To help construction clients enhance the quality of their work, deliver projects on time and prevent costly mistakes, XL Group is teaming with American Contractor's Insurance Group (ACIG), a thought leader in quality management, to provide data and analytics to drive continuous quality improvement throughout their clients organizations.
According to Jason LaMonica, profit center head for XL Group's Subcontractor Default business, "Quality is the second leading cause of subcontractor defaults, and one of the biggest areas of lost profit for a General Contractor. Every dollar spent fixing a quality issue is four dollars of lost profit."
"Historically, Quality Assurance and Quality Control have been evaluated in a mostly subjective manner making it hard to drive decisions based on trends and benchmarking. ACIG has come up with a standardized way to evaluate quality from firm to firm, and really start to capitalize on 'Big Data.' That changes the landscape, "explained Jason. "Now, our construction clients can have access to 'Big Data,' collected from leaders in the construction industry, to help them make changes and improve the quality in their operations."
"We look at quality as the third leg of a contractors three legged stool. The three legs are safety, quality and productivity, each equal in importance," said Mike O'Neill, President/CEO of ACIG. "Working closely with our shareholders/insureds in the development, implementation and measurement of their quality assurance program, we identified 100 key data points. This allows us to correlate their quality assurance programs with actual claims results. With the information that XL and ACIG can provide, contractors can implement best practices leading to continuous improvement in their quality assurance program. Properly executed, this will lead to higher levels of project owner satisfaction and improved productivity."
To help their clients improve quality, XL Group will use ACIG's proven, standardized criteria for assessment of 100 data points consistent with strong industry quality-related practices, in addition to data we collect during the underwriting process. XL Group will access to a repository of quality assessment data across ACIG's book contractors on a blinded basis for benchmarking purposes. Using that data, XL Group will be able to give objective feedback to their Subcontractor Default Insurance customers allowing clients to benchmark their quality practices against their peers within the industry, encouraging continual improvement to QA/QC programs and helping prevent insurance claims and potential profit losses.
