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Can you trust a contractor?!
Just a quick question really guys, have any of you trusted the contractor to work to their own ITP. It might seem strange but during my site attachment the contractors were loathe to follow their own contractually agreed documents. I was just wondering if any of you had any issues?
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Rob,
SRM usually expected the contractor to create their own ITP but it needed to be approved my our engineers. For contractors who were potentially less established SRM provided a template to them and in one occasion I had to write one for a contractor but on the whole they wrote their own.
The ITP is a quality management document rather than a contract document and it’s important that it remains under the sub-contractors ownership. For this reason SRM review the submitted ITP as an assurance measure but will only ever ‘accept’ the document rather than ‘approve’. In this way the quality control/assurance risks remain with the sub-contractor.
If you write the ITP for them, or approve it in your name, when the thing goes wrong (see my blog on grout quality) they can say “we did it the way you told us to, it’s your fault”. Pretty cynical commercial outlook as always but that’s my experience.
I completely agree with what you are saying, but do they actually follow their ITP? EDF only A-Accept ITP documents but I found that the likes of Bylor would completely ignore them. This would result in delivery having to stop works and get the NEC3 supervisor involved, is this type of scenario happening with you guys?
My lot had an extensive ITP for grouting that I went through in minute detail with them because it was identified as a key risk area. The ITP was accepted but not followed resulting in major quality issues. The contractor is now in the firing contractually but where it goes from there I don’t know.
Presumably in the PQQ and tender, EDF state some standards of quality management which sub-contractors are to follow. If they then don’t follow an accepted ITP and screw up on quality they are left with no leg to stand on when it comes to recovering costs and damages for the ensuing delay. On the face of it I’d say your NEC 3 supervisor should be penalising Bylor hard and EDF should be considering revoking the contract at the extreme end of things.
What are they doing about it?
“On the face of it I’d say your NEC 3 supervisor should be penalising Bylor hard and EDF should be considering revoking the contract at the extreme end of things”. – This is exactly what should happen but this project is too big to fail and at present EDF is keeping Bylor afloat through this contract. Basically, nothing will get done apart from a couple of lessons learned meetings. The NEC supervisor wants to haul over the coals fro their lack of quality awareness but his hands are tied due to the costs involved.
Under the London City Airport contract the subcontractor was to produce their own ITPs. Like SRM, BAM provided a template and the basic outline.
We have also produced a higher level ITP which incorporated their works initially but then due to issues we devolved it to them.
The issue we had initially was compliance checking as they did not have a quality engineer and no idea of the specification, this resulted in a lack of control by the subcontractor and avoidable NCRs occurring on site due to a lack of knowledge of the ITP.
Overall the quality should be managed by the contractor and overseen by the principle contractor to ensure compliance, this is then checked by the client. This prevents shifting the buck so to speak, if they do it they take responsibility for assuring the end product meets the specification requirements.
Key issue is what does it say in the contract the subcontractor signed up to. It should be stated who produces the quality assurance documentation.
I’d be interested to see if anyone has experience of a project where QA was done well? My experience wasn’t that contractors didn’t want to, it was that they couldn’t.
For Phase 2 I joined the project fairly early on in terms of progress, so everyone was focused on delivery at maximum speed. The QA team consisted of one guy. This for a AU$330m project spread over multiple sites and working 7 days a week. It being a Joint Venture also means that some teams were using John Holland processes, whilst others used Laing O’Rourke. ITP generation was a copy-pasta exercise done by PEs, usually as an afterthought when construction was in full swing. Whilst it should be a sub-contractor led exercise, many of them did not have the expertise to generate anything worthwhile and had no experience in monitoring it.
There’s a QA nightmare brewing on that project. However speaking to other PEs, it seems that the last few months of almost every project consists of panic QA generation and rectification of defects. Trouble is, most of the original cohort have been moved on to other projects, so those that get left behind get thrashed. Everyone seems to have a horror story and it is very often that grad engineers are parachuted onto projects just to sit and close out QA lots.
Must be a great welcome to the construction industry!
I think partly Rob, this was symptomatic of the complexity of the HPC project. Where there is usually a PC looking down towards the output of a couple of sub-contractors, HPC (as the PC, PD and client), are looking towards around 35 Tier one contractors who all have a number of subbies who also have subbies that have… you get the idea. Although most contractors on site know what their daily output needed to look like, they we’re generally oblivious as to how any of their works were captured within the QIRs (Quality Inspection Reports) that make up a full ITP. Their engineers and QA teams get it, but are generally dislocated from the days work by being sat in an office somewhere else and popping up to get “stuff signed off” when and where required. I’ve seen first hand the frustration of Keir-Bam QA teams trying to get the message through to the guys on site, but their too focussed on the physical output and not the processes behind it.