One evening a few years ago, the manager of an offshore oil and gas rig in the Gulf of Mexico called me out of the blue. Their new facility was experiencing a dangerous quality problem. Almost all of its more than 2,000 bolted pipe connections were leaking. I was in crisis mode and needed immediate help to diagnose and fix the problem.
Many cups of coffee later, we found out what had happened. Workers at the shipyard that built the rig had tightened most of the bolts by hand, rather than using calibrated torque wrenches required by standard operating procedure. Somehow, the loose bolts were not detected during the initial inspections. More than 75% was leaked once the systems were pressurized.
Unfortunately, stories like this are not uncommon in modern construction and manufacturing.
Indeed, loose screws have been in the news quite a bit after the Jan. 5 Alaska Airlines door plug incident, and subsequent quality investigations by manufacturer Boeing Co. and its suppliers. Even the most experienced workers make mistakes, and intense schedule and cost pressures make mistakes more likely.
The construction industry faces a persistent 30% rework rate on projects, which adds an average of 12% to total project costs, according to a 2023 study published in the journal. Quality and quantity. Overwork is also the cause of 39% of all worker injuries, according to construction industry consultant BBI Services.
High rework rates contribute to the larger problem of projects going over budget and behind schedule. These are not caused by a lack of knowledge of how to build things.
missing
Industry has proven methods for building and maintaining the built environment. Rather, it is systems for training and managing field workers—giving them the right information when they need it and verifying that the work is done correctly—that have not kept pace with other industry improvements driven by the technology
Many construction planning, scheduling, and turnaround processes have been digitized, but fieldwork is still mostly done on paper, if at all.
Improving the quality of work requires changes in both culture and processes.
For culture, we can use many of the same strategies that are used to improve workplace safety. Leaders should make it normal to talk about and learn from quality failures, without fear of retribution. Workers and supervisors who identify quality risks should be rewarded, not shunned. For process, leaders should look to ISO 9000, the “gold standard” for effective quality management systems,
It boils down to three basic principles: Write what you do; do what you write; and make sure you do.
In construction, this means that contractors should have written procedures for all critical work processes; train teams on these procedures; ensure that a system is set up to confirm that the correct procedure has been followed for each work activity; and perform periodic audits to confirm all of the above.
Unfortunately, many believe that balancing quality and productivity is a zero-sum game, so quality suffers when time is short. But that doesn’t have to be the case. Quality and productivity tin improve at the same time.
Technology now allows fieldwork to be tracked with the same level of accuracy available for tracking Amazon package deliveries. Over the past five years, data platforms have been used to track more than 7 million completed jobs at the individual worker level. In addition to improving the quality of work, the data has provided amazing insight for users to increase the productivity of the workforce.
Optimized work team
One user’s data showed that 80% of the field work on their projects was done by 40% of the workers, with no material difference in the quality of the work. Some workers had low rework rates but moved slowly. Others were fast, but had rework rates well over 30%. With this data, the user was able to improve both quality and productivity by optimizing their workforce to balance efficiency and quality. High performers were rewarded, and low performers were corrected or removed from the project.
Capturing detailed workflow data also allows managers to identify process bottlenecks with greater specificity. A user who found that the job took 35% more time than expected on average was able to identify the culprit, almost always, as the QA step in the workflow.
Workers generally completed tasks on schedule, but spent longer than expected waiting for a certified inspector to approve the work and were unable to move on to the next task, exacerbating the delay.
These process inefficiencies were not visible in legacy project management tools, but the new data helped project managers highlight an improved quality control process: reducing wait times by 60% and maintaining rates below-average rework, so projects got back on track and stayed there.
Build quality and productivity challenges will worsen as a generation of veteran tradesmen retires and are replaced by less experienced crews. Inefficiencies like the examples above are often invisible or obscured, but are easily resolved once noticed.
Collecting quality, worker-level data in real time will help improve the skills of the industry’s workforce, complete projects on time, and ensure the job gets done right the first time, every time.
Matthew Kleiman is co-founder and CEO of Cumulus Digital Systems, a Cambridge, Mass.-based cloud-based platform enabling connected work in construction and manufacturing, and author of Job well done: using systems thinking to guide your digital transformation. He can be contacted at matt@cumulusds.com
