The Impact of Implementing a System Approach to Quality: A General Contractor Case Study

This paper introduces a novel General Contractor approach to quality management called the Systems Approach to Quality (SAQ), which shares the Behavior-Based Quality (BBQ) concern for individual initiative and responsibility, and Quality Function Deployment (QFD) principles. Building on that previous work, this paper investigates the quantitative and cultural impacts of implementing a company’s SAQ approach in its construction projects across the U.S. To do so, the authors examine lagging indicators of various performance areas including cost, schedule, quality, safety, and changes for a group of projects that implemented the SAQ approach and compare them to another group of projects that did not. The hypothesis under investigation is that SAQ implementation in projects improves performance across a range of critical indicators. Furthermore, the study compares project culture in projects where SAQ was implemented to those where it was not using Quinn’s Competing Values Framework (CVF). The early results from this work indicate that the implementation of an approach such as SAQ leads to significant financial and non-cost benefits including improved collaboration.