Impact of using minimum preliminary items for building works in Sri Lankan construction industry

Abstract

Preliminary items section is one of the critical sections in a bill of quantities, though they are not direct parts of the permanent work. There are some preliminary items which are not included in the preliminary bill. In Sri Lankan construction industry employers are willing to pay for the preliminary items which mostly impact to the work items while ignoring the other items. Further, corporate consultants do not instigate employers to include preliminary items. There is a research gap in identifying the impact of minimum usage of preliminary items for building works. Hence, this research was aimed at investigating the impact of using non-detailed preliminary bill for building projects in Sri Lanka. Initially, a literature synthesis was carried out to identify the preliminary items commonly included in the preliminary bill for the building projects in locally and in global context. Furthermore, factors to be considered when pricing the preliminary bill and the importance of preliminary items were identified. Subsequently, the relationship between preliminary amount and the total contract amount was recognized. Data was collected through the semi structured expert interviews and a work study. Thirty building projects were selected for the work study. The collected data was analysed using content analysis with the use of Nvivo 11 software. The analysis revealed that there are negative impacts due to minimum usage of preliminary items in the preliminary bill such as; deterioration of standard and quality of the construction industry, lack of investments toward construction industry, impact to the employer and subsidence of involvement of labours in the construction industry name to few. Furthermore, the paper discussed the factors to be considered when preparing the preliminary bill. Among those factors size of the project is a critical factor when preparing the preliminary bill. Moreover, findings disclosed that average preliminary percentage of building projects is 4.98% and the percentage is increasing with the accretion of the contract amount in Sri Lankan construction industry.