A system for assessing and communicating contractors' competitiveness

Today's business environment for construction has been fundamentally changed to one characterized as increasing globalization and intense competition. To improve competitiveness continuously is like the law of the jungle for contractors who wish to survive in the market and outperform their rivals. This need is particularly urgent for China, which provides one of the biggest construction markets in the world but whose contractors are relatively less competitive. Competitiveness is a powerful thinking which can lead a contractor to gaining competitive advantage. Nevertheless, it is a concept that is neither well understood nor easy to communicate to people, despite widespread acceptance of its importance. During this study, an IT based decision-support system has been developed which enables contractors' competitiveness to be easily understood and communicated. A mathematical model has been developed to calculate indexes of contractor competitiveness. Based on this index model, an IT system has been devised to facilitate the calculations and to communicate the competitiveness of contractors. The C-CACS can be applied in three typical construction activities: for contractors to self-diagnose their competitiveness, for administrative departments to rank contractors in order of competitiveness, and for clients to pre-qualify contractors that are bidding for a contract. The academic contributions of this study include not only the enriched knowledge on the subject of competitiveness, but also the introduction of a new methodology for investigating competitiveness issues. Furthermore, the findings revealed during this study provide a framework of reference against which the competitiveness of contractors in other regions can be compared.