Civil Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
sustainable market not only by supplying goods and services to the
programme, but also by creating employment and training opportunities
and by assuring minimum wage and other general working conditions
are applied on all projects.
Balanced scorecards can be used to communicate many of the priori-
ties of clients. These priorities translate into policy objectives that guide
the tender process and subsequent contracts. Balanced scorecards enable
delivery to be managed and measured across different policy areas.
Scorecards can also be applied further down the supply chain. For
example, tier 1 contracts with main contractors may include a require-
ment to apply some or all of the same balanced scorecard to all tier 2
procurements with subcontractors. This ensures that the client's policy
objectives are cascaded down the supply chain to smaller fi rms, who
might not otherwise have been directly exposed to client-led initiatives.
In this way scorecards can help to monitor, manage and control tier 1
and tier 2 contractors during procurement and delivery.
This scorecard method can be used to raise issues and aid communica-
tion on a variety of matters, including cost certainty and life-cycle costs,
to establish which matter most to the client. For example, a grocery
retailer procuring a building might be most interested in their built asset
making the fastest return on investment, while a care-home provider
might be looking for longer-term savings on the running costs of the
facility and the initial capital cost per room.
One of the major client objectives is very often timely delivery. The
most common remedy for failure to meet this requirement is the use of
liquidated and ascertained damages (LADs). Although Lal (2009) points
out that the advantages of LADs are that they are precise and unambigu-
ous, others, including Bingham (2008), have argued that they are seen
by contractors as penalties waiting to happen and can, therefore, cause
more problems and disputes than they solve.
This implies a need for clarity and a need to communicate in precise
terms, as early as the initial procurement stages, a vision of what the
client demands. The London 2012 programme involved a major procure-
ment exercise spanning a number of years with a large number and
variety of stakeholders, whose needs, expectations and aspirations
needed to fi nd a balance of requirements using a scorecard. These
requirements included security, employment, environment and legacy
objectives.
One of the features of very large construction projects is that they
have a major and transforming effect on the thousands or even millions
