Integrating collaborative extranets with project integrated databases to improve the construction tender stage

The management of the construction projects is exponentially increasing in complexity since it has to deal with highly fragmented, complex and unique combinations of business relations, communications and processes. Each phase in the construction cycle requires effective communication of information/knowledge as well as coordination among project participants and stakeholders, thus leading to timing and technical content transfer enhancements and/or problems. Recent advances in the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) are considered essential and promising in improving sharing/exchange of project information as well as communication among construction industry stakeholders whilst reducing associated costs and time. One facet of such advances in ICT is evident from the proactive indulgement of the construction supply chain in collaborative extranets. In parallel, the construction industry has recognized the importance of sharing and exchanging project information across the supply chain through project integrated databases. However, such advancements in the ICT utilisation in construction industry were unable to develop a system that exchanges/shares project information, at the element level, over a well defined matrix of communication that can also integrate into the business processes of the members of the supply chain. This research will discuss the features, limitation and nature of the process and information models which can be integrated into the core business processes of the construction supply chain members. This is basically achieved by investigating the communication processes and information exchanged across the supply chain during the construction tendering stage and the available process and information modelling techniques. The objective of this research is to highlight the need to bridge the gap created by the level of satisfaction provided by ICT applications through the development of an augmented process model which will enable integrated databases to support collaborative extranets at the tender stage. This will be developed after validating the models with real world case studies. The overall findings revealed that the current construction tender processes under the traditional procurement scenario suffer from key problems and impediments, and improvements are needed. Many specific reasons have been identified and grouped together as underpinning causes of the present problems and impediments. The system architecture developed in this research based on the augmented process model will address and alleviate many of the problems and impediments identified, will improve the current practices in the construction tender stage under the traditional procurement scenario, will foster greater adoption of ICT applications in CI, will provide a modular research unit to be applied in similar research and will provide recommendation for the successful development and implementation of the related ICT application.