Using Quality in Construction Awards to Benchmark and Optimize Operations

Benchmarking operations and optimizing processes helps organizations improve performance standards and stay relevant in the marketplace. Each year, companies that participate in the NAPA Quality in Construction awards are provided scores for four areas of mix production on their projects asphalt cement content, air voids, gradation, and in-place density as well as the average score of all applicants. This helps organizations benchmark their project against the nation’s best.

Granite Construction Co. has used these scores to assess where projects are high-performing and where they have opportunities for improvement. I spoke with Marty McNamara, Granite’s Director of Quality Control, to learn more.

Q: How do you use the NAPA Awards program to benchmark?

A: Over the last number of years, in addition to using the awards program as a way to celebrate our teams’ success, we have taken a deep dive into the detailed scoring data. Recognizing that projects submitted by each company are typically the best of the best, the scores allow us to understand where we stand as a company versus our industry peers on material quality. In addition to external benchmarking, it helps us to look across our company and identify high performing operations and also those who have an opportunity for improvement. Because the NAPA awards program uses the same properties that many of our customers and agencies use as part of their incentive/disincentive specifications, we believe that this information can be used a leading indicator of future performance on projects.

 Q: What actionable information has Granite gleaned via benchmarking? When did you start benchmarking?

A: When we compared our performance to our industry peers, our need to improve became clear. We also have identified certain items we do better than our industry peers which allows our senior management to optimize improvement efforts, saving both money and time. Over the last three years, we have observed an improvement in our performance on the metrics used in the award system, however, we have also seen that same trend among our industry peers, reinforcing the need for us to stay focused and continually improve.

 Our company has developed an internal materials quality metric we call Materials First Time Quality (MFTQ) that is used to benchmark our aggregate and asphalt product performance across all our plants across the company. Reviewed monthly and generated from internal process control testing, this metric acts as a leading indicator for acceptance and provides an overall measure of materials quality. Using these metrics has allowed us to manage HMA materials related acceptance and payment risk.

 Q: What improvements has Granite made due to benchmarking?

A: Benchmarking quality performance as it relates to HMA quality is difficult in our industry. Our focus on improvement actions were derived from our understanding of how we perform in relation to our industry peers. We have used the detailed HMA property information to establish adjustments to design mixes, HMA plant setup, quality control focus, and to set targets for testing results. The NAPA Quality in Construction awards program allowed our company to focus on the items we know impact quality and financial performance and differentiate our product quality in the marketplace. We are able to quantify performance and communicate awareness of materials quality for our plants, quality teams, and senior leadership. Although being recognized with an award is extremely meaningful, understanding the why behind the award has been invaluable to us.