Steel Structure Engineering Construction Quality Control

Author: Chen Jianping
Editor-in-Chief: Bian Yuqing
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2001-05-01
Features: Based on the "Management Regulations on Continuing Education for Professional Technicians in Construction Enterprises" issued by the Ministry of Construction, this book is compiled in accordance with the characteristics of continuing education and the principle of being concise and focused. The book is divided into seven chapters, with the first two chapters covering an overview and an introduction to construction quality control. The following five chapters discuss the pre-event, in-process, and post-event quality control during the construction phase of steel structure projects, as well as introduce the basic tools and methods of quality control. The book provides an appropriate description of engineering quality standards, facilitating learners in solving practical problems in construction quality control. Written in line with the spirit of relevant documents from the Ministry of Construction, it is one of the essential reads for steel structure manufacturing and installation professionals and managers in Shanghai, and can also serve as a training textbook for related professionals nationwide.
Excerpt:
Chapter Overview
Section Development of Quality Management
With the advancement of science and technology and the improvement of social productivity, market competition has become increasingly fierce, compelling business leaders to deeply feel the urgency of enhancing product and service quality. They have come to realize that high-quality products and services are effective means of market competition, a fundamental guarantee for attracting customers, capturing market share, and fostering business growth. Some compare the current world to a "Third World War," not a bloody conflict fought with guns and bullets, but a "soft knife" battle—a battle of commercial competition. In this war, the key to victory lies in quality. Whoever effectively controls the factors influencing quality will gain the initiative in this battle. As the world-renowned management expert Professor Sandholm said, "Quality is the golden key to opening world markets." Quality management emerged to meet this demand and gradually evolved into an emerging discipline. Learning the history of quality management development is to seek its developmental patterns from its emergence, formation, and evolution, grasp its universal essence, and help us correctly understand the inevitability and necessity of its development. This, in turn, enables us to apply these objective laws to guide our quality management practices.
The emergence of quality management as an emerging discipline was a gradual process shaped by the development of modern industrial production under capitalism. It underwent a long period of evolution. The United States was the first country to propose quality management. After World War II, Japan introduced a set of quality management techniques and methods from the United States, adapting them to its own realities and advancing them further, leading quality management onto a scientific path and achieving remarkable global success. In the 1980s, the International Organization for Standardization's Technical Committee for Quality Management and Quality Assurance (ISO/TC176) issued the ISO 9000 "Quality Management and Quality Assurance" series standards. These standards not only met the needs of international commodity economy but also provided guidance for enterprises to improve their quality systems, implement strict quality control in production processes, reduce consumption, and enhance economic efficiency. Their emergence aligned with the trends of international economic development and met the needs of businesses, customers, and other stakeholders.
The development of quality management has kept pace with the growth of productivity. Its emergence, formation, development, and continuous refinement have generally gone through the following stages:
1. Quality Inspection Stage
The quality inspection stage, also known as the post-event inspection stage, represents the earliest phase of quality management development. This stage spanned roughly from the 1920s to the 1940s. In the early days of capitalism, the management of capitalist enterprises was characterized by reliance on the personal experience and judgment of capitalists. In production, workers relied entirely on their own experience and manual skills to ensure quality. In the early 20th century, as market boundaries expanded rapidly and production scales grew, capitalists increasingly recognized that to make their products competitive in the market, earn more money, and secure higher profits, they had to focus on improving product quality. If their business operations failed to meet this requirement, resulting in poor-quality products and loss of credibility among customers, not only would they fail to make a profit but even the enterprise itself would not survive. At the same time, rapid advancements in science and technology placed ever-higher demands on product quality. Failure to meet these demands could bring significant harm to businesses and projects.
Due to the development of capitalist productivity, large-scale mechanized production gradually replaced manual labor, and the requirements for interchangeability, standardization, and generalization of components became increasingly stringent. Under these historical conditions, a management revolution emerged. Among them, American engineer Frederick Taylor studied the management practices of large-scale industrial production since the Industrial Revolution and established the theory of "scientific management." In his advocacy of scientific management in enterprises, he emphasized the need for rational scientific division of labor between managers and workers, with specialized management—including specialized quality management—being a crucial component. Taylor believed that the functions of planning and execution, inspection and production should be separated. This functional management system, on one hand, separated management from production, and on the other, ensured that all managers were responsible for only one or two management functions, creating a system where planning, execution, and inspection were each handled by dedicated personnel. Quality product inspection thus emerged. This marked the first time in history that the quality inspection function was separated from direct production, and the personnel responsible for inspection were distinguished from production workers. This system transformed the past "operator quality management" into "inspector quality management," marking the transition to the quality inspection stage. From the historical perspective of quality management development, this undoubtedly represented a significant progress. However, the characteristic of this stage was its reliance solely on inspection, limited to post-event quality control, which could not prevent the production of defective products in the process and could also lead to inspection failures, causing quality accidents and damaging corporate reputation. Therefore, its management effectiveness was limited, and from today's perspective, it was merely an indispensable link in management.
In 1924, American statistician Walter Shewhart introduced the concept of "preventing defects" using principles of probability theory and mathematical statistics. He argued that quality management should not only involve post-event inspection but also proactive prevention. When defective products were identified, measures should be taken to halt the issue and propose specific solutions for controlling production process quality and preventing defects. He developed a set of theories for preventing quality accidents, including statistical quality control charts, and published the book "Economic Control of Industrial Quality" in 1931. At that time, a few companies in the United States, such as General Motors and Ford, adopted the statistical methods he introduced in quality management and achieved certain results. Simultaneously, other statisticians such as Dodge and Romig proposed "sampling inspection tables" and early sampling inspection schemes in the context of destructive testing, providing preliminary scientific foundations for addressing quality assurance issues for such products. Due to the limitations of the then-developed level of productivity and economic maturity, the demands for product and management quality were still relatively low, and these advanced management techniques and scientific methods were not fully recognized or understood, failing to be widely adopted.