Putting quality on the agenda

GIRI has been a lever for change at National Highways, director for quality, standards and lean Paul Doney told the summer members’ meeting. Following an internal review, the organisation put quality on the agenda at the highest level and is focusing on behavioural changes throughout the supply chain to drive improvements.

National Highways looks after major roads and motorways in England, which make up 3% of the roadways and carry around 30% of the nation’s traffic. It also manages other assets such as bridges, soft estate, and lighting columns. “The quality of the asset really matters in terms of what it costs to build, maintain, and operate,” said Paul. “It is also about the safety of our customers.”

The quality challenge

Two years ago, the organisation realised it faced a challenge around quality, but it was the potential cost of error that helped get leadership attention, said Paul. “When I first read GIRI’s Strategy for Change, I didn’t believe the cost of error could be that high. But when you consider an asset that doesn’t last as long as it should – when, for example, a road surface needs replacing after six years instead of 12 – then not only are costs twice as high, it also doubles the carbon footprint, doubles the safety risk for workers, and causes twice as much disruption to customers. That’s huge.”

National Highways commissioned an independent assessment of its quality performance, looking at its maturity in relation to criteria such as quality culture, processes, assurance, design, and supplier management. “We went out to our suppliers and our schemes and gathered evidence, and we realised that we had a real opportunity to make improvements.”

Changing the conversation

With the backing of National Highways CEO Nick Harris, the first step was the creation of a quality charter that set out what NH wanted to achieve: to do the right thing, in the right way, the first time. Then the decision was taken to target five focus areas to make a difference on the ground: Significant Quality Incidents reporting; commitment to increased pavement life; interim asset lifespan performance metrics; supplier quality awards and incentivisation; and quality management via an independent works examiner role.

“The first thing that needed to change was to talk about quality,” said Paul. “We had a lot of conversations on site about time and cost, but not quality. So we launched a new metric called Significant Quality Incidents. There are parallels with safety – we want to achieve similarly open reporting of this kind of thing. Now anything that costs more than £100,000 to resolve, or that could have caused harm or reputational damage is assigned to a director to close out and is reported to the CEO. This makes a massive difference.”

The second major focus was on asset life. “A lot of reducing rework is about the asset lasting longer, so we are looking at measures for interim performance. How is an asset performing two years into a 12-year design life? If it is not performing well, can we do anything about it? We are also trying to incentivise the supply chain. We are running supplier awards, and we are starting to measure supplier maturity, all with a view to saying: this is what we want. Can we help each get there? Finally, the supplier self-assurance model isn’t working as well as it could, so we are getting more involved there.

“It is all about collaboration and building momentum,” added Paul. “I have been delighted by the response from our supply chain. No one wants to go to work and do a bad job. If we create the environment that enables people to do a good job, everyone wins.”

Looking ahead

Current challenges include a lack of consistency around non-conformance reports. “Everyone has a different interpretation of what constitutes an NCR. We require these to be reported but every supplier manages them differently, so we are working on defining our interpretation and explaining what we need so we can understand trends and work on root cause analysis.”

Next steps that have been discussed include the development of a metric for quality and a way to demonstrate the benefits of improvement. “We are also looking at how we can incentivise reporting and help suppliers understand the financial implications. And we need to link all this into that culture change that’s required and work with the sector to improve together – that’s key. These are early days but we are making a start, and we have GIRI to help us with the process.”

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