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More than half of all construction companies recently surveyed by ACA Research find analysing and reporting on quality assurance across their business challenging. Here are five ways experts suggest a substantial investment in project QA can deliver added value for continuous business improvement.

On average, construction companies in Australia could be spending around 30 hours a week on quality assurance processes, according to ACA Research. This represents a significant investment of time and effort. However, many have difficulties when trying to make it pay off in terms of broader benefits.

The ACA survey of 162 Australian construction firms found that in a large company with more than 100 employees, the effort put into QA processes can amount to as much as 70 hours per week. Overall, 70 per cent of firms report a significant challenge in analysing and reporting on quality across their business. Meanwhile, 64 per cent believe QA should be a connected and transparent process across all areas of their firm, from policy design to data capture and reporting.

1. Establish your QA Benchmarks

A paper by KPMG, Effective reporting for construction projects: increasing the likelihood of project success, explains that given the volume of data generated during a project, effective data capture, analysis, and QA reporting requires establishing the objectives and purpose of reporting.

Data capture should focus on the information that is most useful for company decision-making. In the case of quality, that might include when rework occurred and why, and what defects were identified either before or during project inspections. It might also include time and cost overruns, post-completion defect reports, and verification of product suitability.

“Make sure you define quality from the customer’s perspective,” says Reid Ossington, General Manager of, a specialist business improvement and training consultancy

“Erroneous and complicated QA processes that do not deliver value to a customer is ‘waste’. Understand the difference between regulated quality, for example, safety standards or codes, and quality that differentiates you from the competition.”

2. Gather Information From the Ground Up

LEAN Construction and Six Sigma management systems include a number of principles that can be extremely valuable in gathering data for reporting. A Gemba Walk, for example, involves upper management regularly walking through a site and observing how the work progresses. This gives management first-hand insight into how work is carried out, which can help shape the information-gathering approach.

Another useful concept is Kaizen, which is based on a Toyota manufacturing practice of empowering every worker to suggest small changes to improve outcomes. Cumulatively, all of these small changes lead to a much larger overall improvement in quality.

“Data capture serves three purposes,” Ossington explains. “Firstly, you want to know where you have been and if you are trending in the right direction.

“Secondly, it is an indicator to other business drivers that may be affecting your quality (for example, raw material issues upstream, lack of standard work, or poor employee engagement). And finally, it creates the proof points to replicate the success or learnings in other areas of the business.”

3. Map Your Value Stream

According to, construction firms and subcontractors can improve their QA outcomes through a value-stream mapping (VSM) exercise. It identifies the activities that add project value and the ones that are wasteful in terms of materials and labour.

“When you start to manage your business processes through the value they add to the customer, you start to ‘clear the fog’ and often reduce process time or eliminate waste,” Ossington says.

“You now have a choice. You can fill that gap with other non-value-adding effort or use the freed-up resources to improve, for example, quality. An example might be allocating a freed-up staff member to create ‘built-in quality’ controls, such as poka-yoke [error-proofing] in lieu of down-stream quality checks.”

Ossington advises to “always start from the end customer.” He says, “This helps ensure your mindset has an ‘outside in’ view. You then consider every input by people, process or machine as a value-adding activity.

“We always recommend doing this with a sheet of A3 and coloured pencils. Keep it simple, and just start. It’s not a test on creating VSMs, but an opportunity to improve how your business supports customers and the quality you promise and, hopefully, deliver.

4. Make Reports Easy to Comprehend

s reporting should be clear and easy to comprehend. This way, it can be of value to stakeholders, such as shareholders, and should support any regulatory information requirements.

The level of detail required will vary depending on who is using the report and for what purpose. So KPMG suggests multiple formats, including project dashboards, summary management reports, summary cost reports, risk reports, scheduling and “look ahead” reporting.

“With the advent of sophisticated software programs and the ability to report large volumes of data on a real-time basis, there are almost limitless project reporting capabilities at an organisation’s disposal,” the.

Analysis of data underpins reporting. A by the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (RICS), Benchmarking for Infrastructure Projects outlines four key types of analytics. These are descriptive analytics (what happened), diagnostic analytics {why it happened), predictive analytics (what might happen next time), and prescriptive analytics (how to prevent problems occurring in future).

Diagnostic analytics are particularly important for QA reporting, as this process focuses on identifying the connection between features and understanding how key variables influence one another. For example, how does the scheduling of one process influence the outcome of another in terms of time taken and the level of finish achieved.

5. Use Effective Tools

Paper-based systems are not always effective in gathering, managing and reporting on quality-related data. In fact, according to 38 per cent of firms surveyed by ACA research, paper systems can even increase the risk of re-work.

Nearly half of the respondents said it is difficult to effectively monitor projects’ quality without an integrated data management platform.

“We were using a number of different platforms to manage quality and safety and made the decision to consolidate and simplify some of our processes by replicating them within ���Ǵ���’s Quality and Safety tools,” says Beau Parker, Quality Coordinator at Probuild Constructions.

“The ability to access the ���Ǵ��� platform onsite, and streamline reporting between site teams and senior management, has contributed to our ability to ensure QA processes are successfully implemented across projects.”