EVALUATING THE CONTRACTORS’ QUALITY CONTROL PRACTICES ON CONSTRUCTION SITES IN MALAYSIA

Abstract

Quality is a standard of something that measured against other similar thing of its kind, whereas quality control is a process that involve in a production stage of a product that will determine the product’s standard. Quality can also be defined as meeting the legal, aesthetic and functional requirements of a project. It also can be defined from the view point of function, by how closely the project conforms to its requirements (Arditi and Gunaydin, 1997). Quality control requires the site person and the site team to inspect the accomplished work to ensure its alignment with the project scope. In practice, projects typically have a dedicated quality control team which focuses on this area (Quality control, http://en.wikipedia.org). According to Oxforddictionaries.com, quality control is a system of maintaining standards in manufactured products by testing a sample of the output against the specification (Oxford dictionaries, 2013). Performing quality control involves monitoring specific project result to ensure that they comply with the relevant quality standard while identifying ways to improve overall quality. The main outputs of quality control include quality control measurements, validated changes, validated deliverables, organizational process asset updates, change requests, project management plan updates, and project document updates (Schwalbe, 2011). Thus, this study aimed at evaluating the contractor’s quality control practices on construction site in Malaysia and to determine the commonly used practices in construction site.