A Private Organization Utilizes the Best Value Approach on an Enterprise Resource Planning System

The Best Value Approach(BVA)is a new project delivery method that has been developed at Arizona State University.It has been documented to increase performance and value on projects by the identification and utilization of expertise instead of management,direction,and control(MDC).It utilizes perfomance information that is simple,observable,and countable.It allows the expert vendor to know what the client proj-ect requires,why they can achieve success and what they will do before they do it.The tracking of the project cost and time deviation requires an initial plan and method to tack it.Preliminary results of the BVA have shown a 90%decrease in effort by client organizations,98%customed satisfaction and has led to 1%vendor cost and time deviation rate.It ap-plies to construction,services/TT projects,and any long-term service.In 2014,a large private organization having dificulty delivering information technology(T)and construction/facility services identified the BVA as a potential solution.This paper will summarize a major IT Enterprise Resource Planming case study that the large private organization used the BVA on and identify the full results.

Construction engineering management culture shift: Is the lowest tender offer dead?

The procurement of public construction projects must walk a fine line between the corruption of state officials and collusion of contractors. The method of awarding projects to the lowest responsible tenderer was originally implemented to guard against corruption of state officials. However, an investigation of the construction industry in the Canadian province of Quebec showed that lowest-tender-offer procurement gave rise to collusion of companies tendering for the contracts. Alternatively, bestvalue procurement has been used for decades, but here problems arise owing to the necessity of subjective judging of measures other than price to compare bids, giving rise to time-and money-consuming protests. The paper proposes a compelling argument that the construction engineering management(CEM) culture should refocus its efforts on enhancing project cost certainty rather than merely searching for means to design a project in a manner that produces the lowest initial cost, and awards the construction to the lowest tender offer that focuses on cost savings during the project development and delivery process. The difference in the two approaches is subtle but extremely important. To make the transition, the engineering management tools must be advanced to the next level.This means that all project control tools for managing cost,schedule, and technical scope must be transformed from working in the deterministic mode to the stochastic mode,thus making the probability of completing the projectwithin or below its official budget the primary decision criterion. To do so, CEMs must accept that there is a benefit in paying more for an alternative that increases cost certainty for the entire project. The authors of this paper hope that it will provide the grist for a more general dialog across all industry sectors where engineering management is practiced.

Tender evaluation through efficiency analysis for public construction contracts

Given the European Public Procurement Directive 2014/24/EU,policymakers have ordered the inclusion of various criteria,such as the price,life-cycle costs,environmental,and social aspects,in the evaluation of tenders for public construction projects.Consequently,the relevance of non-monetary award criteria has gained significant value.However,the established evaluation formulas,which are used to obtain the best value for money procurement,have resulted in legal disputes.The existing evaluation formulas exhibit mathematical weaknesses,wherein scoring indices do not express economic efficiency adequately.Thus,a conflict is observed between the political requirement of non-monetary award criteria and their evaluation by contracting authorities.To overcome such dilemma,an extensive literature review is conducted.Specifically,this study explores the essential problems of existing evaluation formulas and develops a more reliable method.The technique from the field of efficiency analysis,i.e.,Data Envelopment Analysis(DEA),is adopted in this study.For contract awarding,the DEA is extended by introducing a decision theoretical framework.For public procurement,the proposed method combines two advantages.First,the proposed method ensures the derivation of a robust tender ranking given that with respect to clients’preferences,irrelevant and insufficiently tailored tenders do not influence the scoring.Second,the proposed method supports the intention of policy makers to promote public goals,such as sustainable aspects.By disclosing the strengths and weaknesses of bidders with respect to their competitors,all bidders can obtain a precise overview of their performance regarding the award criteria.In sum,the proposed method allows a targeted improvement of certain criteria values in future tenders and consequently leads to an enhancement of public goals.

Interprocedural Constant Range Propagation and Alias Analysis by Multiple Version Method

A set of methods for interprocedural analysis is proposed. First, an ap-proach for interprocedural constant propagation is given. Then the concept of constant propagation is extended so as to meet the needs of data dependence analysis. Besides certain constant, constant range can also be propagated. The related propagating rules are introduced, and an idea for computing Return function is given. This approach can solve almost all interprocedural constant propagation problems with non-recursive calls. Second, a muItiple-version par-allelizing technique is also proposed for alias problem. The work related to this paper has been implemented on a shared-memory parallel computer.