Building Procurement

Procurement as an activity in commerce and industry has come to mean purchasing - the tendering and selection systems required to obtain anything from paper clips to power stations. In the property/construction process it is now becoming quite common to work with a procurement officer and to agree with him how best to go about satisfying his "requirements for facilities". A person who wants a building must travel through the process of building procurement. It must sometimes appear to the building owner that the other participants, the consultants and contractors, who are there after all to help him in acquiring his building, are sometimes themselves more intent on travelling on their own separate journeys than perhaps in arriving at the client's, or even at their own, journey's end. It is hoped that this book can provide the logic and the lexicon of building procurement. This book aims to explain, simply, how the construction constituents of client, consultants and contractors fit together and to provide practical guidance on the decisions necessary to choose a particular procurement route. It introduces, as a common thread throughout the book, procurement assessment criteria (PAC) and procurement arrangement options (PAO) and looks at contracts appropriate to each procurement method. It is aimed at property students, construction students, property, construction and professional practitioners and their clients.