ensure that these provisions are carried out, and are suitable to achieve the objectives.

Quality audits are carried out by persons not directly responsible for the sectors they want to audit, working mainly with the cooperation of personnel in those sectors.

One of the objectives of a quality audit is to assess whether it is necessary to introduce improvements and corrective actions. Not to be confused with the audit inspection or monitoring activities, the aim of the latter is process control or product acceptance.

3. Total Quality

The quality system should include processes that do not directly affect product quality. The integrated quality concept involves development at different levels so that the successive introduction of each of them carries a higher degree of quality, defined as achieving Customer Satisfaction, which is the basis of the quality policy adopted by the company.

4. Quality Management

The set of actions to plan, organize and control the quality function in an enterprise.
Is the activity that generates, frames, and culminates the whole quality system.
Quality Management is the address of the company, but generally applies to all members of it.

1.8. Architect’s Decennial Liability

The Direction of the works, bone technical architect and senior architect with civil and criminal liability for 10 years from the issuance of the Certificate of Completion, the shortcomings and defects that may arise in the work during this period.

Assumed responsibility and therefore it is essential that the party bringing the action proves the existence of any actual harm, arising from a breach of contract, since the architect’s obligations arise from the contract with the promoter.

The legal liability arises by virtue of the law as a legal guarantee of the company, and part of the contractual liability with respect to the contracting party and contractual liability to third parties.

In some performances of the property against the architect’s responsibilities have been ordered longer than ten years, we also want the responsibilities of the promoter.