Procurement And Supply Chain Strategies For Built Environment Projects

Property Context

This is a procurement plan for the project of school construction in the state. This project is funded by the “Capital spending program from the education department”, this is to develop a school program which is not under the management of the local authority. In this project, it requires a well-planned procurement and supply plan, so as to ensure the success of the project. Different materials, skills, knowledge and experts in the different field of specialization are required to be involved in the project. The client needs a quality procurement report which will convince the team to accept the proposed plan. The client has a high demand to work close with available contractor throughout the project time. This contractor is required to offer a timely completion of the project and the budget by proving facilities of high first class. More than one part is required in this project to make the project successful (Mostafa and Chileshe, 2018). The major requirements includes peoples like experts in project management, construction contractor and other useful consultant who will make completion of the project successful. The client will require to maintain the first architecture. This report will help in getting quality and reliable services and product from the selected team, therefore, maximizing the value of every product to be used in all stages. The following report will show out the strategic procurement processes that will be used, client requirement will be captured and all responsibilities of the consultants employed will outline out (Phillips, 2018).

The school will offer a Health and digital education in the technology sector. The project is expected to be complete by the year 2020 and this will enhance the students and the management to relocate and carry out their operations from the new premises.

This procurement report will outline all required properties, including personnel which will be employed in the project. The construction of the school will start from scratch since the selected local architect has not completed everything (Herbert, 2018). The reason being that, the developed design was not approved by the school principal. This stage involves the following elements:

• Teaching and learning facilities.  
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• Staff offices.
• Laboratory facilities.
• 3D, VR, and digital universe.
• Dining and canteen facilities.
• Multi-purpose hall and indoor games arena.
• Outdoor play and learning areas.

Therefore, due to the above reason, the school principal and promoters were limited to carry out the project requirements complete. The caretaker, chairperson and five members were selected by the promoters to be included in the procurement committee. Admission manager, Principal PA, and manager of the Business Liaison were selected also. In this selected team, no person had technical or operational know-how of construction concept, therefore the team is responsible to select another team of experts who will run the project until completion. The required experts includes:

• Full-time project manager. This person should be available throughout the project time, monitoring the progress of the project.
• Construction contractor. This expert will organize various elements in the project to be performed within the construction site.
• The architect was needed. This area was not fully decided since the original architect might continue with the original design or the promoters employ another one, who will start a new design or continue with the original design.
• These are another experts who will be required to collect and deliver useful information about the project, also, can be called assistant team.

Procurement involves the acquisition of the materials, services, supplies and other requirements which will be used in the targeted project and make it successfully completed. Therefore, when it becomes to the procurement strategies it means that these are already planned methodology on how to get cost-effective purchase for the project materials from different suppliers under consideration (Mena, Van Hoek, and Christopher, 2018). Several factors will be considered when setting out procurement strategies like timeline, the budget, and funding project opportunities. These procurement strategies will define the goals and objective of the project to be achieved with time. The selected team should plan an effective procurement strategies which will assist them in getting viable materials of the project. In this process of decision making cost factor is important to be under considerations plus the quality of the materials to be used (Bag, Venkatesh, Luthra and Anand, 2018).

Procurement Strategy

The building of this school, the selected team should come up with the procurement strategy which will facilitate successful completion of the project. The selected team should sit down and exchange ideas on how to achieve the project completion successful (School). These strategies may be on the quality of the product used and certain measure should be met by all materials to be used in this project. Another factor to be considered is time this includes duration the project will take and timely delivery of the materials from different sources should be considered. Also, the price of the materials and other personnel should be quoted according to the budget of the project (Ahmadi, Pishvaee and Torabi, 2018). Therefore, the requirement to meet should be cost-effective, therefore, encouraging to achieve procurement goals smoothly.

The following are the key steps for developing strong and effective procurement strategies:

1. Understand the Mission of the organization. Is very important for the team to understand the organizational mission when coming up with procurement strategies. This will help to know the stand of the organization and what is required in the future. If is impossible to measure the organization progress today also, will be hard to achieve future goals. Therefore, in procurement, the team should understand the procurement sector is currently accumulating value and understand on how to operate effective. These includes payment terms and conditions, procurement lifecycle, contract compliance, investment in procurement returns and others.
2. Identifying and evaluating what is important to procure for the project. Once the mission of the procurement is clear to the team, now the opportunity is identified. The most important items are the one to be procured first because they will motivate the achievement of the organizational and procurement strategies effectively.
3. Define the success of the product to be procured. The procurement strategy must be able to identify the quality of the product. Will the product assist to add a certain percentage of progress in the project, therefore, attaining the procurement strategies in and outside the project? This will help to measure the procurement ability on the products.
4. Develop target that defines success in a measurable way. This is done after procurement is determined, this where the quality of product can be measurable only. The measurable of the strategy will cooperate with different objectives in procurement. Also, will allow prominence on quality, cost, and services. This is important since it provides progress improvement when the goal is measurable.
5. Implement and measure of the strategy. The strategies developed now is required to be implemented in the project system. After implementation, the team should ensure progress is still monitored across the project activities.

The use of an effective procurement strategy in this project on the purchase of services and materials, it will enhance effective cost, quality maintained and timely delivered (Oke, Aigbavboa, and Tong, 2018). As procurement strategies are achieved also the organization and project objectives will be successfully attained.

In every procurement report, there is a procurement process to be carried out in the project. For example, in this project of school construction, the team should select effective procurement processes. The selected team of experts should carry out a detailed investigation of the various sectors which are going to be involved in the project of school construction (Ajayi and Oyedele, 2018). The following areas need the investigation before selecting procurement process: transportation of items available for the construction, site and environment survey, structural design investigation and the analyses of the materials to be used in construction. Also, the required methodology in the whole processes of project construction is required to be investigated.

Therefore, the team of an expertly selected for the school construction should be ready to select the suitable procurement processes after the investigation is done on those sectors. The correct procurement framework must be implemented in the project. This framework will be based on the main terminologies of procurement, that is time, quality and cost. The success of the project activities will depend on the selected procurement process to be used in the construction of this school. Also, this will help the team to meets client and final user requirements and needs to design the project (Ghazali, Rashid, and Sadullah, 2018). The expert team should be ready to develop, implement and control the selected procurement processes. The school construction team has identified several qualities which should be met by the project, therefore, satisfying the client’s and all parties requirements involved in their needs accordingly. These qualities they include:

• The cost of construction material. The standards cost according to the material quality should be agreed by both parties involved.
• The required time for project completion should under heavy consideration.
• Competition of the price. Is very important to analyze well the price competition on the market before procuring anything for the project.
• The quality of the material, ideas, and expert must kindly be investigated.
• As the team of experts is selected, should be assigned different roles which each individual will participate to ensure successful completion of the project.
• The project processes should be complicated due to the use of a complicated procurement process selected. This must be avoided at the highest rate as the project is concern.
• The exchange of various risk within the different activities in the project, will it possible within the project of school construction?

Using the above qualities, will enable the team to select an effective procurement processes and implement the process according to the project requirement of the client and to the final user of the school developement. A successful project is based on the perfect and effective selection of the procurement process.

Procurement Process

This is the same as the procurement framework to be used in the project development. This system of procurement will lay out several duties and responsibilities to be undertaken by several selected experts (Awuzie, Farag and McDermott, 2018). Therefore, effective implementations of the procurement framework will involve scheduling and planning cost saving in all project operations and put a commitment on the procurement team. This will facilitate cost reduction in the project activities but increase the profitability level.

Procurement system is classified into four categories, as mentioned below:

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• Design and construction.
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Most orders of this project have multiplied much in the market due to the high demand of the material. The development of suitable procurement system will be depending on the school project and the procurement techniques to be used in acquiring materials (Daoud, Othman, Robinson, and Bayyati, 2018). The risk is a very important factor to be considered in the project, as well as the involvement of the client in general. The selected system implemented in this project should facilitate contract strategy, methodology and team selected knowledge on how to processed and finish the project within the time limit.

Several parties, like buyers and sellers, are most important to be involved in the procurement processes. The school team of experts, contractors, suppliers and any party involved in this project development must work under certain contract of agreement. The existence of those several parties should sign up the contract which will help the project to run effectively. Also, they is existence of a general worker in the project which they need to be managed by the experts, therefore, requiring management contract between these casual employees in the project (De Marco, 2018). The management which is selected by promoters of the school must supervise the project until it’s over according to the legal requirement they agreed together. They are many contracts of agreement involved in this project like management construction contract, design and implementation contract, employees and management contract and these all contracts will help and encourage the technical and procurement framework to implemented and managed well in achieving procurement and organizational objective (Kumar, Pal, and Dash, 2018). All the management contract they have advantages towards the procurement processes. These advantages they include:

• The selected Team of experts and school team they will encourage each other to coordinate and combine all efforts between the contractors, consulters, and designer of the project.
• The developed plan will be implemented according to since each party will focus to work according to the agreed contract.
• Set of responsibilities, roles and areas of specialization are well defined by the contract.
• Terms and condition governing the project and the participants are well elaborated in case of any change. This helps to maintain the good relationship between all parties involved in the management.
• Use of quality contract, it will enhance the use of quality and timely delivered materials. The contact between a supplier and the contractor is very important for successful project development.

Project team and participants are the groups of peoples and individuals who are involved in the development of a successful project. The team of experts like architects, contractors and consulters are required in the project development processes (Eftekhar, Masini, Robotis and Van Wassenhove, 2018). The project owner and his management team are also involved. The outsiders’ participants like suppliers, local government and competitor for the tender in one way or the other they motivates the success towards the development of the project. For the local government, the authority has provided £60m towards the school development. This team is ranked according to the mandate it has in the project. The following is a structure towards this project team selected.

Project Manager. This is an individual who is responsible for all achievement and failures of the progress in the project. The project manager must be involved in every single step of the project and understand what is going on. The project manager cannot execute all activities of the project alone, therefore, requiring a team of experts to work alongside him. Therefore the project manager is in charge of this team, anything undertaken by the team is the responsibility of the manager to be aware. Eventually, single mistake inside the project, the project manager is answerable to it, therefore he should a person who takes his responsibilities with heavy concern and careful (Zwikael and Meredith, 2018). The following are the key roles and responsibilities of the project manager:

• Incorporation management. This is ensuring all activities have been created and directed in the right way according to the construction phases resulting in the success of the activities.
• Scope supervision. He is the overall planner and controller of the whole project in progress. All the resources within the project are under his responsibilities.
• Management quality services in the project. This involves setting up measures which will determine the quality measures according to the project requirement.
• All human resources in the project are managed by the project manager. The employees are controlled by the project manager. The project manager he will ensure all tasks assigned to the employees are completed on time and have met the required standard of the project.
• Risk taker. All risk which might raise from the project should be addressed by the project manager. This should be recovered without no time wastage.
• Manage all procurement processes. Procurement team is under the project manager. He should be aware of the suppliers and material to be supplied for the project to be complete in time. He must ensure all standards are met in the procurement process.
• He must ensure clear and frequent communication channel is implemented in the project system. All level of management in the project should maintain all direct communication since it will result in the quality decision making (Martinsuo and Hoverfält, 2018).

Procurement Systems

Construction manager. The construction manager will work closely with the project manager to ensure the success is achieved in the project. Regularly, the construction manager will work closely with several teams. For example, the designer of the project to ensure correct implementation is done according to the original design. Also, the Architect is required to work closely with the construction manager. The main role of the construction manager is to maintain the planning is on progress well as it is initiated, allocation of resources, management of the staff in the site, doing the budget calculation and finally, conducting the minor tender in the site for boosting project success (Gustavsson, 2018).

Architect. This is the individual who is responsible in designing the project from the scratch. Is the one who originated the project form the first stage and plans the direction the will follow. When the project starts, he should be ready to provide any clarification where is required by the rest of the team. He must ensure all plans from the first one are safely packed and preserver since they will used at the end to evaluate the standards of the project (Kelkar, 2018).

Procurement team. Material for the project is required in high demand when the project startes. Therefore, the procurement team should be ready to conduct health purchase of all these materials at a required quality and on a good time. The materials on the site is planned, controlled and disposed of by the procurement team where possible. Conducting the procurement process like searching quality and reliable supplier is the role the procurement team (Nguyen and Hadikusumo, 2018).

Ethical conducts are the responsibilities of every party involved in the project to maintain high standards in carrying out activities in the project and maintain good behavior towards each party. Professional ethics are role and condition to be followed by every part of the project to ensure professional and reliable solution has been provided (Ikeda and Mangan, 2018). The following are some code of ethics in this project development:

• All parties should cooperate and respect each other accordingly, failure to that the action will be undertake to the necessary part.
• Every project team they must adhere to the agreed contract.
• The procurement should exercise open and clear purchase of materials. These materials they supposed to meet required standards of the project.
• In case of failure to the specific sector, the responsible team will bear that risk as personal or as the group level until it is recovered.

Conclusion

In summary, this is the procurement report describing all the procurement strategies, procurement processes, client requirements in the project and the personal skills which are required to complete the construction of the school project. Finally, the procurement team should cooperate with other teams of experts in drawing out the procurement processes and strategies. Quality, time and cost factors are every important factors to be considered in the procurement processes and entirely in the project.

Reference

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