Search results

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.

Skewed pricing is a typical tactic used by tenderers in unit price projects to gain additional advantages at the expense of the owner or other competing tenderers. This paper aims to describe the development of a model for detecting skewed pricing in competitive tendering for unit price contracts.

The model evaluates how much the offered unit rates for work items deviate from the reasonable rate identified from the item’s submitted unit rates. Item rate deviations are integrated into a total deviation score for each submitted tender based on the relative weight of the work item to the total project amount. The model allows for assigning higher weights to work items that are more prone to skewed pricing, such as those that are performed early and those that are expected to experience quantity fluctuations.

The paper presents a detection model that uses only the submitted prices of the competing tenderers to perform the needed calculations, which reduces subjectivity in identifying skewed tenders. Two examples are given to demonstrate how the model may be used to detect skewed tenders.

The model supports tendering officials in the challenging task of identifying skewed tenders, which is required by rules and regulations governing public procurement. The model’s ease of use is expected to make it more widely used as a decision-support tool during the tender evaluation stage of real-world projects.

The tender documents, an essential data source for internet-based logistics tendering platforms, incorporate massive fine-grained data, ranging from information on tenderee, shipping location and shipping items. Automated information extraction in this area is, however, under-researched, making the extraction process a time- and effort-consuming one. For Chinese logistics tender entities, in particular, existing named entity recognition (NER) solutions are mostly unsuitable as they involve domain-specific terminologies and possess different semantic features.

To tackle this problem, a novel lattice long short-term memory (LSTM) model, combining a variant contextual feature representation and a conditional random field (CRF) layer, is proposed in this paper for identifying valuable entities from logistic tender documents. Instead of traditional word embedding, the proposed model uses the pretrained Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model as input to augment the contextual feature representation. Subsequently, with the Lattice-LSTM model, the information of characters and words is effectively utilized to avoid error segmentation.

The proposed model is then verified by the Chinese logistic tender named entity corpus. Moreover, the results suggest that the proposed model excels in the logistics tender corpus over other mainstream NER models. The proposed model underpins the automatic extraction of logistics tender information, enabling logistic companies to perceive the ever-changing market trends and make far-sighted logistic decisions.

(1) A practical model for logistic tender NER is proposed in the manuscript. By employing and fine-tuning BERT into the downstream task with a small amount of data, the experiment results show that the model has a better performance than other existing models. This is the first study, to the best of the authors' knowledge, to extract named entities from Chinese logistic tender documents. (2) A real logistic tender corpus for practical use is constructed and a program of the model for online-processing real logistic tender documents is developed in this work. The authors believe that the model will facilitate logistic companies in converting unstructured documents to structured data and further perceive the ever-changing market trends to make far-sighted logistic decisions.

Pre-construction of a project comprises stages that are pivotal for the procurement performance. It is defined as the duration from the project's initiation to construction. However, Private Public Partnerships (PPPs) have been subjected to a long pre-construction, thereby leading to an inefficient development process. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to pay attention to the influencing factors elongating the pre-construction duration.

Based on data of 5,677 PPP projects between 2009 and 2021 in China, the authors adopt the Accelerated Failure Time (AFT) model in duration analysis to empirically analyze the following underlying dynamics determining the duration of PPP pre-construction stages: (1) policy uncertainty; (2) corruption; and (3) procurement method selection. To observe the influencing paths more specifically, the authors divided the pre-construction duration into the pre-tendering period and tendering period and regressed them separately.

The results indicate that the pre-construction duration is significantly prolonged with increased policy uncertainty and corruption degree as well as the use of tendering methods. Meanwhile, the above factors have a greater impact on the pre-tendering period than the tendering period.

The contribution of this study is twofold: (1) theoretically, this paper provides new evidence on the impact of PPP policy uncertainty, corruption and procurement method selection on the pre-construction duration. It complements empirical studies on the factors elongating the time efficiency of PPPs projects. (2) In practice, it provides a specific path for the government to improve the time efficiency of PPPs.

Complying with the code of conduct by professionals in the construction industry worldwide has become a significant issue over the years. This has led to projects' failure, leading to losses to both the client and contractors. The study's objective is to identify the challenges of construction professionals in complying with their code of conduct and preventing corrupt practices.

Quantitative approach was used to collect empirical data by sending questionnaires to 56 construction professionals in South Africa. Data gathered were analysed through Excel statistical tool. Mean values were calculated for the quantitative data, whilst thematic content analyses were used to generate frequencies and percentages for qualitative data.

The findings indicate that construction professionals experience many unethical issues in their work duties such as inflated tender prices, overpricing the rates, tender-based kickbacks, bribes for projects, unethical methods of project execution, use of lower grade materials than specified, discrimination, among others. However, issues such as greediness, acceptance of corruption as usual practice, lack of knowledge about the code of conduct, the only way to get contracts, part of the process, and peer pressure create a challenge in complying with the code of conduct and preventing corrupt practices among construction professionals.

Construction professionals face many unethical and corrupt practices in their project management and execution, which they cannot overcome due to many factors. Therefore, there is the need to sensitise the professionals in the construction industry regarding their code of conduct as well as the danger associated with engaging in corrupt practices in their work and their implication on project performance.

The findings give an insight into the critical factors curtailing the construction professional's ability to comply with their code of conduct and be corrupt-free in their line of duty. Thus, professional associations can use the findings in guiding their members.

This study aims to build on the dynamic capability view by examining dynamic capabilities associated with public value in public procurement.

A qualitative case study approach is used in this study. The interview and secondary data consist of eight cases of value-creating procurement from four public organizations.

The findings connect dynamic capabilities and public value in terms of innovation generation and promotion, well-functioning supplier markets, public procurement process effectiveness, environmental and social sustainability and quality and availability of products or services.

Dynamic capabilities in public procurement are necessary to improve public procurement.

This study extends understanding of how sensing, seizing and transforming capabilities contribute to public value creation in both innovative and less innovative (i.e. ordinary) procurement scenarios.

Insufficient time allocation for the bidding period occurs, causing drawbacks to both parties, the client and the bidder. Hence, this study aims to evaluate the time allocated for preparing a bid proposal as per the National Competitive Bidding (NCB) in the Sri Lankan context.

The study has adopted a mixed method approach and expert interviews and document review to detect, analyse and validate the issues, and solutions based on NCB along with the adequacy of the allocated bidding period used as main data collection tools. Both qualitative and quantitative data were analysed through manual content analysis and inferential analysis respectively.

Overall, 24 local issues with the existing competitive bidding process and solutions for each were identified. Among the 24 local issues, it was unanimously agreed by all interviewees that three specific issues require attention and improvement. These issues are related to the standard and incompleteness of bidding documents, inaccurate BOQ quantities measured by the consultant or the main contractor, and the excessive number of bidding document amendments by the consultant. It was revealed that a maximum of 42 calendar days (6 weeks) is sufficient for the bidding process while a minimum of 21 calendar days (3 weeks) is insufficient.

The findings of this study would be recommended that Information and Communication Technology Agency (ICTA) understand the necessity of revising the NCB reference to the time allocated for the preparation of bids. By recognising the importance of sufficient time allocation for bid preparation, this research serves as a practical guide for authorities involved in policy formulation, aiding them in implementing revisions that align with the dynamic requirements of bidding procedures.

With the surge in public procurement, especially in developing countries, ensuring fair competition in procurement has assumed paramount importance. Academic endeavors in the domain of competition issues have often lacked the views of field-level functionaries. This study aims to involve a large number of expert practitioners in India to identify the significant contemporary competition risks in public procurement from the procurer and supplier sides and develop a model depicting the hierarchy of competition-restrictive actions (CRAs) in procurement based on their mutual interactions.

The significant CRAs along the procurement cycle are identified through literature survey, interactive workshops and expert interviews. A questionnaire survey covering 143 respondents from 12 public organizations is used to evaluate their impact. Considering the complex causal interactions involved, interpretive structural modeling followed by MICMAC (Iimpact matrix cross-reference multiplication applied to a classification analysis is used to develop a hierarchical model of competition risks in procurement.

Tailor-made contracts, splitting of a project below competition thresholds, restrictive selection criteria and awarding the contract on nomination emerge as CRAs with the highest driving power. Horizontal collusion among vendors strongly depends on practices followed in the procuring organization.

The survey data and the experts’ opinions emanate from practitioners in India, which is a limitation. However, with necessary contextual calibrations, the study is of high functional utility to policymakers and practitioners.

The research facilitates a comprehensive understanding to procurement managers/policymakers of the CRAs along the procurement cycle and their interdependencies. It offers valuable insights for improving competition, which is foundational for optimal procurement outcomes.

The study enriches the public procurement domain knowledge by identifying and assessing the significant contemporary CRAs, examining their mutual interactions and developing an interpretive structural model. Although contributing to the body of knowledge, the study is unique in being grounded in field realities.

This paper aims to identify how a public client’s use of control systems (process, output and social control) affect innovation possibilities in construction projects.

Semi-structured interviews about six infrastructure projects were conducted to identify respondents’ views on innovation possibilities. These possibilities were then analyzed from an organizational control perspective within principal–agent relationships between the Swedish Transport Administration (STA) and their contractors.

How the client uses control systems affects innovation possibilities. Relying on process control could negatively affect innovation opportunities, whereas output control could have a positive influence. In addition, social control seems to have a weak effect, as the STA appears not to use social control to facilitate joint innovation. Public clients must comply with the Public Procurement Act and, therefore, retain the requirements specified in the tendering documents. Much of the steering of the execution is connected to the ex ante phase (before signing the contract), which affects innovation possibilities in the design and execution phases for the contractor.

This study was conducted with only one client, thus limiting its generalizability. However, the findings provide an important stepping stone to further investigation into balancing control systems and creating innovation possibilities in a principal–agent relationship.

Although public procurement has increasingly been emphasized as a major potential source of innovation, studying how a public client’s use of organizational control systems affects innovation possibilities in the construction sector has received scant attention.