How Construction Quality Management Saved Austin Commercial 30,000 Hours a Year

Austin Commercial (Austin) – part of Austin Industries – is one of the largest, most diversified builders in the United States. With a safety culture that demands zero incidents, the Austin team wanted to enhance analytics and data management around quality for successful project delivery.

How Paper-based Data Management Undermines Quality Standards

Due to antiquated paper processes, scorecards were going home with field workers, leading to data loss. In addition to data loss, communication around issue management was siloed and shared across disparate systems, including email and text. The lack of a centralized database and method for creating and tracking issues led to miscommunication and inefficiencies between project teams, causing project delays, rework, and cost overruns.

“iPads were still new, and everybody was reliant on paper-based processes. We needed to implement a construction quality management tool that would track all the information on an issue in one place, so that if someone moved off a project, that knowledge of an issue did not leave with them.”
– Jack Mangel, QA/QC Trainer

Data Standardization Requires Stakeholder Collaboration

Austin used a Process Improvement Committee (PIC) to develop standardized operating procedures for data management to improve quality standards across projects, leveraging BIM 360 within Autodesk Construction Cloud™.

The PIC included a diverse range of members with varying technical expertise ranging from superintendents to project engineers to senior project managers. The team started with assessing project data from 30 teams using BIM 360 between 24-36 months to identify what works and what does not work to refine and optimize processes. The team then used the lessons learned to create a standardized quality program that’s scalable across the company.

“In the first year, we had gone from a project team having 15 different issue types to the company standard being four-issue types. Stripping down the checklist was a huge undertaking, but a necessary action to drive consistency across our projects to make identifying, reporting, and tracking issues easier to drive higher quality deliverables for our clients.”
– Jack Mangel, QA/QC Trainer

30,000 Hours Saved by Standardized Data and Construction Quality Management

By developing standardized checklists in BIM 360, Austin was able to create:

Greater consistency in punch lists during project closeout leads to greater efficiency and organization.
More transparency and visibility into projects, so issues are well-documented regardless of who comes on or off a project.
Better alignment and flexibility in field observation reports from third-party inspections.

As a result of digitizing its quality checklists, Austin saved more than 30,000 hours annually. By getting digital tools into the hands of the field, information is managed and tracked in one place, with updates available in real-time. With greater detail in reporting, Austin’s subcontractors have all the relevant information to resolve issues faster and with greater certainty. And by standardizing issue types on checklists, Austin can understand the root cause of construction quality issues in the field with greater certainty.

With the success of standardizing its quality standards, the team is looking to apply the same process and learnings to use data analysis to uncover leading indicators to improve safety performance.

“You can have all of this data, but it is a matter of looking at it to understand and ensure successful outcomes. We are using data to shift from measuring quality after closeout to leverage data analysis to discover leading indicators that allow us to review current projects to anticipate issues and change behaviors to direct toward better outcomes.”