Effectiveness of Quality Management System (QMS) on Construction Projects

Effectiveness of Quality Management System (QMS) on Construction Projects Behnam Neyestani Email address: behnam_neyestani@dlsu.edu. ph Department of Civil Engineering, De La Salle University, Manila, Philippines. Abstract: Quality management system (QMS) provides generic guidance and requirements for establishing an appropriate quality management procedure, in order to lower cost, increase productivity, customer's satisfaction, and market share in the organizations since the last two- decade. In construction industry, it can assist the companies to achieve successfully their objectives, and ensure that all phases of construction project consistently meet client's requirements (need). The main aim of this article was to evaluate the impact of QMS implementation on main factors of construction projects in Metro Manila, Philippines. For this intention, the study was conducted an in-depth literature review from different books, journals, and websites, in order to understand profoundly quality management system, identify the characteristics of the vital factors of construction projects, and the findings of empirical studies concerning the effects of QMS on construction projects. Subsequently, a questionnaire was designed based on previous studies and then distributed randomly among the 37 managers with the aim of collecting data. Finally, the analysis of data was accomplished by descriptive statistics to find the results and conclusion. The findings have shown that the implementation of QMS can be affected mostly on customer's satisfaction, followed by cost, and time respectively, while minimum effectiveness of QMS was on scope (quality) through QMS implementation in construction projects in Metro Manila. Keywords: ISO, ISO 9000 Family; Quality Management System (QMS); Construction Projects; Critical Factors; Project Success Criteria, Customer's Satisfaction. I. INTRODUCTION The majority of the construction companies face many challenges and problems, such as “workmanship defects”, delay, and “cost overrun in complementing their projects in all over the world. Since over the past three decades, the globalization and competition have been increasing (Neyestani and Juanzon, 2016). Thus, the globalization and competition are the most important reasons that each construction company needs to improve and correct its system for achieving its objectives by management tools. As the results of studies in 776 projects across seven industries in different countries have showed construction and engineering companies were successfully achieve their goals because of being subject to particularly through planning, analysis and controlling by project management (Zwikael and Smyrk, 2011). Successful project management can be defined as having achieved the project objectives as on time, within cost, and quality (scope) to meet client's requirement (Kerzner, 2010). Quality is the most significant factor in the success of construction projects. But numerous reports have criticized the construction industry, especially in terms of productivity, quality and quality system (Ali and Rahmat, 2010), and the majority of project managers focus on the cost and time instead of quality for construction projects, but the scholars emphasize more attention should be towards quality (Mane and Patil, 2015). Nowadays, quality has not just implicated on products and services in the organizations, it can be related to the process, system, and management as well. Quality of construction project is a general philosophy by which process are carried in a total quality infrastructure (Alberto, 2011). The total quality infrastructure consists of several key pieces. The first, and one of the most important, is the quality system (Juran and Neyestani, B. (2016). “Effectiveness of Quality Management System (QMS) on Construction Projects”. http.doi. org/10.5281/zenodo.290272