How are today’s leading builders consistently delivering homes to higher levels of quality and performance and delighting their customers?
During our March webinar, we took a look at best practices of National Housing Quality Award winners, who have successfully implemented Quality Management as a business strategy. Drawing on their experiences, we touched on 3 big steps in the process: Getting Started, Implementing Quality Management, and Measuring the Impact.
The primary presenter for this session was Denis Leonard of Business Excellence Consulting, the co-leader of IBACOS’ Building America research into Business & Quality Management. Denis was joined by Michael Dickens of IBACOS, and several award-winning homebuilders, including Gary Zajicek of Veridian Homes, George Murphy of Wayne Homes, John Albright of Charter Homes & Neighborhoods, and Mike Nimon of Wathen-Castanos Hybrid Homes.
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Take a look at some of the great questions posed during this session, answered by Denis Leonard.
Denis, you’ve talked about procedural roadblocks to changes -- infrastructure changes -- when you’re implementing quality. How can you avoid that if you’re a builder looking to implement Quality Management?
[Denis] Infrastructure tends to mean, simplistically, you’re adding another meeting, you’re adding
another report, you’re adding another step in the process, so to speak. You’re kind of adding to the bureaucracy. Haseko, one of the NHQA winners this year, for example, integrated quality and safety meetings. Veridian did a similar thing. If you have meetings set up, whether it’s with your trades or with your cross-functional team, you don’t need to add another meeting. You can integrate some of these issues. So you could integrate safety management with quality training if you’re doing tailgate or safety box training on the job, in the field. If you have monthly meetings with the entire company or quarterly leadership meetings, integrate the quality programs into those.
This person says, I struggle with how we can actually apply a metric to quality. I measure callbacks, warranty issues, etc., but quality is completely subjective, isn’t it? How do you do it? Wisdom?
[Denis] We certainly know what quality isn’t when we see it. But that’s true, it’s back to that what is quality, and how do you define it. You’re right, there isn’t one measure. Some builders will say it’s customer satisfaction. But my view is that it is a mix of measures, and the Blueprint and the NHQA provide some great measures to look at that. But it has to be taken into consideration both inside and outside the company -- what your net profit is, what your employee satisfaction is, what your trade satisfaction is, your customer satisfaction, and looking at some of your key processes, like cycle time. Like Veridian really focuses on the process of improving cycle time for construction.
But it’s you deciding for your organization, your culture, what are the top 5 metrics you need to use to drive your business, and that provides your quality measure.
We had a quick question to you on NHQA, someone asked—How many of those guys who won awards are still in business? Any stats on that?
[Denis] Well you know the NHQA awards have been around since 1993. We’re still going strong, and there have been 62 homebuilders that have earned NHQ awards, some of them multiple times. I’m not replicating on that number: 62 individual organizations have won NHQA. 93% of those builders are still in business, and if you look at that across the board, in terms of what’s happened to our industry, that’s a very strong indicator that doing the right things helps you sustain in the tough times.
You’re not really just talking NHQA here. You’re a believer in it, you’re a judge in it, you helped create it with Serge and the team. But, it’s just good business, isn’t it, to focus on Quality Management?
[Denis] You used the term earlier about business performance and performance excellence, and that’s what it’s about. Someone mentioned TRIZ being an innovation tool, it’s about what are the appropriate tools to your organization or whatever the individual improvement initiative it is that you’re doing. What will help you get the impact that you need? And NHQA is just another one of those tools. But like Blueprint [a tool developed by IBACOS through Building America], it’s unusual in that it can view your entire organization and help you coordinate all of those tools and efforts in a focus on your strategy.
