Autodesk BIM 360

Quality Management
In The Digital Age

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Introduction
Today we are well into the digital revolution, and all industries are trying
to figure out how to take advantage of the tools at our disposal so that we
can best take advantage of digital technology. This resource focuses on how
you can improve the underlying processes in your quality program through
technology.

The following content was developed in partnership with a group of global

construction professionals and industry thought leaders who have shared
their experiences so that you can benefit from their lessons learned.

What’s Inside
• Benefits of a Digital • State 3: Pro-Active
Program
• State 4: Collaborative
• Inspection & Test Plan
• Stage 5: Continual
• Digital Communication Improvement ­­
Plan
• Reporting
• 5 Stages of a Digital QA
• Capturing Knowledge &
Program
Experience
• State 1: Re-Active

• State 2: Organized

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Benefits of a Digital Program

It’s important that you understand the potential benefits of a digital quality program. Though there are many benefits, we’ve attempted to group them into
four major categories: risk mitigation, improved quality leading to minimized rework, winning more business, and creating operational excellence.

1 RISK MITIGATION
A General Contractor’s primary goal is to minimize risk in many forms. One into all of the inspections that are being performed. What this did was
of the most common areas of risk is ensuring your team is building off put in context the number of deficiencies identified. Based on the project
the most up to date set of information. A digital document management complexity, having a dozen unresolved defects or – as you might call them
platform solves this problem by linking office and field through real-time – non-conformance issues might sound like a negative thing if that’s all
communication and document exchange. you really know, but if your client sees that you inspected 30 areas of work
last week and made over a thousand quality observations, then 12 non-
Using a single, cloud-based storage solution for project documents conforming items in context seems very manageable.
allows field workers to access the most up to date versions of digital
plans and models on their mobile devices. Updates sent from the office
are immediately visible to team members in the field. The entire project 4 OPERATIONAL EXCELLENCE
team is notified in real-time the instant a change is made, allowing them
to comment on or question any points requiring further clarification. With When we say a digital quality program improves operational excellence,
delays in communication virtually eliminated, the end result is fewer RFIs we’re referring to how it can enhance a company internally from its people,
and increased accuracy of work done on site. Ultimately lowering risk and process, and relationships with third parties. Many will argue that the most
allowing more time to be spent driving the project toward completion. important asset any construction company has is its people along with
their collective knowledge and experience. A digital quality program gives
an organization the ability to take the best practice and knowledge from its
2 IMPROVED QUALITY & MINIMIZED REWORK most experienced teammates and capture it to be carried forward in the form
of a checklist.
Construction quality problems that cost the most are the ones you miss.
Adopting technology to digitize your quality program helps you to standardize
processes and reduce rework. For example, teams can pro-actively manage
quality across the project by completing inspections with digital checklists.
With digital checklists, team members can execute them from any device
in the field. Instead of having to write down every observation they can add
notes, attach photos, or instantly create issues for any non-conforming
items, and assign them to the subcontractor for resolution.

3 WIN MORE BUSINESS

A digital quality program allows you to improve the visibility of inspection
and test program to the project stakeholders you see fit. Many contractors
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have reported improved relationships with their clients by providing visibility
Inspection & Test Plan

Your inspection and test plan or ITP forms the foundation of your proactive
quality assurance program and may be included in your works method
statement. It may reference what bodies of work are expected in reference
to specification sections, when the inspections are to be performed, on
what frequency, who performs them, how information is captured including
whether a photo should be captured, where information will be stored, and
if inspection will be part of client delivery. It should also include how non-
conformances and conformance items will be documented and managed.
Optionally, we want to begin to tie inspections to the project schedule, major
milestones, and location of installation. One of our partners says that since
our implementation of dedicated digital workflow processes and procedures,
our quality standards – i.e. their inspection and test plans – have become
centralized and consistent throughout the entire company no matter what
the project size is or where the project location is. Due to having multiple
office locations, this is critical to our success in keeping our company’s
standards.
EXPERT TIP - MAKE ITP’S USER-FRIENDLY
The best way to make ITP’s user-friendly is to keep it simple!
These are very important documents that if implemented
successfully provide a tool to ensure structure and integrity
in your quality program, but if you let them get too large or
complex, they’re just as likely to gather dust.
Another way to keep it simple is to create quick guides for
easy reference. For each major application like wall tiles,
create a single-page guide that highlights the things that are
important, includes a reference benchmark, and then links
to the appropriate specification or checklist inspections if
further detail is required.

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Digital Communication Plan

The goal of a digital communication plan is to have a clear understanding and

expectations of quality among all stakeholders at the onset of the project.
Then a way in which you’re able to hold all stakeholders accountable for
their bits. A digital communication plan helps you identify three important
things. One, the stakeholder, two, the frequency of communication with that
stakeholder, and three, the digital output.

It’s important that you clearly outline the expectations of your quality
assurance process at the beginning of the project with the client or project
owner. The more detail you provide upfront, the less objective the judgment of
the deliverable will be at handover. Be sure that this expectation aligns your
ITP and procedure, the client’s involvement in the inspection, and whether or
not the design team is going to be involved. You want to know what visibility
and reporting will be provided during and after the inspections, perhaps
most importantly, a well-defined client handover process including training
and data deliverables.

With all of your trades and subcontractors, be sure to include language in

their contracts around their involvement in the inspection process. Share
your inspection and test plan with them. Outline your quality assurance
procedures including resolution of non-conformances, RFIs, and change
orders including the expectations on timeliness and level of documentation
of the responses. In this sample we’ll see that the stakeholder, frequency,
meeting, and digital output have been defined. Focusing on the digital output
drives visibility needed for real collaboration and holds all stakeholders
accountable.

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5 Stages of a Digital QA/QC Program

When implementing a digital QA/QC program, it’s important to take reasonable steps; often one at a time so that your team has the opportunity to adjust
and does not feel overwhelmed. To this end, we’ve developed a five-stage evolution to help you decide what steps you will take.

CONTINUAL
RE-ACTIVE ORGANIZED PRO-ACTIVE COLLABORATIVE
IMPROVEMENT

Defects electronically
documented on-the-fly
and tracked through
resolution.
Digital checklist
inspections performed.
Both conforming
and nonconforming
observations documented.
Checklist inspections Key stake-holders Enable team to feedback
scheduled in relation to including trades and learning and process
specific milestones. subs participate in digital improvement into
checklist program. program.

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Stage 1: Re-Active

A CENTRALIZED DIGITAL ISSUE LOG

A great starting point is to digitize all of your reactive quality management defects and non-conformances by implementing a centralized digital issue log.
This will help drive ownership, make sure nothing slips through the cracks, ensure it’s all documented including corrective action and resolution.

The core features of a centralized digital issue log include:

• A single digital repository for stakeholders to access anytime, anywhere.

• Real-time access with the ability for multiple stakeholders to collaborate and make updates without overriding one another.

• Role-based permission enabling privacy and security while helping to manage workflows.

CONTINUAL
RE-ACTIVE ORGANIZED PRO-ACTIVE COLLABORATIVE
IMPROVEMENT

Define Information Central Repository Define Permissions Define Resolution Train Team Collect Feedback &
To Capture With Mobile & Access Procedure Iterate
Interface

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Stage 1: Re-Active

DEFINE INFORMATION TO CAPTURE DEFINE RESOLUTION PROCEDURE

1 4
• Create standard checklist templates. • Define how different types of issues will be
resolved.

• Build a status workflow assigning

responsibility at each stage.

5 TRAIN TEAM
• Build an on-boarding program to ensure
your team and stakeholders have the
training needed to be successful.

6 COLLECT FEEDBACK & ITERATE

• Ensure there’s a feedback loop.

• Collect feedback from your team to

continually improve your solution and
workflows.
CENTRAL REPOSITORY WITH MOBILE INTERFACE
2
• Determine where your central issue log will live. Most
common is a cloud-based database to enable real-time
access.

• Mobile component to log or address defects at the point of

construction.

3 DEFINE PERMISSIONS & ACCESS

• Determine permission levels.

• Often based on project roles. Example, trades my only have

access to modify certain information for just the issues
they’re associated with. AUTODESK BIM 360 | 6
Stage 1: Re-Active

CHECKLIST TEMPLATE LIBRARY

Develop a cloud-based checklist template library for teams to easily pull from.

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Stage 2: Organized

DIGITAL CHECKLISTS
Next, we want to get even more organized by bolstering our inspection and test plans with checklist inspections. This will cover you by ensuring conforming
in addition to non-conforming observations are documented.

The benefits of developing checklist templates include:

• Ease in documenting all conforming inspection points in addition to non-conforming issues. Allowing you to positively confirm conformance.

• Serving as a guide making sure event the smallest items aren’t missed.

• Driving conformance in how you execute your quality program, regardless of who is doing the inspection.

• Increases speed for documenting quality observations allowing you to observe and document a great number of inspection points resulting in
higher quality.

• Leveraging a digital program allows you to analyze inspection results to better track quality program performance including inspection coverage
and conformance rates.

CONTINUAL
RE-ACTIVE ORGANIZED PRO-ACTIVE COLLABORATIVE
IMPROVEMENT

Document Serves As A Guide Provides Best-In-Class Improved Speed Track Coverage

Conforming & Consistency Knowledge & Number Of (Risk) &
Non-conforming Regardless Of Available Inspections Conformance Rates
Inspector Performed
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Stage 2: Organized

SAMPLE QUALITY CHECKLIST

With a cloud-based project management software such as Autodesk BIM 360 teams can assign checklists to team members to execute from any
device in the field. Add notes, attach photos, or create issues during inspection for any non-conforming items.

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Stage 2: Organized

NON-CONFORMANCE ISSUE CAPTURING

For any non-conforming items, easily create issues straight from the checklist and assign them to the subcontractor creating clear accountability to
ensure quick resolution.

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Stage 3: Pro-Active

INSPECTION ACTIVITIES IN SCHEDULES

Once you’re comfortable with your checklist inspections, get proactive and start linking them to milestones in your project schedules and discussing their
use in your look-ahead planning meetings. This process assures your team is planning for inspections that will occur with specific tasks and work packages,
so you don’t get caught on the back foot.

Many teams will conduct 2, 4 or 6-week look-ahead planning meetings where they gather with all relevant stakeholders to talk about what work needs to be
performed and in what sequence in the coming weeks. During this meeting, one topic should be what quality measures need to be put in place for specific
work, and you want to discuss WHAT, WHO and HOW.

CONTINUAL
RE-ACTIVE ORGANIZED PRO-ACTIVE COLLABORATIVE
IMPROVEMENT

WHAT WHO HOW

work will be will inspect it at will they inspect it?
inspected? each stage?

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Stage 4: Collaborative

CONTINUAL
RE-ACTIVE ORGANIZED PRO-ACTIVE COLLABORATIVE
IMPROVEMENT

INSPECTIONS WITH TRADES & SUBS

Once your team is on-board, we want to get collaborative by
enabling your trades and subcontractors to participate in the
checklist inspection program. In your two, four, or six-week look-
ahead planning meetings involve your trades and subcontractors
when building out your checklist to improve alignment and set
expectations. This will reduce the number of non-conformances
and resultant re-inspection efforts required. As one of our thought-
leading partners describes it, they turned a corner on their quality
program when they enabled their subcontractor partners to take
ownership for their own quality program before they invested time
into quality-assuring their work. For some subcontractors, they went
so far as to allow the subcontractors to load their own checklist into
their digital quality management system.

This may not be necessary for all inspections. You may require this
for particularly complex bodies of work or maybe you require it when
you identify that a particular subcontractor is struggling to perform
a particular body of work. Depending on your team’s culture, you
may take a top-down approach and mandate it by including language
describing the expectations of your subcontractor’s involvement
in their contracts. Mandating collaboration will only get you so far,
though. You also need to ensure that your subs are on-board by
explaining what’s in it for them and why this way of working benefits
the entire project. Then do as much as you can to make it easy for
them to make the transition.

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Stage 5: Continual Improvement ­­

CONTINUAL
RE-ACTIVE ORGANIZED PRO-ACTIVE COLLABORATIVE
IMPROVEMENT

Finally, put in place a continual improvement loop so that the

improvement never end! One way of doing this is by developing
a central knowledge repository for sharing information on
your project or across all projects in your company. This may
include best practices, lessons learned, or even your checklist
templates. Put in place an easy process where any project
team member can initiate improvement to the checklist
templates with lessons learnt or from gathering insights from
issue defects that continually pop up. This isn’t too far off how
in the original lean manufacturing any member on an assembly
line could hold up their hand and stop the assembly line and
offer a process improvement idea to management. Leverage
recognition programs to find subject matter experts and give
them a microphone to share their knowledge and experience
with the rest of the organisation.

This could take a couple of forms. One way is an annual

awards program with a referral program that allows you to
create multiple categories for awards. Some examples might
be awards in excellence for particular project programs like
quality or safety, perhaps using project performance metrics
like coverage to identify award candidates. Another award
might be an award for innovation where you can identify
folks for improvement in process or their use of technology;
maybe even an award for collaboration that spotlights multi-
stakeholder project teams. Alternatively, to an awards program
you can more informally develop a lunch-and-learn program
or webinar series where you can spotlight subject matter
experts. Give them more visibility in the company while at the
same time helping the rest of your company learn from their
knowledge or experience.

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Reporting & Analytics

Debatably, the largest benefit of a digitized quality program is that you now have the data that – if appropriately organized – can surface insights into project
and program performance, arming your team with the knowledge to make more informed decisions on a daily basis.

3 COMMON METRICS FOR SUCCESS ROOT CAUSE REPORTING

Three of the most common metrics for quality programs are coverage,
conformance rate, and subcontractor scoring.
1 Coverage - is a measure of the number of inspections or quality
observations performed. By monitoring this we have a way to better
With a digital quality program, we can learn from our past so that we can
better arm ourselves for the future. That’s why putting in place a root cause
reporting system is so important. Here’s a five-step approach to enhancing
your root cause program.

understand our level of risk or exposure on the project. Since on projects we
can’t check everything, we have to rely on sampling. Well, it holds that the
more inspections or the more observations that we make, the less likely we
are to miss something and thus the lower the risk profile on the project. The
inverse is also true.
2 Conformance rate - is a measurement of the percentage of work
performed correctly upon initial installation. You can review this by
inspection type to understand which areas of work or inspection procedures
produced the highest or lowest conformance. This information will arm
you with an understanding of subcontractor performance and areas for
improvement. It also helps you identify where your team is spending
additional time managing the trades and subs. If every non-conformance
takes you three hours to determine the corrective action, that is taking away
from the time that can be spent performing value-add tasks like additional
inspections, increasing your coverage, and reducing risk.
First look at existing and known issues to understand patterns. Second,
determine a set of common root causes. Be sure that any root cause you
determine would be actionable, meaning there’s something you could do
to improve next time. Also, keep the list as simple as possible if you want
folks to fill it out. Third, make sure your team understands how to classify
all defects with the root cause. Fourth, out of a centralized digital issue log,
pull together all the root causes over a specified period of time. Find your
biggest offenders in terms of how often they appear, how large their impact
when they are, and how actionable you could prevent them. Fifth, take action
against the root cause and follow up and measure any change to drive
accountability and further learning. This is a loop that should never end.

3 Subcontractor scoring - by measuring subcontractor performance,

you have an opportunity to identify and help struggling subcontractors
improve and have more information for the next project when you’re selecting
your team. We recommend putting together a subcontractor scorecard
system. Your scorecard can get more advanced as your digital quality
program evolves. As a starting point, you can leverage information out of
your central digital issue log. This may include counting the number of issues
by severity including those that had a schedule or cost impact, those that
affected others, and the average time to resolve those issues as a measure of
responsiveness. As you integrate checklist data your program becomes more
advanced and you can analyze trends to determine performance on specific
bodies of work or even specific sections or items on your checklists. AUTODESK BIM 360 | 14
Reporting & Analytics

REPORTING SUMMARY
Now that you’ve looked at some examples of how you can leverage digital information to surface insights and improve your understanding of project
performance, let’s recap how this is done regardless of what stage of development your digital quality program is. Here are five simple steps.

Have open discussions with your corporate or project team

1 stakeholders and understand how you’re going to measure success.

Determine where the data needs to come from to create those metrics
2 and how that information is going to be collected by your team.

Determine how that information is going to

3 presented out to your team.

Be sure to follow up and take action on those

4 insights. Data for the sake of data is useless.

Don’t stop improving. Collect feedback and

improve process. As your digital quality program
5 evolves and more data is captured, supplement
metrics or feed in additional ones.

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Capturing Knowledge & Experience

Construction at its core is a people business. The value of a construction

company is their employees and their knowledge plus their relationship with
subcontractors; more people. The median age of a construction worker is
high according to the US and UK census data and by 2025 75% of workers will
be millennials. Before our people retire we need to unlock all the knowledge
and experience in their brains so that the future generations can benefit.

Here are two idea for doing this:

1 Corporate Template Checklist Program - we want to capture all

that knowledge and experience by digitising it. When building your
corporate template checklist program, sit down or follow around your
most senior site managers and pick their brains as they perform specific
inspections. Ask them what to inspect and what to watch out for in different
scenarios. Some teams I’ve worked with have been effective in assembling a
task force to do this.

2 Apprenticeship Program - perhaps a bit more radical… you can bring

back but also reinvent the apprenticeship program. Traditionally pair
up your junior site personnel with your senior experienced site managers, but
create a relationship that’s bidirectional. The senior teammates share their
deep domain knowledge and experience as in a traditional apprenticeship,
but in return the junior teammates who were born in the digital age instead
of being immigrants to it assist in the use of electronics and technology. This
bidirectional apprenticeship fosters a much greater mutual respect, provides
benefit for both parties, and drives ownership for both generations.

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 Whether you’re just starting out or are well on your way toward a fully digitized
quality management solution, we hope we helped provide you with some new
ideas or helped you better structure how to think about some of the things you
already were familiar with.

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