Project Management in the Oil and Gas Industry

7.4.4 Quality 
Assurance
The following is an example of the importance of quality assurance. You 
decide to perform a sewage system project and about seven years ago a 

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Project Management in the Oil and Gas Industry
contractor company built you the same system in high quality in the plan 
time and cost. You are responsible for the decision without any influence 
from others.
Is it a good decision to go directly to this company or not? Why? (Please 
answer these questions before going to the next paragraphs.)
There are now different multinational companies worldwide in dif-
ferent industries and one of these industries is construction. So, every 
company and every one of us are both a customer and manufacturer or 
service provider sometimes. For instance, the contractor company does 
the service to the client and, at the same time, this contractor company is 
a client of the manufacturer for the plumbing equipment, HVAC, ceramic 
tiles, and other materials and equipment required to complete the proj-
ect. At the same time, the factory that sells the ceramic tiles is also a cli-
ent to the mechanical spare parts company to maintain their machines 
working.
So, any defect to any one of the systems will affect all. It is obvious that 
the quality system should apply to all the companies and organizations, 
assuming that everyone in the company has a good quality system.
Every company should build its own system to ensure that the product 
and service is based on specifications, requirements, and satisfaction.
When the quality assurance system is strong, it means that if anyone in 
the organization moved or retired the quality system is the same.
As an answer to the first question, if this company is a family company 
with a father and a son and the son becomes lazy and doesn’t care, the 
project could be in trouble if his company is sharing in any of the project 
activity. On the other hand, if he has a real quality system, you can deal 
with him but you should also do an audit as we will explain later.
On the other side, for the multinational company, the chairman is usu-
ally sitting in a country far away from the project, so quality assurance will 
be in a document that can be reviewed by an external or internal audit. 
If there are complaints about the company from the owner, the system 
should record and solve these complaints.
The purpose of quality assurance is as follows:
• To make sure that the final product is in conformity with the 
specifications and that the employment is highly qualified 
and able to achieve a high quality of the product through the 
administrative system
• To ensure the application of the company’s fixed character-
istics among all sectors in the factory, regardless of the pres-
ence of the same people

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The History of Graphene 231
• The benefits of the application of quality assurance systems 
can be summed up in that it gives the ability to produce a 
product identical with the required specifications and also 
reduce manufacturing cost because it will reduce waste 
or defective products. In particular, projects have a major 
impact because in these projects the time factor is very 
important and may be the main driver of the project.
For example, due to the construction of hotels, the provision of any day 
of the total time for the project will have a significant return on the owner. 
The same is true for oil projects. Therefore, when reducing or not rejecting 
any product, time is not wasted in removing what had been done or repaired 
or in negotiations between the team of the contractor and the owner and 
the supervisory, achieving savings of the total time for the project.
If the product is proper, no part is rejected from it and a strong and 
good relationship is achieved between the seller and the client by reducing 
the number of complaints from the client. That relationship is very clear 
between the contractor and consultant or architect of the owner. The con-
tractor provides the service or the work required of him with the presence 
of complaints and few observations that do not have a strong impact on the 
whole project from the supervising engineer, indicating that the quality of 
the work of the contractor. 
In the case of repeated complaints from the contractor that have a 
strong impact on the project, the problems may occur in the project and 
the result is that he would not be called again in similar jobs. This is dan-
gerous in the world of markets as the reputation and quality of the final 
product with a good relationship between the parties has a powerful and 
direct influence in the reputation of the company which provides the final 
product. 
The quality assurance system is the basic way for any factory, construc-
tion company, or owner to have the ability to enter both internal and exter-
nal competition.