رضایت مشتری و سیستم های مدیریت کیفیت در سازمان های پیمانکار

The construction industry is predominantly project based and quality is one of the client's prime concerns in their construction projects. Many clients, especially those in the Hong Kong public sector, require their contractors to have a Quality Management System (QMS) certified under ISO9000. Also, several contractors as well as clients themselves voluntarily implemented an ISO9000-based QMS in their respective organizations in order to target the various benefits perceived from such initiative. It was considered timely and worthwhile to explore the effectiveness of ISO9000-based QMSs in the Hong Kong. This paper portrays the key findings from a focused study that relate to the client satisfaction aspects from implementation of the ISO9000-based QMSs in the contractor organizations.

Quality is an essential element for sustainability and customer satisfaction. In construction projects, quality performance of contractors is considered as vital for client satisfaction. Various quality performance focused initiatives have been considered by both clients and contractors, e.g. balanced scorecard, business excellence model, ISO9000, ISO14000, OHSAS18001, six sigma, and total quality management systems (QMSs). Amongst such quality initiatives, ISO9000 certifications related to construction are popular in several countries and the application of ISO9000-based QMSs in the construction industry has been studied by several researchers, e.g. Love and Li [1] in Australia; Serpell [2] in Chile; Henry [3] in France; Kam and Tang [4] and Kumaraswamy and Dissanayaka [5] in Hong Kong; Hiyassat [6] in Jordan; Saraiva et al. [7] and Ribeiro and Curado [8] in Portugal; Bubshait and Al-Atiq [9] in Saudi Arabia; Low et al. [10] and Ofori and Gang [11] in Singapore; Landin [12] in Sweden; Giles [13] and Moatazed-Keivani et al. [14] in UK; and Lindsay and Peoples [15] and Chini and Valdez [16] in USA. Furthermore, some researchers established potential linkages of ISO9000-based QMS with various other management systems such as just-in-time productivity [17], total quality management systems [18], safety management systems (e.g. [19] and [20]), and maintenance management [21]. ISO9000-based QMSs have been widely adopted in the Hong Kong construction industry, and many Hong Kong based construction contractors have chosen ISO9000 certification for more than a decade [22]. However, the majority of the contractors were reportedly led into ISO9000-based QMSs mainly by client initiated mandatory requirements for contractor selection, e.g. by the Hong Kong Housing Authority (HKHA) and the Works Departments under the Environment, Transport and Works Bureau (ETWB) in Hong Kong. While clients (both public and private clients) may have favored an ISO9000-based QMS for their contractors as a basic thrust in their quality drive, it is also chosen by some contractors themselves in anticipation of various tangible and intangible benefits, e.g. reduction of rework and wastages, improvements in documentation, marketing tool. While the client led quality initiative for construction contractors on ISO9000-based QMSs has been in place for about a decade in Hong Kong, their eventual effectiveness has not been studied in detail before. With an aim to better understand whether the implementation of ISO9000-based QMSs could effectively improve the quality of construction and benefit the stakeholders, a research exercise was recently conducted to examine the quality related impacts brought by the use of ISO9000-based QMSs. The study covered various aspects of the implementation of the ISO9000-based QMSs, such as client satisfaction regarding quality performance; end-user satisfaction with respect to quality of constructions, costs and benefits to the contractors from their implementation of ISO9000-based QMSs, and impacts on maintenance costs aspects. This paper focuses on discussing the perceived quality related impacts of ISO9000-based QMSs with respect to some ‘identified’ client satisfaction aspects only. The main research methods adopted in this study are (i) an extensive literature review, (ii) a series of focused interviews with experts from a cross section of stakeholders (e.g. clients, project supervisory personnel, contractors) and (iii) collection and analysis of project related datasets from different projects that were completed ‘before’ and ‘after’ the implementation of ISO9000-based QMSs in contractor organizations. Accordingly the discussions in this paper are presented in the following three sections—(i) essential extracts from the relevant literature on the significance of clients’ assessment of contractor performance and contractors’ quality management initiatives such as application of ISO9000-based QMSs; (ii) key findings on impacts of contractors’ ISO9000-based QMSs on client satisfaction levels—from the analyses of client maintained datasets on contractors’ performance records in pre- and post-ISO9000 implementation periods; and (iii) a basic summary of perceptions from project supervisory staff on the implementation of ISO9000-based QMSs in contractor organizations.

Quality generally refers to the totality of characteristics of a product or service that bear on its ability to (i) efficiently meet the outlined requirements/specifications and (ii) effectively satisfy the stakeholders’ needs. There is no panacea type solution for achieving such quality benefits and best value. While one cannot deny that there is a significant advancement in the overall quality of construction works and the efficiency of various construction-related organizations, it is hard to determine whether such improvements emanated from the ISO9000-based QMSs or indeed the results of other quality initiatives introduced by the clients or contractors themselves. Effective comparison of quality performance improvements from a client-satisfaction perspective requires rational analysis of massive amounts of historical datasets on relevant aspects compiled from various projects that were completed during pre- and post-ISO9000 implementation periods. The project based nature and one-off type procurement that is characteristic of the construction industry posed tremendous challenges in obtaining the required information for making such comparisons and analysis. Furthermore, hardly any clients have comprehensive sets of data that could be readily used for this type of research. The results of this study indicate that ISO9000-based QMSs are beneficial to the construction industry in general. For instance, the analyses of contractors’ performance assessments in the pre- and post-ISO9000 implementation periods indicated the potential improvements from client satisfaction perspectives. Furthermore, the consolidated observations from client's project supervisory staff confirmed that the overall quality of projects including the quality of materials should have improved after the implementation of ISO9000-based QMSs in contractor organizations. In turn, the contractors also should have benefited through reduced rework/non-compliance items and less wastage, which might have improved their profit margins as well as business opportunities. While the basic findings from this study are rather encouraging, there is a need to further validate the results through more comprehensive studies. For example, the upgrading and implementation of the new version of ISO9000, i.e. ISO9001:2000 is also deemed as mandatory for some contractors (e.g. in Hong Kong). With this recent introduction of the new version of ISO9000, a longitudinal study in ongoing construction projects to examine the real impacts of ISO9001:2000 will be very useful to more realistically assess the effectiveness of ISO9000-based QMSs in the construction industry.