In 1993 a research project was initiated by the Swedish Rail Administration, and the University College of Gävle-Sandviken. The objective of the project is to determine the cost of poor quality throughout the construction process of a major civil engineering construction project. This working paper presents a study on costs of poor quality at three separate consultants offices. The study concerns the latter stages of the design process in major civil engineering projects.

The studied consultants has filled in reports about failures that occur throughout the design process. Each failure have been registered on a special form that contains 14 different parameters. When necessary, the form was combined with additional information, such as protocols, blueprints and other information. Personnel from the research project visited the consultants once a week to gather failure forms and interview the consultants about the project and its progress. Failures that occurred at the studied consultants office was registered, no matter who caused them. The failure cost registered is the cost that the failure caused at that specific consultant's office.

Throughout the three studies, a total failure cost of 125.000 SEK was registered. The total failure cost was distributed on 67 different failures. The failure cost of the three studies corresponded to between 6 and 20% of the total design cost. When the cause of the failures is analyzed, the largest single human cause is communication which corresponds to 51% of the registered failure cost.68% of the failure cost registered by the consultants was due to internal failures at the office of the consultant. The registered cost can be seen as a minimum since many minor failures have never been registered. In one of the studies the consultants only registered failures caused by other actors apart from himself. The cost has also been separated according to the quality system requirements in the Quality management and Quality assurance standard ISO 9000-1. The failures have been separated according to which subchapter of the system requirements that could have helped to avoid the failure. Most of the failures could have been avoided by 4.9 Process control, 4.4 Design control and 4.3 Contract review. The three performed studies all indicate that lack of communication is the largest single cause of human failures. Necessary information for the work in progress might not be available, and the information available is often not perfect and sometimes totally wrong. At times the information was available but not used.

This report is the second working paper out of totally three from the research project "Cost of poor quality in major civil engineering projects". The research project continues with the main study and reference studies of the defects liability period.