Ranking the benefits of early contractor involvement: a client’s perspective

Abstract

With the increasing popularity of collaborative project delivery models to deliver infrastructure projects, there has been a growing interest in the possibility of integrating contractors in the preconstruction phase of the project using Early Contractor Involvement (ECI). However, previous studies on the impact of ECI did not consider whether the observed benefits were the ones that motivated the client to use ECI. This study aims to investigate the ranking of the ECI benefits from the client’s perspective, as well as how this ranking is moderated by the client’s motivation. 32 participants from the same client organization were asked to rank the potential benefits of ECI using pairwise comparison which was analyzed using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method. The findings show that the possibility to collaborate with the contractor, enhance constructability, and better quality of solution are the most desired benefits for the client. In addition, the benefits expected by the client organization are found to be moderated by what motivated the client to use ECI. These findings help to contextualize the ECI effects as identified in previous studies from the client’s perspective and give contractors a better awareness of which ECI benefits are most useful for the client side.