'The HKMA Quality Award is certainly a prestigious one, and winning it was one of the milestones of our achievements in quality control,' John Leich, general manager of Ken On, a member of Shui On Construction and Materials, said. 'We did not prepare everything specifically for the competition.

'After a few years trying to strengthen total quality management, we wanted to see how good we really were. But there was no point in judging it ourselves.

'Instead, we wanted to get an independent outside group to judge it. The award was the result of a tremendous team effort.' Process management is a vital part of Ken On's strategy and the company has developed an operation and management information computer system to make sure it has real-time information on the whole process from production to state of delivery.

This way, management knows whether the business is on track and makes sure customers' requests are responded to quickly.

'The timing of delivery is a crucial part of the business, because concrete is wet and has to be transformed into a building in a certain period of time. The shelf life of concrete ranges from one or two hours to 10 hours,' Mr Leich said.

'The production and delivery teams and the customers have to work closely. It is not one delivery. It can be several hundred deliveries for a project.

'We have to do it in a systematic way. If deliveries are either too early or too late, the concrete may get hard in the truck. We have to make sure that everybody in the company understands it.' Ken On participated in a quality month campaign organised by the Industry Department last year and under a performance pledge promised to deliver concrete in the right shape within the right time frame for a year - the first of its kind in the business.

This year, happy with its performance, the company will further narrow the requirements and make them more stringent. When it was first established in 1978, the company mainly supplied construction material to the Shui On Group. Now, only 15 per cent of its business is to support its sister company.

Its batching plants in Hong Kong and the mainland produce a combined capacity of one million cubic metres of concrete each year, which is distributed by its fleet of more than 100 trucks.

The rapid expansion has made the management realise the importance of having outside information and the need to interface all levels of the company staff with its clients.

A modern computerised system has been developed.

Ken On is planning to introduce a larger range of mixes by using different material, giving it the ability to tailor make products to customers' needs.

One of its research and development results is to use ground granulated blast furnace slag, a waste product, for buildings close to a polluted environment.

'The HKMA has been really impartial in this competition. The judges gave us a lot of hard questions and useful feedback,' said Mr Leich, who has had 26 years of experience with construction materials.