What is the role of IT in Quality Management?

“The EPC sector is a wide field with a range of players offering a range of services, from design to contracting to turnkey projects. At WRENCH we address the entire gamut, but the design/engineering firms hold a special place for me because they were my first customers.”

The EPC sector is a wide field with a range of players offering a range of services, from design to contracting to turnkey projects. At WRENCH we address the entire gamut, but the design/engineering firms hold a special place for me because they were my first customers.

The interesting thing about the construction industry is that although the E phase is highly critical – some would argue the most critical – it gets the least love, so to speak. Far more time and money is spent in streamlining the P and C phases. Speaking as an IT provider, I am constantly amazed that the industry is still focussed on data/document management rather than optimizing the engineering process as a whole.

At a recent event, I had the pleasure of speaking to the owners of small engineering and design firms and some interesting conversations developed. I thought I would share some of the key questions we discussed. (To keep this blog tidy I’ll be splitting this post into multiple parts). One question I heard a lot was on the lines of “We’re a small design company, we have a QMS but how can IT help me enforce it? How can I make sure my team follows the procedures defined and so ensure the quality of all deliverables? I understand how IT can increase efficiency, but quality?”

I understand the hesitancy. How can an engineering process be automated? Is that even possible?

A common concern. Let’s explore it.

At first glance, it seems obvious why using IT to ensure quality is counter-intuitive. Quality is a manually-enforced process, driven by human skill and dedication. So it has always been. But should it always remain so? Once you accept that a ‘manually-driven’ process is by its very nature limited, the solution becomes obvious: automate! Automate the smaller steps that make up a deliverable and watch quality become the default outcome.

Let’s say you have a deliverable from a civil discipline. The civil engineer designs it,the civil draftsman drafts it, it goes to the civil checker, then to the interdisciplinary check, after which comments are incorporated and sent back to the civil engineer who incorporates those comments and changes. It then goes to the project manager who sends it to the client. The client may send it to a PMC, in which case more comments may be added and sent back – and so on. At first glance, this seems a very human ie expertise-driven work process with not much room for automation. But this is exactly my point – if you open up to the idea of separating ‘human expertise’ from the process, then you open up the idea of improving the process, via automation. And so 100% efficiency becomes not only possible but inevitable.

I designed my software SMARTPROJECT to help my customers re-think their processes and the roles and responsibilities of people involved. Whatever could be automated was built into the system and only where human intelligence was truly necessary did a human have to step in. In the example above, let’s say you break down the process and its various loops and back-and-forths into a systematic series of steps, each with an owner. You then automate those steps one by one. So now the system automatically sends the deliverable from one step to another, exactly on time, and with no possibility for human error or misunderstandings. You still need human expertise for the actual reviewing and commenting of course, but the comments get recorded, appended, logged, tagged, and even shared to the concerned group automatically. And that is how the defined review process plays out in real life exactly as it was defined on paper. Which gets you one step closer to quality.

The second aspect of achieving quality through IT is that automation empowers users. How? By making tedious task less tedious. If to err is human, then automation is definitely a solution. Consider this: during the process of the work flow, a user forgets something or skips a step inadvertently. That tiny mistake can snowball. With an automated system you can prevent both the initial mistake and its fallout. You can build in checks and reminders, or a complete checklist, and set up the system to ‘prompt’ the user. (SMARTPROJECT ‘pops up’ a check list and walks the user through the various check points so nothing gets sidestepped or overlooked. For example, ISO 9001 2015 defines a risk mitigation process. With an automated system you can follow this process exactly as defined in every detail.)

Finally, I believe quality is about Staying Informed. Meaning, working with the latest information. Engineering is not a static process, there are many people involved and so although the process is (or should be) fixed, the way the process is followed can change, or parameters and paradigms can shift, or priorities can ebb and flow. The process itself might get modified and some of those modifications may change the deliverable. That is why you need to have the history of all those changes archived and accessible. You need to know what is the latest status of your deliverable but at the same time you need to know the history of the deliverable’s lifecycle. In WRENCH, it was this need for our customers to stay on top of both the entire ‘timeline’ and the latest status that first got us thinking about Real-Time Monitoring which eventually became one of the unique features SMARTPROJECT offers.

So those are the three main ways I believe IT can help engineering organisations achieve quality. Questions? Feedback? Leave a comment below.