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The purpose of this study is to investigate the challenges of pricing quantity surveying (QS) professional services to enhance the understanding of practitioners in developing strategies for the determination of fees for their services.

The paper adopts the quantitative approach by administering 150 survey questionnaires QS professionals out of which 79 questionnaires were retrieved for analysis using the mean, standard deviation, standard error and the Chi-Square test.

The study identified the challenges that continue to hamper the successful pricing of QS services as the inability to respond to changing contractual arrangements; lack of appropriate response to emerging services; slow response to changes in information and communication technology.

This paper focused on QS professionals. Hence, a future study to encompass other professionals in the built environment will be novel.

The findings of this paper have the potential to motivate QS firms to develop solutions that address the challenges identified to improve the efficiency of their service delivery to clients. The paper also has the practical importance of opening up new frontiers of research that focus on pricing of professional services in the built environment in general.

The paper contributes to the awareness and understanding of QS professionals about the challenges that continue to hamper effective pricing of their services.

Competitive tendering in South Africa is often associated with procurement based on the lowest fee tendered. Previous research on this topic did not provide in-depth examinations of how pricing within consulting engineering companies was affected by competitive tendering nor did it illuminate the extent to which professional services were impacted by competitive tendering. This paper aims to examine the implications of competitive tendering on pricing and delivery of consulting engineering services in South Africa.

A survey research strategy with a questionnaire as the research instrument elicited qualitative data from 28 experienced consulting engineers in South Africa. Thematic analysis was used to analyse qualitative data from the questionnaires.

Three key themes were identified, namely: considerations when determining consulting engineering fees on competitively tendered projects; the impact of reduced fees due to competitive tendering on the delivery of consulting engineering services; and interventions to prevent unsustainably “low” professional fees. Many consulting engineers in South Africa still determine fees using fee scales, while other considerations include resources, project complexity, risk, etc. Most participants asserted that design optimisation/value engineering, training, meetings and construction monitoring were adversely impacted by “low” fees.

This paper provides in-depth qualitative feedback from experienced consulting engineers (most having more than 20 years’ experience) on a topical issue in the South African construction industry. Thematic analysis was a novel method of analysis that was not used previously in this area of study.

Several researchers in the construction industry have mentioned that quality of tender documents is declining without tangibly assessing quality. Similarly, in practice, no standardised instrument exists to assess tender document quality. Therefore, the aim of this paper was to develop a framework to assess the quality of tender documents produced by built environment professionals in the construction industry. A framework was chosen to address the gaps in theory and practice as it provides a flexible but structured mechanism to assess tender document quality.

The research methodology contained three stages, namely: multi-investigator triangulation, a workshop with infrastructure experts and framework development and validation. A consolidated list of key quality indicators was developed following the literature review and multi-investigator triangulation. The indicators were discussed with ten experts in the South African construction industry, who were responsible for validating and providing insight on whether additional indicators were required. This informed development of the framework.

This paper proposes a framework to assess tender document quality by evaluating six key quality indicators namely: accuracy, clarity, completeness, standardisation, relevance and certainty.

The framework is limited to the assessment of tender document quality in the construction industry and is suited to the “Design by Employer” contracting strategy. From an academic perspective, this paper provides researchers with a framework to measure and benchmark quality of tender documents in future studies.

This framework can be used by clients to continuously assess and benchmark quality of tender documents produced by professionals.

A comprehensive and standardised approach to assess tender document quality was not available in the construction literature or the construction industry. Therefore, this paper addressed this gap in knowledge, by providing consumers (clients and contractors) of tender documents and researchers a mechanism to assess quality.

The construction industry’s daily processes demand heavy data usage and communication between project participants to meet client requirements. Thus, the application of information technology in project implementation has been increasing in the construction sector (CS) lately. However, the same cannot be seen in public sectors responsible for implementing government projects in South Africa. This study aimed to investigate the causes and effects of the underutilisation of information communication technology (ICT) in the building section of a public sector in a municipality in South Africa.

A qualitative approach was adopted for the study, using a public sector in one of the municipalities as a case study. Face-to-face interviews were conducted among the building unit workers, using unstructured interview questions. The data collected were analysed using the ATLAS.ti software.

The findings indicate a lack of understanding of existing and newly available ICT software and hardware technology among staff within the building technology due to lack of digitalisation in construction projects implementation, inadequate system upgrades, lack of adequate ICT resources, lack of financial resources for internet and software application subscriptions and lack of ICT training leading. The issues mentioned above have led to the outsourcing of projects professionals, slow pace of electronic emails, untrained professionals, usage of different and unlicensed software, resulting in the underutilisation of ICT within the whole building section. This change also adversely affects all officials, especially the junior officials who have graduated using the most recent ICT technology during their studies.

The building department of only one public sector was used for the study; therefore, the findings may not be generalisable. The case study public sector’s name is withheld for confidentiality purposes.

Adequate change management and continuous development, combined with the allocation of proper resources, would be necessary for all staff members. Enormous investments had to be made in the ICT equipment by providing a sufficient budget in the building section of the public sectors. The building section within public sectors should provide change management to all aged skills staff by attending seminars to learn new ICT technology applied within its work environment.

The study established the causes of the underutilisation of ICT in the CS, especially in the public work departments and municipalities, and how this contributes to service delivery.

Economists argue that trade liberalization is good for every country involved in the process since, according to Ricardian theory, free trade would allow more trade, which, in turn, offers wider choices for consumers and allows the most efficient producers to concentrate on their specialty areas. This observation raises the issue as to whether the general public believes in such a proposition. If the answer to the question is not in the affirmative, then there must be other reasons why developing country members participate in trade negotiation. An attempt is made to resolve this issue from a new standpoint - the regulatory reform perspective with particularly reference to Korea. Even if this new perspective is satisfactory, the issue remains as to whether the general public can be persuaded by its intrinsic argument. However, a new and different answer definitely adds to the reasons why developing country members should participate in the services negotiation associated with The Doha Development Agenda and the General Agreement on Trade in Services Negotiation.

The purpose of this study is to determine the relationship between the geographic market size of businesses and the competitiveness of being able to bid at low prices.

The design of this study is based on a natural experiment approach. Firstly, after controlling for the firm size and other factors, the author sees that firms participating in bidding in a large region are more competitive to bid at lower prices than firms doing business in a smaller region. The author then tests for causality in a natural experiment of the exogenous event.

The results show that firms participating in the bidding process in a large area are more competitive to bid at lower prices than firms doing business in a small area. This is tested in a natural experiment, and the result is that they are more competitive because they do business in a larger area.

The practical implication is that, when aiming for competitiveness, it is most important to consider the nature of the business and to see the essence of the business, for example, that networks are important in the construction industry, and that doing business over a wide area is the way to become competitive.

The social implications are that to make firms more competitive, we must look at the characteristics of the industry and come up with policies that fit the reality, such as encouraging them to do business in a wide area.

The originality of this study is that this study viewed competitiveness as being able to bid low prices for public procurement and found that doing business in a wide area is competitive. Furthermore, the causal effect of the study was to test the fact that doing business in a wide area does not mean doing business in a wide area because it is competitive, but that doing business in a wide area creates a competitive advantage.

The current research aims to answer the following question: To what extent and under what conditions does hiring consultants to implement a customer relationship management (CRM) system produce performance gains for companies? To answer this question, this research delves into the critical interdependent roles of CRM consultant resources (CR) and user involvement (UI) in overcoming CRM’s technological and organizational implementation challenges.

A quantitative field study methodology was used to empirically test the research hypotheses. Cross-sectional data (N = 126) were collected from large client companies using CRM technology. Partial least squares-structural equation modeling was used to estimate the significance levels of the structural model.

The findings indicate that the extent to which CRM consultants improve CRM system quality (SQ) and, ultimately, firm performance, largely depends on UI, which acts as the key facilitating mechanism to cope with application complexity (APP) and requirements uncertainty (REQ).

This research probes into the largely unexplored interactions between CRM CR, UI, APP and REQ. Using these parameters, this model successfully predicts CRM SQ and firm performance.