CE 5130 CONSTRUCTION QUALITY AND SAFETY MANAGEMENT

ASSIGNMENT-02

APPLICATION OF TOTAL QUALITY MANAGEMENT IN

REPORT SUBMITTED BY

1.K.ESWAR PRASAD (CE18G005)

INTRODUCTION

TQM is a culture, inherent in this culture is a total commitment to quality and an attitude
expressed by everybody's involvement in the process of continuous improvement of products
and services through the use of innovative scientific methods.

• Commitment from top management

• Scientific knowledge (tools and technique)
• Employee Involvement (all in one team for a social change)

Employee Involvement:
Employee involvement and empowerment is worldwide applicable technique. There is no single
option for employee involvement. It includes suggestion systems, teams, focus groups, surveys,
self-directed work groups, incentive programs and more. The goal is to determine the most
effective employee involvement options that will be linked to specific organizational goals. In
order to implement employee involvement and empowerment to an enterprise the following key
actions need to take place:
• Giving employee the responsibility
• Training employee to accept responsibility
• Communicating and giving feedback
• Giving rewards and recognition

Tools and Techniques :

1. Flowcharts – a boxes and arrows method of examining activities, potentially used in
brainstorming, also found in business process modelling
2. Fishbone / Ishikawa Diagrams – fishbone-structured diagram for identifying cause &
effect patterns, in which primary categories are generally pre-determined according to
context.
3. Run Charts – a graph which plots data / change along a timeline.
4. Pareto Charts – a line and bar graph displaying cause / effect ratios, especially biggest
relative cause, based on Pareto theory.
5. Histograms – a bar graph displaying data in simple categories which together account for
a total.
6. Checklists / Check sheets – pre-formatted lists for noting incidence, frequency, etc.,
according to known useful criteria
7. Control / Shewhart Charts – a standard pattern of performance / time for a given process,
often in Run Chart format, which acts as a template to check conformance and deviation.
8. Scatter Diagram / Scatter plot – a graph which plots points (typically very many
individual instances) according to two variables, which produces a useful visual
indication of the relationship between the two variables.
Process improvement tools such as:
FMEA
PDCA
SIPOC
Statistical Control

Top Management Commitment :

 Management commitment is not a gift. It is earned and maintained through hard work,
loyalty, communication and good staff work. Commitment from top management may be
the most critical factor in the success of any programs.
 Senior management commitment is essential to help get started with a TQM program.
Often, the first step is to convince senior managers of the financial and wider benefits and
overcome any barriers that they may have.
 One of the best ways to do this is to identify obvious areas of cost reduction and
environmental improvement and where to make immediate savings through no-cost or
low-cost measures.
The top management should strive to implement the following objectives:
 To improve the quality of products and services and innovate
 Total cultural transformation‐need to shift from old style of management
 Role of senior mgmt to plan, initiate and coordinate quality improvement process, proper
work conditions, adequate training and education, retraining retraining
 Create policy/eco‐system where there is encouragement and help available
 Create right conditions and appropriate environment

The framework of TQM is based on the Quality Triangle as shown here:

Commitment

Techniques/
Tools Involvement
This report describes the way Total Quality Management is installed in the design division, EDRC
(Engineering Design and Research Centre) of WET (Water & Effluent Treatment) IC of L&T
Construction.
TQM in EDRC-WET IC:

COMMITMENT

EDRC strictly adheres to the Quality policy of L&T Construction, which revolves around
Customer satisfaction by supporting customers’ business goals. The objective remains to
execute projects with high quality standards and services that will meet or exceed customers’
needs. It is committed to continuous improvement of its design processes by implementing
globally accepted standards such as ISO: 9001-2015.

Every year EDRC goes for an LRQA (Lloyd’s Register Quality Assurance) certification which
assesses and ascertains its performance from the view point of quality standards. Apart from
these, EDRC also conducts internal audits quarterly, to confirm quality is being followed in all
processes, methodologies, work procedures, formats, drawings, documentation thus ensuring
continuous improvement. It collects a periodical feedback from its customers for various
parameters like Co-ordination with external agencies, Material knowledge and constructible
details, Schedule adherence for deliverables, Cost and time consciousness, response time to
effect changes etc, which also aid in continuous improvement. The performance is evaluated on
a scale of 1‐10. The following figure shows a sample of a CSR (Customer Satisfaction report)
TOTAL INVOLVEMENT

EDRC maintains an exhaustive list of documents for quality assurance and quality control which
track the involvement, roles and responsibilities and accountabilities of all the stakeholders
involved in a project, for maintaining the project quality standard. The following figure shows a
list of some of these documents:
Right from the initial phase of design of collecting site inputs, plot and other clearances
through the interdisciplinary (Geotechnical, Mechanical, Electrical &Instrumentation,
Chemical and Civil) design phases, these checklists ensure that all the engineers and managers
involved are responsible for incorporating correct and exact data and designing the structures
pertaining to the customer requirements.
Further, these lists also bring in the external suppliers of equipment and materials, by using
certain parameters to evaluate their performance and ensuring that quality is not compromised
at any stages of design.
A Schedule adherence target is fixed and it is continually monitored through this framework for
maintaining the project timelines, which makes everyone involved in the design phase of
project equally responsible. The design quality performance is also tracked through the number
of revisions a document/drawing undergoes before getting approval from client.
The Design Co-ordinator/Head is the approving authority for all the EDRC documents and
he/she along with the entire team is ultimately responsible for the design deliverables.

TECHNIQUES/TOOLS
In the design phase, documentation plays an important role in quality management. The
Quality Management Manual consists of a protocol which has to be followed across the entire
company for naming of the documents, status of document (Preliminary, Approval, Good for
Construction etc) and maintaining the revision history. This helps in a uniform understanding
across all the disciplines and sections, and also ensuring that the correct document/drawing is
used for project execution/construction purpose.
There are statistical tools such as Pareto Analysis, Checklists, Histograms, Flowcharts etc used
for analysis of the defects, NCR (Non‐Conformities) and a feedback mechanism to ensure that
corrective action is taken in proper timeframes.
Maintaining Hard copies of documents and keeping a track of them is a cumbersome task. For
this, there is an in‐house EDMS (Electronic Database Management System), where all the
documents are uploaded for inter‐disciplinary checking, approvals, vendor evaluation as per the
Document Control Index schedules. The workflow of EDMS passes the documents to each
authority in a hierarchical manner. It generates automatic reports on EDRC’s performance based
on certain parameters like No. of revisions for each document before approval, Schedule
adherence of all the documents, Customer Satisfaction Reports etc.
EDRC also in order to evolve its Quality Management uses Six-Sigma statistical tool based on
DMAIC (Define-Measure-Analyze-Improve-Control) project methodology where the targets
and benchmarks are defined based on feasibility and actual capabilities.
L&T Construction‐WET IC‐EDRC seeks to go beyond the compliance with regulatory standards in
pursuit of excellence and also assigns equal weightage to Innovation as a part of its Total Quality
Management (TQM) philosophy. The entire team is encouraged for applying feasible innovative
methods or construction practices in the design phase and the project is suitably rated and
appreciated.