A cooperative Internet-facilitated quality management environment for construction

The failure of construction projects can be minimized if quality is closely scrutinized and controlled throughout the design and construction stages. However, some organizations treat quality management as a routine exercise and pay little attention to the implementation of quality management systems. As a result, the expected improvement in quality at both project and organization levels has not been truly realized. Concurrent checking, reporting and auditing are necessary to improve the quality of an organization and its works. However, an immense amount of time and effort is required to report, input, retrieve, analyze and disseminate the data instantaneously. Therefore, an automated and user-friendly quality management system would be helpful. A web-based quality management system could be an effective tool for gathering, filtering, managing, assessing, and sharing quality data at project and corporate levels. The aim of this study is to examine the potential for applying the web-based techniques to collect, manage, assess and distribute quality-related data. A prototype system has been developed, and the results indicate that quality management data can be collected from various project participants to improve the transparency and efficiency of a construction project. © 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.