ICT-based improvement of construction procurement process

Abstract

The research by Maliranta and Rouvinen based on the Finnish industrial statistics confirms that the productivity improvements in ICT services in firms correlate to organizational and process changes. These results implied a further question: Which types of process changes create the most beneficial productivity improvements in different environments? In this paper we apply the Three Viewpoint Method (3VPM) approach, originally developed for the productivity analysis of process changes, to analyze the improvement of the construction procurement process of a large Scandinavian construction company when an IT system for procurement was taken into use in the Finnish offices. The analysis revealed that implementing the procurement IT system decreased worker utilization rates and improved the procurement process throughput.