This Master Thesis is made by Tobias Qvistorff Sidén, student from the Department of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering at Aalborg University. The Thesis is entitled Reduction of Failures in the Construction Phase – A Simple Guide for the Constructors. The Master Thesis deals with reducing of failures in the execution phase in the Danish construction industry and it addresses mainly construction companies.
The starting point of the Master Thesis is an analysis of the following initial problem:
What are the main reasons to the many failures and poor quality?
To answer this initiating problem, the following six theses were considered.
1. Problems with the subcontractors - including cooperation problems.
2. Construction workers with wrong attitude regarding quality and or lack of
professional skills.
3. Wrong or lack of focus of quality assurance from the contractor’s building managers.
4. Time pressure in the construction phase.
5. Different expectation to the final quality from the client, the contractor and the
subcontractors.
6. Poor project material and difficult construction solutions, and any subsequent
changes in project documentation.
The theses were analyzed in order to demonstrate, if the six thesis are significant reasons to failures in the Danish building industry. In order to do this existing analysis of failures in the Danish building industry was used together with the construction project of Musikkens Hus in Aalborg, Denmark. It turned out that all six theses were major causes of failure, which led to the following problem formulation:
How can the contractors, the advisors and the client optimize the quality assurance during the construction phase, so the number of failures during the construction phase is minimized and the project is completed with the agreed quality level.
The research question was answered by establish eighteen steps, which separately or in combination can help to reduce the number of failures, in the construction phase in the Danish building industry, due to the six theses.
The essence of the eighteen measures is, that they are easy to implement, and can be implemented by a single company without the remaining construction industry necessarily has to follow. Though it of course would be optimal, and necessary to solve the problem of too many failures at a national level.