A Building Project-Based Industrialized Construction Maturity Model Involving Organizational Enablers: A Multi-Case Study in China

How to Assess Sustainable Planning Processes of Buildings? A Maturity Assessment Model Approach for Designers

Over the past decades, it has become apparent that increasing demands in the construction industry have repeatedly led to project delays and increased project costs in practice. These demands have increased as a result of international and national action plans that have been developed to achieve the climate target paths and, therefore, the necessary reduction of CO2 emissions in the construction industry. We address this problem by developing a sustainable construction maturity model (SCOMM) to answer the following research question: “What is a holistic quality assurance tool for the early design phase of buildings to monitor (sustainable) planning practices in order to achieve better certification results?”. The model includes a self-assessment procedure for the building design process, based on Software Process Improvement and Capability dEtermination (SPiCE) and the German Sustainable Building Council (DGNB) building certification system. The results show that systemic interactions between sustainability criteria can be identified in the early design phase, allowing the quality of planning practices to be evaluated and early project management to be implemented to achieve the best certification results. Our findings will enable clients and users of the construction industry to better manage the complexity of the sustainable design process and avoid undesirable developments in building projects.

Evaluation of eMaintenance Application Based on the New Version of the EFQM Model

Maintenance management is connected with two opposing aspects, management costs and operational efficiency. With the implementation of new technology within the Industry 4.0 (I4.0) concept, new technical solutions are being created. These solutions (mainly robotic workplaces) must reach a maximum performance rate, production quality, and, of course, high availability. Their operation, during the whole life cycle, is expected to be absolutely safe with minimum maintenance costs. These trends, even though they seem to be optimistic, face a lot of problems. The conducted research follows up on the results of previous research aimed at the initial assessment Slovak industrial company readiness status for the I4.0 conception between 2017 and 2019. The aim of the ongoing research was to assess the readiness status in more than 70 industrial organizations in the selected area for the new concept of maintenance management (eMaintenance) and its relation to machinery integrated safety. The research was carried out by questioning, with the structure of individual questions and closed answers stemmed from the self-evaluation according to the new European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) Excellence Model (2020). The results of the research were presented to managements of questioned organizations and confirmed the assumptions about a low level of maintenance management transformation to eMaintenance.

Understanding the Key Quality Factors in Construction Projects—A Systematic Literature Review

Project management frameworks describe the preferred approaches to project quality management, as well as applicable methods and tools. Despite this, quality problems in the construction project are still widespread. This study aimed to identify crucial quality-related factors in construction project management and find relations between them, to help researchers and project managers better respond to quality issues. A systematic literature review (SLR) was used to identify previous studies on quality-related factors. Literature review and further quantitative analysis revealed that quality-related factors are related to three categories: Quality of project process, quality of organisational processes, and quality of results (products), which together create the quality of the whole construction project. The results highlight quality-related factors (14 related to the quality of processes, 6 to quality of an organisation, and 13 to quality of products) that should be taken into account in further research, as well as planning and executing construction projects. Their inclusion at the planning stage should help project managers, sponsors, and steering committees avoid or minimise quality-related problems. Moreover, this study sheds an interesting light on quality. We found that the quality of processes and quality of an organisation has precedence over the final product quality. Based on the results of the study, structural equation modelling (SEM) was used to create a null model that will be the starting point for further research in the construction enterprises.

Performance Evaluation of the Urban Cadastral System in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

The cadastral system is a land management and land administration tool to provide a safe and reliable real property registration system. In Ethiopia, however, the attempts to implement a reliable urban cadastral system have not been successful, which translates into a deficient land administration system. This paper is an evaluation of the performance of the urban cadastral system of Addis Ababa, based on the European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) excellence model. The nine criteria of the model were used as independent and dependent variables. Data were collected through interviews, Likert-type questionnaires, and focus group discussions, and validated with method-to-method technique. Qualitative and quantitative data analysis techniques (ordinal logistics regression model) were employed. In order to ascertain reliability of the data, Cronbach’s alpha reliability test was performed in SPSS, and a coefficient of 0.883 was calculated, confirming that the items (questions) have relatively high internal consistency. According to the statistical result from the independent variables, the people result criteria estimated the achievement of cadastral organization at most (1.724). The societal result predicted with a coefficient of 0.281 less. This indicates that the people criterion determines more importantly than other variables. Overall, the independent variables scored the performance of the cadastral organization 24.92 out of 40 points. Findings from interviews and group discussion also confirmed that the most bottlenecks for the organizational achievement are the strategic plan, quality of leadership, bureaucratic processes, and supply of resources. Therefore, we suggest that the responsible authorities need to pay more attention to the enabler criteria (especially, the design of policy and strategy, quality of leadership, provision of resource and partnership, and the process), in order to improve the achievements of the urban cadastral system organization.

Improvements of Design for Safety in Construction through Multi-Participants Perception Analysis

For several decades, the number of reported accidents and fatal incidents in the construction industry has remained high compared to those in other industries. Therefore, many studies have been conducted in an effort to reduce accidents and fatal incidents in the construction industry. Recently, construction safety management has shifted from the construction phase to the pre-construction phase, ultimately to eliminate fatal incidents. In line with this change, South Korea enacted the Design for Safety (DfS) process in 2016. However, the current DfS process remains not well implemented for several reasons. Therefore, this study aims to present eight alternatives to improve the DfS process and suggests DfS improvement priorities by considering construction project participants and career levels using what is known as a fuzzy-analytical hierarchy process (F-AHP) analysis. The results of this study are as follows. First, respondents overall suggested improvements in the area of ‘assignment of responsibility for DfS to the client’ (0.196). Second, improvement priorities were also identified according to construction project participants and career levels. The results of the study can be utilized as basic information for DfS improvements during construction projects.