Determining the Performance of Procurement Methods against Selection Criteria using Outranking - Satisfying Methodology.

Abstract

The need to develop a decision support system to determine the most appropriate procurement route for a building project led to the development of various theoretical models. One of the foremost techniques was the multi-attribute utility approach (MAUA). In this technique, the arithmetic mean (averaging) method was used to fix the utility factors relating the procurement routes to each criterion. In this paper, the averaging method was subjected to further analysis using the outranking-satisfying technique to determine the correctness of the results derived from the averaging method used to fix the utility factors in the use of MAUA. The results showed that there is a significant difference between the rank-order of procurement methods against selection criteria by averaging and outranking-satisfying techniques. The use of outranking-satisfying analysis revealed that, the use of arithmetic mean to determine the utility factors can lead to inappropriate association of procurement routes with differing utility coefficients. 1. Introduction The use of appropriate procurement method to implement construction projects was brought to the fore after the release of Latham's (1964) and Emerson's, (1994) reports. Clients were advised to use and demand for appropriate procurement method on their projects to mitigate the effects of time and cost overruns of construction projects on the economy and the growth of the construction industry. This demand led to an increase of research efforts to determine the most appropriate procurement method for a construction project. Several theoretical models have been proposed and developed. These include the discriminant analysis approach (Skitmore and Marsden, 1988), multivariate analysis (Chan et al., 2001), decision support systems (Kumaraswamy and Dissanayaka, 2001), the multi-attribute utility approach (MAUA) (Bennett and Grice, 1990, Love et al., 1998, Chan, 1995), and the analytical hierarchical process (Cheung et al., 2001). Ojo and Aina (2010) also developed a weighted model to determine the most appropriate procurement option using the averaging method to fix the performance of the procurement options on the selection criteria for building types and cost categories. Ren et al. (2012) acknowledged that the selection of an appropriate strategy has long been identified as a major contributor to project success but suggested that the route which is most appropriate depends