The use of Bills of Quantities in building contractor organizations

Abstract

The prime purpose of the Bill of Quantities (BQ) is to enable all contractors tendering for a contract to price on exactly the same information. Subsequent to this, it is widely used for post-tender work such as: material scheduling; construction planning; cost analysis; and cost planning. Due to the re-work involved in the post-tender use of the BQ, the ‘extent of use’ of the BQ is important. The ‘re-work’ is any work such as; modification, or grouping, or breaking up of data when used for a particular task by a management group. The ‘extent of use’ is defined as the direct use, after subtracting the re-work from the total use. This paper identifies the contractor's current use of the BQ for post-tender work based on eight case studies, and establishes the ‘extent of use’ thus highlighting the re-working of the bill. By establishing the ‘extent of use’, the true picture of the direct use and the repetition work can be shown. The average extent of use of the BQ for post-tender work in the industry was found to be 50%. This 50% use of the BQ requires some form of re-working. This re-work needs to be reduced if improved post-tender use of estimating data is to be achieved. Information stored in the BQ should be arranged in a directly useable way. It was found that, ‘quantities’, ‘quantity units’, and ‘unit rates’ are the key elements of the BQ information that need to be presented in a more meaningful format if the amount of re-work is to be reduced.