Procurement’s role in engineering and construction is changing. Procurement is
evolving into a far more strategic discipline. Major equipment procurement in particular ties up a large proportion of construction cost, has long lead time, and is usually
associated with the acquisition of complex or specialized technology. Selection of
suppliers is a complex process which requires the evaluation of several suppliers and project targets. This analysis is usually performed manually, it is time consuming, and
certain tradeoffs may be overlooked. This research advances state of the art to aid the
commercial evaluation and selection of engineered equipment suppliers in the early
stages of capital projects. A decision support system was developed in cooperation with
several leading engineering-procurement-construction (EPC) and owner firms within industrial construction. The system integrates firms’ market and supplier performance
data with a decision aid method to support rapid tradeoff analysis and evaluation of sourcing alternatives in the early stages of capital projects. The tool has been developed in Visual C#, in the form of simple and intuitive
forms, with Microsoft Access as the back-end database. A supplier selection module uses
the Aspiration Interactive Method (AIM) for providing rapid tradeoff analysis and points
how each supplier is ranked in relation to the expected procurement targets. The system
also includes a module for schedule analysis of the preferred supplier. Managers first
need to assess unique project and supplier’s characteristics to estimate most likely
durations. These durations are used to run a PERT analysis and provide initial feedback on probability of equipment delivery success. Therefore, managers are able to check whether their procurement master schedule milestones are feasible or not.
Two actual selection cases were used to validate system’s usefulness,
completeness, and deployability. According to experienced managers, this tool brings intelligence to the traditional selection process. The ability to quickly generate what-if scenarios and rapidly perform tradeoff analysis based on real data improves the quality of
decision making, and supports commercial assessment and recommendation of suppliers in the early phases of capital projects. / text
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UTEXAS/oai:repositories.lib.utexas.edu:2152/6524 |
| Date | 14 October 2009 |
| Creators | Azambuja, Marcelo Menna Barreto |
| Source Sets | University of Texas |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Format | electronic |
| Rights | Copyright is held by the author. Presentation of this material on the Libraries' web site by University Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin was made possible under a limited license grant from the author who has retained all copyrights in the works. |
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