| Summary: | 碩士 === 義守大學 === 管理研究所碩士班 === 93 === After the Taiwan’s participation in WTO, many major international contractors have entered into the Taiwan’s construction market with the advantages of their predominant engineering technology, construction management, and financial strength. In addition, the construction of public infrastructures and the private investments have been drastically reduced, and the tendered prices have been extremely low by the malign competition among tenderers. Furthermore, the costs of construction materials have been continuously increased over the past years. With all the above factors, the contractor would frequently encounter the unexpected negative impacts and engage in a very difficult construction situation. Consequently, the contractors have to re-adjust his business strategy and it is reasonable that the control and management of the construction cost should be the most important task required a substantial reinforcement.
The cost control of construction project is the core mechanism to enhance the contractor’s competitiveness and profitability. The contractors should construct a valuable knowledge database to systematically analyze and summarize all the negative factors affected the cost control. Furthermore, they should set up a platform to fast exchange the information and it can reserve, sort, share and re-use all the above data to avoid the potential damage in advance and effectively control the construction cost.
Moreover, the construction industry is a technology / labor intensive one, so the contractor should take the accumulation of the precious technology and experience as his most important asset. Traditionally, most contractors have transferred their experiences by a master – and – apprentice manner. As a result , most of them have been retained in the mind of the masters and the contractors could not effectively transfer them to the company’s asset. In addition, the contractor has to integrate all the information derived from the vertical and horizontal chains of sources through a complicated process. Furthermore, most contractors are used to shuffling site staffs among various construction sites and most of them would be transferred to other sites after the completion of their projects; consequently, the contractor could not effectively maintain all the important as-built records and valuable experiences. With all the above issues, the contractor has to set up a mechanism to effectively manage the construction records which are vital to the cost control of the project.
We have got the permission from the Contractor X to perform our research. Firstly, we have selected 40 factors negatively affected the cost control and prevailed at 6 different construction-related phases, including ”The period of the preparation of the tender”, ”The period between the awarded tender and signing the contract”, ”The period between the signed contract and the commencement of the construction”, ”The performance of the construction”, ”The period between the end of the construction and the final inspection”, and ”The process of dispute”. Moreover, we have designed a questionnaire form and tried to find out how the respondent comprehends the importance of the cost control and the application of the Knowledge Management. Secondly, we have conducted thorough interviews with the managers at various levels of construction management and performed Q&A sessions by going through 40 factors. Finally, we have analyzed the feedbacks and made feasible recommendations.
There have been many papers and reports focused on the cost control of other manufacturing business along with the research of Knowledge Management. However, our research has only concentrated on the investigation of the factors negatively affected the cost control of the construction project and the establishment of the mechanism to collect and analyze all the construction-related information. Furthermore, the mechanism not only can enhance the effectiveness of the cost control at the construction site, but also may integrate with the systems of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Supply Chain Management (SCM), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and Knowledge Management (KM), etc. Hopefully, our domestic contractors will soon be able to explore the international construction market.
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