Abstract:
Construction Procurement Management involves acquiring the services, materials, and
equipment necessary to complete a construction project within minimum possible cost
and time as per client’s requirement. Clients hire special contractors, subcontractors,
and material suppliers for the purpose. Traditionally material suppliers are hired using
past experience of main contractors. Such practices involve long and tedious planning,
negotiations, calculations, documentations, and approvals. These methods are highly
prone to errors, miscalculations, change orders, conflicts, disputes, corruption, and in
cooperation, eventually leading to wastage of money, time, and quality of the whole
project. With the advent of technology, these drawbacks are targeted to be minimized
using various advanced and automated techniques. These techniques involve web
services, design, and procurement software, and advanced mathematical systems for
dealing procurement issues. Construction material supplier selection is addressed in
separate studies using web services, design specifications and Multi-Criteria DecisionMaking (MCDM) to efficiently perform electronic procurement services. However,
researchers have mentioned issues and gaps in these methods. In this research, Building
Information Modelling (BIM) is utilized as a central system for acquiring material
requirements from design, automating web search for suppliers, and performing
MCDM for evaluation of the suppliers. An end-to-end automated system is developed
to minimize the drawbacks in construction supplier procurement and supply chain
management. This system is validated from construction field experts, and results have
shown an appreciable minimization in construction procurement issues.
Keywords: Construction Procurement Management, Building Information Modelling
(BIM), Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM), Web Crawling, Search Engine,
Supply Chain Management.
