استفاده استراتژیک از گسترش کارکرد کیفیت (QFD) در صنعت ساخت و ساز

In this paper, an attempt has been made to examine the applicability of QFD as a strategic decision-making tool after the construction stage of a housing project to determine the best marketing strategy, to make a comparison between the performances of different competitors and to transfer the experience gained from the current project to the forthcoming projects. For this purpose, a QFD team has been formed to collect and verify the expectations of the customer profile of the sample project, which was a high-rise building project located in Ankara, Turkey. The case study findings demonstrated that QFD could be successfully applied in the housing projects as a strategic tool to facilitate marketing decisions. As a result of extensive literature review and the case study observations; the paper also points out the limitations and breakthroughs of the QFD methodology. Finally, critical success factors are proposed to improve the performance of the QFD methodology in construction projects.

Long-term viability of an organization mainly depends on how effectively the organization utilizes its resources for satisfying its stakeholders. For the organizations operating in the construction industry, one of the most privileged stakeholders are the clients (end users or customers depending on the project type; therefore, in the rest of this paper, client, customer and end user will be used interchangeably). Satisfying their needs and expectations is of the uttermost importance for the companies because quality is in the eye of the beholder and whatever they demand and expect from a product/project defines the quality characteristics of an entity. The unique nature of the industry necessitates the understanding of client needs and expectations for each project carefully for increasing their satisfaction level. Over the past decades, quality has been a differentiating factor within the construction industry. It has been demonstrated that despite the constraints on quality differentiation efforts (like project budget, rules and regulations, etc.), many companies are competing using quality differentiation strategy and sustaining their competitiveness in the long run [1]. Achievement of client satisfaction, however, necessitates the management of quality systematically, which further necessitates utilization of quality tools and techniques for this purpose. Quality function deployment (QFD) is one of these techniques to deal with customer needs and expectations more systematically for achieving the most important objective of a construction company, satisfaction of clients. QFD is broadly a total quality management (TQM) implementation technique requiring clear assessment of client/end-user expectations apart from the basic needs of a project to convert them into design targets. Within the context of this paper, an attempt has been made to discuss QFD as a strategic tool to increase client satisfaction with a step-by-step implementation of the methodology to a high-rise housing project and to depict limitations and challenges of QFD implementations in construction industry as a result of extensive literature survey. For this purpose, the previous works on the subject area have been categorized to find out the limitations reducing the applicability of QFD in construction. By considering these limitations, critical success factors (CSFs) for increasing the applicability in construction projects are proposed.

Within the context of this research, the QFD methodology has been applied to a real construction project and its applicability in the wider construction sector has been discussed. According to the case study implementation, it has been observed that QFD can be utilized to determine the right marketing strategy, to make a comparison with the competing alternatives and to collect data which could increase client satisfaction level in upcoming projects. Thus, using QFD during the marketing stage as an uncovered application area has been demonstrated. Although applicability and benefits of QFD have been demonstrated many times for the design stage of construction projects, limitations and challenges have not been covered in depth within the construction management literature. This paper is intended to list these limitations in a categorical format and propose CSFs to eliminate some of these limitations to improve the applicability of the technique for construction projects. To ensure the best performance in QFD applications, CSFs should be taken into account. So far, the construction industry has failed to understand or has ignored the QFD methodology as a tool to increase the quality of projects, as it is perceived by the end users. However, as the number of successful implementations increase by considering these CSFs and the companies experience the potential benefits in various stages of construction, it is believed that they will use QFD both to minimize quality-related costs and to sustain a successful strategic position in the long run.