Quality evaluation of residential houses: the development of a real-time quality assessment tool

摘要

The construction industry has been heavily affected by the economic crisis. Product differentiation and cost reduction through improved qualities could be the way out. However, applying quality control to the construction industry is a challenging task since construction projects are highly customised, constituting the application of statistical process control principles extremely difficult. This paper presents the constituting elements of a real-time quality assessment tool for the residential housing sector. It has been designed to be used primarily for internal company purposes. In particular, utilising the tool for assessing, in real-time, the quality of the projects currently in-progress and comparing the quality of completed projects and consequently drawing conclusions about the company's quality progress. The tool's structure comprises of: 1 a model of the construction process; 2 a checklist; 3 a quality scoring algorithm; 4 an application methodology; 5 an accompanied software tool. The forthcoming challenge of the research team is to pilot test the tool and evaluate its results.