Procurement system evaluation for the construction industry

Successful building procurement depends upon selecting an appropriate procurement system specifically to match the requirements of the client, contractor and the project, particularly in a construction environment where new and untried systems are part of improving procurement by re-engineering the process. This does not necessarily mean that any of the existing procurement systems cannot be the best solution; indeed many have strong features that are ideally suited to many projects. However, it is important to encourage development of new systems and provide tools which enable improvement and innovation to occur. The evaluation procedure described in this paper provides an effective way of determining procurement system performance for a particular project, taking into account the interactions between client needs, project characteristics and procurement process system features. Existing and previous evaluation systems are reviewed briefly, their main characteristics identified and the few evaluation techniques appraised, as well as previous investigations of factors influencing the selection of a procurement system. A range of factors has been identified as describing the requirements of a procurement system and thus influencing the decision on which procurement system to use. The relative contributions of the factors to the success of a project are determined through an interaction matrix, and from these a single value is calculated to rank the possible procurement systems, taking into the account the client objectives and the characteristics of the project.