Interactive Quality Management Discussion Held in Pittsburgh

Through research with the Department of Energy's Building America program, IBACOS has developed a draft generic Quality Management Manual, a list of standardized business metrics, and proposed transformation pathways designed to help homebuilders organize their businesses to more effectively and profitably deliver energy efficient homes. In late October, a core group of production homebuilders, trade contractors, manufacturers, national research labs, and other experts attended IBACOS’ Quality Management Tools and Integration Expert Meeting in Pittsburgh to get a first look at the materials, help identify gaps, and provide feedback. (Descriptions and PDFs of those materials are available for download here.)

Duncan Prahl of IBACOS and Denis Leonard of Business Excellence Consulting led the discussion. Throughout the day, meeting participants shared their own experiences, perspectives and best practices. Two key themes emerged.

When transitioning your business to deliver high performance homes,…

Alignment with trade partners is critical. Trades build houses. Builders manage relationships with and among trades to get houses built. The end product is a direct reflection of the extent to which everyone is aligned with the quality goal and building performance standards. As houses are built more energy efficiently, by the builder’s choice or code requirements, trade partners and their performance becomes a critical factor in the success or failure of the builder’s quality goals.
Having business best practices and metrics in place in advance will help minimize risk. Any change undertaken by a builder is stressful for the entire organization and perceived as a risk. Change is only undertaken where the leadership of the company sees the financial or customer satisfaction benefits outweigh the risk. Many National Housing Quality award winning builders have shown that there is a correlation between satisfied customers and increased profitability in their own businesses. However, very little hard data exists that demonstrate how high performance homes contribute to either increased profitability or improved customer satisfaction scores at a broader industry level. At the same time, although the risk of change is very high for higher performance homes, codes are pushing builders in that direction. To minimize the risk, access to business best practices and a broader set of business metrics can be valuable to help give builders models toward which they can move their business.

In general, meeting participants saw a lot of value in all of the draft materials that were provided for review. The discussion was lively. Their feedback on the content and format of all of the documentation has been captured and will be used by IBACOS and Building Excellence Consulting during the editing process. A summary report with a list of the meeting participants and highlights from the interactive discussion is currently being written. A link will be posted on this web page once it’s available. Stay tuned!

Duncan Prahl of IBACOS leading the Expert Meeting discussion