Quality assurance refers to the managerial process which determine the organisation’s design, objectives and resources, the project team, funding agencies, performance standards and feedback on the project’s performance, appropriate actions to deal with deviations and all steps necessary for promoting quality awareness at all levels and in all parts of the project organisation.
A typical quality assurance programme addresses itself to the following:
- Organisation structure of the project team and quality assurance department
- Responsibilities and powers of the various personnel involved
- Identification of the coordinating personnel
- Quality and its programmes
- Quality education and awareness
- Quality circles
- Training
- Setting up of MIS for quality
- Resolution of technical differences and disputes
- Preparation of quality assurance manuals and their checklists
- Vendor survey procedure
- Vendor surveillance procedure
QUALITY ASSURANCE ORGANISATION/ UNIT AT SITE
At construction site generally a Quality control engineer is responsible for the quality assurance and quality control. He has mainly four functions as follow:
- Setting up of standards and specifications
- Evaluating materials, processes and outputs through appropriate tests, inspection etc
- Appraising failures to these standard and acting when standards are not being adhered to
- Planning improvements in the standards and specifications.
Quality control engineer’s functions include the following:
- Development of specifications
- Interaction with project designers
- Reliability and development testing
- Process capability studies
- QC of incoming materials
- Vendor QC and vendor development
- Quality planning for control of construction process
- Inspection and testing during construction
- Interaction with services engineering
- Records and procedures
- QC record accumulation procedure
- Document control procedure
- In built drawing control procedure
- Non conformance control procedure