ASSESSMENT OF IMPLEMENTATION LEVEL OF QUALITY MANAGEMENT STANDARDS IN THE CEMENT INDUSTRY OF PAKISTAN

Abstract

Quality of construction project is always a matter of concern for the client. The quality of civil structure can not be independent of the quality of materials used in it. Concrete is most widely used construction material in Pakistan and cement is one of its key ingredient which is manufactured through chemical process. Pakistan is a developing country and quality is not considered that much important so the quality management field in the manufacturing industry lacks research in comparison with the volume of the industry. Cement industry is also one of the manufacturing industries and quality management of the cement industry of Pakistan is perceived to be good but a research carried out on causes of destruction of earthquake in year 2005 concluded that the major cause of destruction was low quality of construction materials and there is no research available on quality management in cement industry of Pakistan. Keeping this in view an effort was made to assess the level of quality management implementation in the cement industry of Pakistan. The assessment was carried out on two aspects of the quality management, a)- Technical system of quality management and b)- Managerial system of quality management and in addition quality management awareness among the industry. The technical system included the tools and techniques where as management system included critical factors of quality management and quality management awareness included the basic terminology implied in the quality management of cement industry of Pakistan. A questionnaire was prepared and responses were received. The analysis was done using SPSS and Microsoft excel. The research revealed that the tools and techniques on which the industry heavily relied on are Control Charts, Control Plans, Customer feed back & Bench marking where as the factors representing strong to weak hierarchy of managerial system are, top management support towards quality management, employee training, quality information availability, customer orientation, quality information usage, process and product design, employee involvement and supplier quality. The lack of awareness of basic terminology used in quality control and quality assurance phases of quality management is considered a crucial factor need to be improved. This research has identified weak and strong areas of awareness and implementation of quality management in the cement industry of Pakistan so that the industry can be benefited by improving the weak areas and capitalizing the strong areas of quality management.