A STUDY ON THE APPLICABILITY OF QUALITY CIRCLES TO CONSTRUCTION PROJECTS

Dominic Savio Roberts, Nagesh Ramamurthy, Laxman Kudva

Abstract: There is a rising need for infrastructural development in the city of Bangalore. As there are over 800 construction, civil engineering, building and development firms in and around the city, there is high competition. One of the factors which proves to be imperative in giving a competitive edge to these firms is good quality of their work among others like improved productivity and timely completion of their projects. Quality circles (QC) have been found to be a simple and productive technique of Total Quality Management (TQM) , despite having low cost of quality. Although QC is native to the production industry, it has been proposed to be implementable in construction industry. QC’s have never reportedly been used in the Indian construction industry. As the construction industry is significantly different from the production industry and the Indian organisational culture is also very different as compared to many countries like Japan where QC’s thrive, this paper seeks to analyse and study the applicability of QCs as an efficient TQM method to construction projects in and around Bangalore city. This paper seeks to accomplish this by highlighting the favourable conditions and hindrances that application of QC’s might face in Indian construction industry. The research methodology includes a detailed literature review and a questionnaire survey. The data was analysed using Index Average Method and percentage representations, both accompanied by descriptive analysis. Based on the analysis of the data obtained from the survey it was concluded that the Indian construction industry possesses various conditions which prove to be highly favourable towards the application of QC, however the temporary nature of the teams formed on construction projects, and the present organisational culture which might not support participative management have been found to be questionable conditions, which require improvement.

Keywords: Quality Circles (QC), Total Quality Management (TQM), Participative Management, and Facilitator

DOI: https://doi.org/10.15623/ijret.2015.0410012