Measuring Quality Performance in Construction

A strong quality culture has been recognized to be
an important prerequisite to the achievement of sustained
competitive advantage through the continuous delivery of high
quality products and services as well as clients’/end-users’
satisfaction. Today, the construction industry is one with poor
quality emphasis compared to other sectors like the
manufacturing and service sectors. Many criticisms have been
directed to the industry for generally poor workmanship. It is
not only the final product that is subjected to criticisms but the
processes and parties involved are under high pressure for
better quality in construction. This paper is in two parts; the
first part reviews the concept of quality performance in
construction projects and while the second part presents a
study conducted to compare clients’ evaluation of the quality
performance of government and private contractors around
Selangor and Johor states with the aim of finding the category
of contractors that has better quality performance at the
project-level. To this regard, a field survey was conducted.
Structured questionnaires were used to collect data. The data
collected were analyzed to determine the ranking and test of
difference in quality performance between the two categories of
contractors using Mean Item Score and t-test respectively. It
was found out that clients consider the quality performance of
private contractors to be better than that of government
contractors.