Building construction in Québec
The CERACQ undertook a benchmarking approach for building construction projects in Québec. The objective is to develop a culture of sharing information and comparing the results obtained by work providers. The idea is that with a sufficient amount of work providers, comparing to peers will be made easier for them and will help them determine what needs to be improved.
In 2004, The CERACQ led an extensive inquiry and presented the results at a colloquium entitled “Repenser le bâtiment s’impose. On innove et on ose!”, held in Montréal in November 2004; this aimed at increasing Québec’s building construction industry’s awareness of Québec and Canada having fallen behind other countries regarding innovations.
At the end of this colloquium, a Committee for Innovation was created, in which important work providers from Québec, professionals, building owners and constructors take part. The purpose of this committee is to provide the industry with a decent intervention strategy and a well defined action plan.
The divergent predictions regarding costs and completion dates, the design or construction deficiencies and the variable quality of projects have caused the committee members to reflect on these problems which impair the effective management of customers’ real property portfolios.
Consequently, the following main objective was set for 2005: to lead the important work providers to share their experience and projects with the industry, so as to allowing its improvement through benchmarking.
Since England was identified as one of the most advanced countries, a mission was organized there in February 2005 to gather information for the development of a benchmarking model adapted to the situation in Québec.
Based on the problems identified here and the experience acquired since 1999 by the British industry, ten performance indicators were established, which we decided to call the 10 Keys to Success; from these, a Survey Questionnaire was created to allow the customers to evaluate the performance of the services provided by professionals and constructors during the building’s construction. The results are displayed on a Strategic Positioning Graph allowing the work providers to view their own performance for each of the ten indicators (keys to success) and to compare to their peers from Québec and eventually from England or elsewhere.
The organizations taking part in the benchmarking project can quickly witness its effects and monitor their progress by clicking on the following link: ceracq.archidata.com.
As an example, England has reported the following improvements:
After 3 years:
- 10% drop in capital costs per year
- 10% drop in construction delays per year
- 10% drop in construction defects per year
Source : Achieving Construction (Egan Targets)
After 5 years:
- 55% of the targeted projects are carried out within budget, as opposed to 25% in 1999
- 63% of the targeted projects are carried out within the allotted time, as opposed to 34% in 1999.
Source: National Audit Office
For further information, don’t hesitate to contact us by email: benchmarking@ceracq.ca
[ Survey Questionnaire (in French) ] [ Jules Chevrier’s Speech – SIQ (in French) ]
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