Prof. Urry was always forward looking in his view of the industry and visionary in the way he drew ideas and concepts from other disciplines and applied them to construction. Coming, as an aeronautical engineer, with no baggage he was able to step back and look at how ideas and concepts could be...

Customer focus has become a catch phrase not only in the service industry but also in the housebuilding industry. Furthermore, UK speculative housebuilders have increasingly been searching for ways to be more customer focused. This study, through an analysis of the concept of customer...

The procurement systems adopted in the construction industry are, by their very nature, fragmented and divided into sub-organizations distinguished by the various sentient stakeholders. The industry has come to be regarded as adversarial and one in which cooperation is expected to take place in...

Realizing that there is a lack of commonality in selecting criteria to evaluate contractor ability, the study aim was to develop a common set of contractor ability criteria for both government and private sectors. This included a standardized set of physical characteristics (hierarchical...

One of the most significant environmental impacts of buildings occurs through the consumption of energy during their operational lives. It is a well-known fact that buildings in the UK are only a fraction as efficient as current approaches and available technologies permit. The effective...

For construction activities, timely resource allocation is crucial to avoid unnecessary waiting time of resources and delay of activities, especially under the condition of limited supply of resources. Timely resource allocation, i.e. determination of an activity that has the highest priority to...

The performance of hospital buildings depends to a large degree on the efficiency of maintenance execution. The research objectives were to examine the efficiency of maintenance under alternative maintenance policies and alternative sources of labour (outsourcing vs. in-house). The research...

Total spending on building maintenance in the UK has increased by 66% in the last 10 years (BMI, 1996). Total expenditure on maintenance in 1997 was £39.8 billion (BMI, 1998). Any significant reduction in building maintenance costs will therefore have a real impact on the national economy. This...

Value is a subjective term and is manifested in different ways such as attitude, belief, desire, preference, need and criteria. In this paper, a cognitive value management model for construction procurement is developed to examine how value is influenced by previous project outcomes and other...

Current methods of predicting cash flow have a number of significant weaknesses. At the project level, previous models are simple and incorporate only some of the variables affecting cash flow. On the company level, budgeting is performed on an overall basis (i.e. no account is taken of...