Construction Management & Economics

Buys, Fanie; Nkado, Raymond

doi: 10.1080/01446190600851009pmid: N/A

The implementation of an effective maintenance management system is vital if the maintenance of assets of any organisation or institution is to be managed effectively. A survey was undertaken among tertiary educational institutions in South Africa to identify a list of best practice criteria and to prioritise these in order of importance. The study evaluated the performance of the existing maintenance management systems used by tertiary educational institutions to determine whether there is a need to improve current maintenance management systems. Results showed that existing performance is far below best practice standards and that the use of computerised maintenance management systems is very limited. This led to the development of a model to assist maintenance managers at tertiary educational institutions to evaluate and improve their existing approaches to maintenance management.

Carmichael, Stuart; Murray, Maria

doi: 10.1080/01446190500521207pmid: N/A

Increasingly sophisticated computer software is being utilized to support detailed critical path method (CPM) analysis for resolving delay and disruption claims. The accurate determination of entitlement is however still dependent on the quality of programme and progress information provided by all parties. A comparative analysis of record‐keeping methods in the UK and the US reveals that there is less rigour to this practice in the UK, where parties are not required by the contract to provide such records. In most forms of US government construction contract the contractor is required to produce a schedule using CPM software and to regularly update this to reflect project progress and changes. Recent recommended best practice in the UK also stipulates that the contractor should keep reliable and accurate progress and programme records to assist contemporaneous assessment of the cause and effect of project changes. While not contractually imperative, a clear method of managing information is important in UK construction and engineering projects to facilitate more effective and accurate assessments of delay and disruption. The US experience and good practice approaches in the UK demonstrate the importance of implementing and establishing an ‘event management strategy and archive’ at the outset of projects.

Fu, Wai‐Ki; Lo, Hing‐Po; Drew, Derek S.

doi: 10.1080/01446190500228258pmid: N/A

The interrelationships between collective learning, collective knowledge and learning networks are complex and difficult, especially in a construction context. A questionnaire survey was carried out in Hong Kong to test the hypothesis that practitioners who need a wider domain of knowledge for work learn more actively through their learning networks. This empirical work revealed a positive association between the demand for learning from others at work and the size of construction practitioners' learning networks. The analysis also revealed two opposing aspects of practitioners' learning behaviour influenced by the nature of their work. First, civil engineers tend to manage larger learning networks, given that they very often need to seek advice from other practitioners to deal with issues beyond their specialities at work and coordinate outputs of other practitioners as the project leader. Second, draughtsmen and clerks of works (or inspectors of works), whose work mainly involves complying with a finite scope of predetermined instructions and rules, appear not very active in network learning. These findings will be useful in developing learning policy for enhancing the competitiveness of the construction industry.

Ok, Seung C.; Sinha, Sunil K.

doi: 10.1080/01446190600851033pmid: N/A

Estimating equipment production rates is both an art and a science. An accurate prediction of the productivity of earthmoving equipment is critical for accurate construction planning and project control. Owing to the unique work requirements and changeable environment of each construction project, the influences of job and management factors on operation productivity are often very complex. Hence, construction productivity estimation, even for an operation with well‐known equipment and work methods, can be challenging. This study develops and compares two methods for estimating construction productivity of dozer operations (the transformed regression analysis, and a non‐linear analysis using neural network model). It is the hypothesis of this study that the proposed neural networks model may improve productivity estimation models because of the neural network's inherent ability to capture non‐linearity and the complexity of the changeable environment of each construction project. The comparison of results suggests that the non‐linear artificial neural network (ANN) has the potential to improve the equipment productivity estimation model.

Carrillo, Patricia M.; Robinson, Herbert S.; Anumba, Chimay J.; Bouchlaghem, Nasreddine M.

doi: 10.1080/01446190600799224pmid: N/A

The UK's Private Finance Initiative market is predicted to rise to over £8 billion a year and there are indications of growing opportunities. PFI creates a long‐term income stream and provides valuable opportunities for portfolio diversification. PFI has evolved at a fast pace and the momentum is set to continue. However, there are major challenges facing construction organisations. These include the lack of PFI experts, longer negotiation periods and tight time schedules to deliver large‐scale schemes, high levels of investment and risks involved and limited knowledge transfer between PFI projects. Concerns over the level of knowledge sharing have prompted the development and evaluation of a Knowledge Transfer Framework that encourages construction organisations to transfer PFI knowledge between projects. It achieves this by building on a questionnaire survey of PFI clients and construction companies, case studies of companies involved in PFI, and research workshops to validate the framework developed.

Eeing, Bradley T.; Kruse, Jamie Brown

doi: 10.1080/01446190600851090pmid: N/A

Survey data from Tulsa, Oklahoma residents are used to examine individual valuations of safe rooms. The study utilises two measures of individual valuations, the maximum willingness to pay (WTP) and willingness to accept (WTA) for safe rooms. The primary research questions are concerned with whether the willingness to pay measure exhibits income effects and whether certification standards make the safe room investment more desirable. The main findings can be summarised as follows. The mean willingness to pay for a safe room was $2,500. The value of certification by a national organisation increased willingness to pay for the safe room by $600 on average. There is no direct income effect in that respondents' stated willingness to pay does not bear a statistically significant relationship to reported income. There is evidence of a secondary income effect in that willingness to pay elicited from attendees of a suburban parade of homes was $731 higher than attendees of an urban parade of homes. A mortgage payment‐based WTA measure yields mean valuations of the safe room more than three times higher than the lump sum WTP valuation.

Huang, Rong‐Yau

doi: 10.1080/01446190600568124pmid: N/A

Since most bridge life cycle cost analysis (LCCA) depends heavily on the analyst's experience to determine the times and costs of remedial actions over a bridge's lifetime, the results are often subject to question because of their subjectivity. While some work has been done over the years to develop reliable deterioration models for determining such times and costs, the proposed models often require sophisticated inspection data, which is costly to obtain, and/or complex mathematical calculations. A simple linear deterioration model based on visual inspection inventory data concerning bridge components is introduced and integrated into the LCC analysis. The proposed model provides an alternative approach to bridge LCC analysis that can improve the objectivity of analysis and does not require input of sophisticated inspection, and thus facilitates application of bridge life cycle cost analysis. The LCCA method developed in this study is applied to a case study of alternative PCI (Pre‐stressed Concrete I‐girder) and a PCB (Pre‐stressed Concrete Box‐girder) bridges for the purpose of model validation.

Stoy, Christian; Kytzia, Susanne

doi: 10.1080/01446190600799414pmid: N/A

The building stock is one of the largest energy consumers and simultaneously represents a relevant cost driver for most companies. Thus, buildings should be optimally planned, constructed and used from both an environmental and from an economic perspective. Benchmarking electricity consumption in the usage phase is a tool for achieving this objective. This requires a uniform collection of key usage indicators on the one hand, and on the other hand it is necessary to be cognisant of the factors that drive these key indicators and how they do so. This alone makes it possible to satisfy the benchmarking principle of comparing like or similar objects. Uniformly collected key indicators for electricity consumption (kWh/m2 usable floor area and year) are presented on the basis of 109 Swiss office buildings. This is broken down into further groupings on the basis of the relevant drivers. The analysis of the drivers relies on regression analysis. This demonstrates above all the great relevance of technical installation (e.g. the share of mechanically vented and ventilated as well as air‐conditioned areas), given that the coverage area of such systems has a significant effect on the electricity consumption of office buildings. Accordingly, special attention should be paid to the planning, construction and use of technical installations, in order to be able to provide optimally energy‐efficient buildings.

Fortune, Chris

doi: 10.1080/01446190600851116pmid: N/A

The generation of a reliable early stage building project price forecast for its capital cost is an important aspect of any project's initial appraisal. Such professional advice is central to clients' decision‐making processes. Work on early stage building project budget price forecasting is reviewed and a change in the direction of future research is called for in this topic area. This aim has been achieved by identifying seminal work on the general topic, addressing its shortcomings, and then focusing on research conducted to explore the formulation processes of quality building project budget price advice. It is posited that poor quality building project price forecasts affect clients seeking to make value for money business decisions. Empirical evidence from previous research indicates that previous calls for paradigm changes in practice towards the adoption of newer more stochastic models or tools such as expert systems, probabilistic and regression models have now been generally rejected. As a result it is asserted that practice can be considered to be in crisis and is looking to establish a new way forward. It is concluded that a research agenda needs to be established that has process standardisation and practitioner judgement as well as the existing information engineering‐based approach at its core. Such an additional strand to future research in the topic area will help to ensure that the newly emerging wave of project budget formulation tools, such as neural nets, neuro‐fuzzy nets, sustainability and whole life cost models are taken up and used more effectively in practice.

doi: 10.1080/01446190600771421pmid: N/A