Lets talk about quality
At the beginning of 2021, the Dutch government will introduce its Quality Assurance Act (Wkb bouw). This will mean quite a few changes to the Dutch construction industry, mostly changes to quality assurance. The law, aimed at improving construction quality across the board, will see the introduction of obligatory quality assurance carried out by private inspectors.
We think this provides an excellent opportunity to talk about quality. So, let’s talk about quality.
Quality assurance, inspections and digital tools. How do these three things fit together? Digital tools are the new black. Digitalisation has taken over society, everyone is digitalising left, right and centre. Unfortunately, construction industries worldwide are some of the slowest to take up new digital tools.
This brings us to the next point: quality assurance. We believe that digital quality assurance is the best possible way to ensure standards across the board. Both in your own business, but also across the industry. The value of digital tools lies not only in their time saving measures (which we’ll come back to later) but very much also in the data they provide.
Ensuring you have the same data on every process and documenting the same steps every time lets you see a very clear picture of your work structure. With the data provided by documenting processes digitally, it becomes much easier to pinpoint problems in your processes and deal with them. A bad kept secret of the business is the unfortunate process of signing off on quality assurance paperwork last minute. Digital tools offer enormous advantages to the businesses that understand how to implement effective digital solutions.
Document, document, document
In danger of repeating ourselves, we’ll say it again: the biggest advantage of digital tools are their ability to document.
Take, as an example, digital photo documentation. This tool offers you a way to easily document your process as you go. This way, you can track your progress as well as make sure every step is documented in case something comes up later on. Photo documentation is arguably a very simple process. But it does provide both you and your client with invaluable documentation and proof.
Documenting your work thoroughly may seem like a time-consuming task. With the right tools, however, it might actually save you time:
Imagine the same scenario as before, you’re documenting your installation of some element, let’s say a door. The door looks good, you’ve taken pictures of it, that’s done. You also need to know which door it is and where it is located. That will require some sort of note. Check, you’ve written a note, but here’s the catch. Someone will have to match the note with the picture at the office, getting it ready for a report. Instead of having separate ways of photo documentation, annotation and report creation you can use one integrated solution – voila, time saved.
We see time and time again that this is where most of the problems with quality assurance processes and documentations arise. Therefore, look into going digital.
The Dutch law foresees digital quality assurance. Other European countries are also moving in that direction. If you start today you can get ahead of the game.