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Abstract
The construction industry faces many challenges related to safety, schedule, cost, and quality. While outcome measurements have been established for safety, schedule, and cost, measuring success in the area of quality has been a difficult challenge to both ascertain and achieve. This exploratory study of six California hospital construction projects attempts to ascertain, through benchmarking, and achieve, through critical success factors, construction quality inspection success. California hospital construction projects are large, complex, and extremely difficult to execute and navigate. One of the primary reasons for this is the California Office of Safety Health and Planning Department's permit, review, and inspection process. The quality control rigor imposed by this third-party inspection procedure has caused great angst amongst general contractors and subcontractors alike. This study examined over 60,000 COSHPD quality inspections, spanning six California hospital projects and forty-one separate subcontractors. Specifically, descriptive statistical analyses were conducted on the total number of inspections conducted and the percentage of re-inspections or failed inspections that occurred. Surveys also were conducted in an attempt to correlate critical success factors (CSF) with actual quality inspection success.
The analysis revealed that on average nearly 1500 inspections per subcontractor occurred per project. An overall average re-inspection or failure rate of just over 9% was calculated. Benchmarking analysis revealed for major subcontractors a best inspection failure performance of 2.02% and a worst of 21.82%. These kinds of statistics are noteworthy as they are measurable data that can be applied to future projects thus alerting project teams to excessive future inspection failures and the elevated direct cost of quality. This study uniquely contributes to the body of knowledge in the area of construction quality by measuring inspection success, setting benchmarks, identifying critical success factors, and calculating the direct cost of rework on California hospital construction projects, all from a subcontractor's perspective. This study is of particular value to practitioners by providing empirical data that helps support the predictive identification of excessive rework and assists in the identification of quality critical success factors that promote inspection success and decrease the cost of quality. (Full text of this dissertation may be available via the University of Florida Libraries web site. Please check http://www.uflib.ufl.edu/etd.html)