Construction Procurement: Strategies, Collaborative Working, and Risk Management

Construction procurement
In general, procurement refers to the acquisition of products, services, or building from a third party at
the best available price, in an adequate quantity, and at the proper time and location (Martins 2009;
Office of Procurement Ombudsman 2012). Lenard and Mohsini (1998) proposed a more accurate
concept for construction procurement that takes into account future client satisfaction with the
completed facility. Their concept may be justified as more pertinent to the modern construction
business, because construction managers' ultimate role is to meet project objectives while assuring
customer satisfaction. Hampton (1994; Oyegoke et al. 2009).
Customer satisfaction in the building sector takes into account several qualitative variables in addition to
the completed facility (Karna and Sorvala 2009). Rowlinson and McDermott (1998) presented the
systems perspective of construction procurement to demonstrate the many aspects to be addressed in
the construction procurement process. These characteristics indicate larger aspects of construction
procurement, which also has developed significantly from the typical transaction-based perspective.
Construction procurement practices
According to Miller et al. (2009), mostly in construction industry, project owners and project
managers choose a procurement strategy that has shown to be effective in the past. As a result,
project owners miss out on significant chances to generate financial advantages and decrease
risks. As a result, selecting the best procurement process is critical. According to Cox et al.
(2006), a project owner can manage a construction project using an in-house staff, an external
team, or a blended team of in-house and external workers. The project management team's
next issue will be to settle on a procurement technique based on the project's particular
circumstances.
new ways of working and collaborative arrangements in the construction industry
The new century has seen broad acknowledgement from research results and the construction
industry that the sector must adopt new methods of working but it has to stay competitive and
fulfill the ever-increasing demands of its clients. When individuals and the project parties work
together to align their interests for the project's success, this is called collaborative working.
Collaboration is broken down into partnering, which typically involves a more formal contract
or agreement. The procedure changes as the partners gain knowledge, cooperate rather than
compete, and limit the inflated costs of the legal industry. A shift toward collaborative working
and its connected disciplines is inherent in this goal of new ways of working: concurrent
engineering and lean manufacturing (Anumba et al., 2004). According to Hibbert et al. (2008),
the term "collaboration" is used broadly to refer to any kinds of circumstances in which diverse
parties come together to cooperate. These circumstances included partnering, alliances, joint
ventures, and networking, as well as the frequent interchangeability of those terms. The
motivations behind the industry's adoption of collaboration were summed up by Fiedler and
Deegan (2007). External pressures including setting an example, publicity, and political pressure
were some of the causes. Internal pressures including those related to stakeholder analysis,
economic stability, and efficiency were additional factors.