The Procurement and Management of Small Works and Minor Maintenance

The Principal Considerations for Client Organisations

Jeremy Headley, Alan Griffith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Topic: Business
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317888550
• Subtopic: Operations
• Index: Business

Many client organisations occupy large and often diverse property estates which require significant expenditure on maintenance, alterations, refurbishment or small-scale new building work. Effective organisation and efficient allocation of resources are essential to ensure that the works are carried out successfully.

This book provides a detailed introduction to small works procurement and management within the large client organisation, a significant sector of the construction industry which has hitherto been neglected by researchers. In the large organisational context, characterised by large property holdings perhaps over wide geographic areas, the importance of ensuring maximum efficiency of resource use is crucial. If the regular and numerous work which is required throughout the year is not carried out in line with organisational goals then the core business will suffer.The book focuses on the suitability, efficiency and effectiveness of procurement, organisation and management of small works, and outlines the main stages in the formulation and implementation of well-defined and measurable objectives. Overall it will enable the reader to understand the decision factors involved in designing a small works procurement strategy.

The Procurement and Management of Small Works and Minor Maintenance is an indispensible reference for all facilities managers, consultants and contractors. It is also useful reading for undergarduate and postgraduate courses in building, construction management, maintenance and facilities management.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Small works and the focus of this book

The intention of this book is to address the principal issues surrounding an area of construction and property management that has frequently been overlooked in the past but which is of great importance to both the construction industry and to those utilising its services - the small works sector of construction output.

Small works, as a grouping, is important both because of its great contribution to total construction output and also because it comprises the largest number of individual items of work. Current estimates place the contribution as lying between 11 and 19 per cent of total construction output.¹ This equates to an annual expenditure of approximately £10 billion in absolute terms. The report Building Britain 2001² suggested that the economic significance of the repair and maintenance sector of the industry, the sector containing most of the small works activity, is set to increase in proportion to the output of the other sectors in the period 1989–2001. A rise of over 24 per cent is forecast for this period while growth in the new-build sector is estimated to rise by less than 15 per cent. Furthermore, these figures were compiled before the downturn in new construction activity prevalent during the time this book was written. Consequently, the trend for the increasing economic significance of small works is likely to be reinforced by both clients and contractors, attaching increased importance to this sector in the years to come.

Chiefly, because of the relatively small size of the individual items of work comprising this sector of construction work, it has received little attention in the field of published literature. It is both timely and purposeful to redress this situation from the separate perspectives of clients, consultants and contractors as the recessionary conditions prevalent at the time of writing have led to a reduced demand for large construction projects from clients, forcing contractors to seek new opportunities for work. Small works is one of the few areas for which predictions of increasing output can be made with confidence.

From the client’s perspective, small works should be treated with greater regard given the financial pressures to remain in existing buildings prevalent in the early 1990s, a situation very different to that of the late 1980s when the demand for new-build progressed as high as business confidence allowed. Continued occupation of an ageing building stock, beyond the point when moving to new premises would be the preferred option in healthier financial times, requires that an increasing amount of maintenance work be carried out to the building fabric to at least maintain tolerable functional and occupational standards. It is probable that internal alteration work will also increase to enable existing buildings to cope with changing requirements in the use of the space they contain, in line with management change, advances in technology and the ever more volatile and hostile financial environment in which the majority of organisations must operate today.

Little is known of the problems of managing small works in situations where there is a high volume of this class of building work, especially in the context of the large property estate, although it is true that many of these problems can be imagined. If such guesswork fields a perception where clients’ technical staff are hard pressed to keep on top of the workload and the finance department is inundated with invoices to be paid at the end of every month, that would often be an accurate perception of small works procurement and management. The workload of a local authority maintenance department, for example, may involve around 200 contracts and in excess of 60,000 works orders a year and this serves to illustrate the magnitude of the problem in many cases. There is no doubt that certain ways of procuring small works in a high-volume situation will be inherently more efficient and effective than others. The question is which and how best to approach the design of the small works procurement and management approach?

The starting point for the better understanding of small works is the assumption that more efficient and effective small works management will result from a greater understanding of the attributes of this class of building work. Since small works management has been comparatively ignored in the past by client and management organisations, there is no widely accepted set of guidelines on what constitutes good practice. An early objective in the course of writing this book was to study the range of procurement options currently employed by large client organisations so that the current best practice might be identified. The extent to which effective management practices are employed could then be determined.

As little, if any, research work has been conducted in the small works subject area, certain fundamental aspects need to be addressed initially to provide the basis for a complete understanding of small works. The need to formally define and categorise the particular types of building work comprising small works is paramount as this sets the scene for understanding the concepts and principles of small works procurement and management. The influences of the individual client organisation must be determined with regard to such considerations as size and nature of property estate, geographic dispersion or concentration and closeness of the building stock to the core business. The central importance of clearly defined goals and objectives must be appreciated along with aspects of in-house and external procurement and management. Contractor selection for small works must be understood along with the supervision and control of the workload, which are essential to the likely success of small works procurement and management.

From this book, the reader should gain a purposeful insight into concepts, principles and practices of small works procurement and management. The following specific aspects are prominent:

• To present a formal definition and categorisation of small works.
• To highlight some of the particular problems of the organisation and management of the particular client organisation’s characteristics on the range of procurement options.
• To emphasise the importance of taking into account the objectives of the client organisation in formulating a small works procurement policy.
• To identify the decision factors involved in choosing between in-house and external procurement and management of the small works workload.
• To identify the range of procurement options open to client organisations and discuss the design of the procurement approach.
• To present outline guidance for good control and effective supervision of the workload.
• To give basic guidance on the essential requirements for effective management of small works in the context of the large organisation.
• To promote greater management awareness of the issues involved in small works.

This book focuses upon procedures and practice relating to small works of a building nature and with a focus upon the building fabric. Small works in connection with building services or plant facilities represent too specialised an area for inclusion within the scope of this book. Such items of work are characterised by a greater degree of planned maintenance and often more sophisticated procedures generally. However, this does not necessarily imply that in the future there should not be an attempt to bridge the gap between building fabric maintenance and plant and services maintenance. On the contrary, there is much in common between the two areas of maintenance and a case could be made to bring some of the accepted practices of plant and building services maintenance into line with building fabric maintenance.

It is well appreciated that small works and minor maintenance are often intertwined with and caused by the failure of and alterations to building services systems. The decision to exclude this area of maintenance from this book owes more to the fact that most organisations currently draw a distinction between plant maintenance and building fabric maintenance and treat the two areas quite differently in terms of procedures and practice, even though there can be considerable overlap and many small works result as a consequence of services problems.

Small works, for the purposes of this book, does not include refurbishment work. Refurbishment projects tend to be more costly, more resource intensive and generally involve many separate types of construction work carried out by multiple trades. They therefore require a greater degree of planning and control. Refurbishment projects occur much less frequently than items of small works and tend to have a greater degree of consultant input. Subcontractors are common in refurbishment work but not in most small works situations, especially at the lower end of the scale. The increased degree of complexity and the greater number of parties involved in refurbishment work usually demands procurement along more traditional lines with a standard comprehensive form of contract and orthodox tendering procedures, although it is fair to say that this may often be the case for certain types of small works also.

It is also not an intention of this book to review small works in the context of major new-build projects. However, it is recognised that a means of reducing the requirements for building maintenance and small works is to consider these in the design and commissioning of new buildings. Building designs do not always consider the needs of the user with respect to maintainability and, therefore, savings made in the capital cost of new buildings will likely be lost later in the additional expenditure for maintenance, repairs and alterations during the operational life-cycle. The concept of constructability and how small works may be influenced at the design stage is a specialised area that lies outside the scope of this book and is, in fact, covered in another work.³ In general, however, a client should be forward thinking to anticipate and plan for the building’s likely maintenance requirements and future potential use and operation.

Key issues in procurement and management

The key issues in the procurement and management of small works in the context of the large organisation stem largely from the traditional methods of organising and managing the workload. Traditionally, the process would be for senior management of the small works/minor maintenance department to deliver the required working environment and degree of support to assist the building occupiers in the achievement of their organisational goals. This requires an understanding of what their customers require in terms of service provision within the organisation and an awareness of the work required to be done in order to maintain the property portfolio in line with the organisation’s objectives.

Having carried out this exercise, the organisation’s property management department must then establish the resources implications of providing the requisite level of service provision; that is, the required financial and personnel resources. A proportion of the personnel resources will be in-house specialists, managerial and technical staff, in addition to which there might be an element of directly employed labour. Any resources not available in-house will have to be procured externally from the marketplace, which gives rise to the need for systems and procedures designed to obtain these external resources and to ensure that optimal use is made of them, thereby facilitating the attainment of organisational objectives.

The approach outlined above might seem, prima facie, to be quite straightforward but in reality many factors conspire to place considerable challenges on the smooth running and chances of achieving optimum success in the process. In small works management the characteristics of a very high number of individual jobs of a relatively low value can lead to many management difficulties; the main problem often being that the amount of management time spent administering the small works workload may be disproportionate to the costs of the work itself. In the large organisational context, contractor approved lists can easily run into hundreds and works orders and invoices into thousands annually. This presents a considerable management challenge and indeed a situation in which inefficiences can easily arise.

The situation might be perpetuated by the nature of small works themselves, which often serves to disguise their true importance to the organisation. Consequently, many of the problems inherent in small works may never be fully addressed in practice. Perceptions of small works in the large organisational context require to be changed in order to effect an improvement in management practices. In particular it should be realised that although a job of small works may be relatively unimportant to the organisation’s success, the aggregate effect on the organisation of many hundreds if not thousands of such jobs is a significant contributor to the large organisation’s continued success, particularly in view of the high cost of small works when the individual jobs are added together.

The traditional small works procurement and management process allows little opportunity to address the issues highlighted since the planned maintenance, alteration and improvement work and small new works element of the workload will require a high management resource input. The little time that might otherwise be available will be consumed by the inevitable reactive maintenance work which arises incessantly and which, along with planned small works, will usually occupy management time fully; the greater the maintenance component of the total workload, the less management time will be available to address the important issues in small works, on both the strategic and operational levels. In such an organisational climate, improvements in procedures will not be realised and the status quo is likely to be merely maintained.

The pace of change in modern large organisations is ever increasing. Management in general must be responsive to the more volatile and often more hostile environment by constantly seeking better methods of construction. This precept should apply equally for small works managers. They should be able to foster continued improvement and seek increased value for money by optimising the balance between the efficiency of resources use and the effectiveness of the end result in a way that is responsive to the ever-changing needs of the organisation. Only by implementing a small works procurement and management system that is based on well-defined and, preferably, measurable objectives will there be any certainty that this ideal is being achieved. This book aims to take the reader through the main stages in the formulation and implementation of such a management approach.

References

1. Griffith A 1992 Small building works management Macmillan, Basingstoke

2. University of Reading 1988 Building Britain 2001

3. Griffith A and Sidwell AC 1995 Constructability in building and engineering projects Macmillan, Basingstoke

Chapter 2
Definitions and characteristics

Small works and minor maintenance defined

Presenting a precise definition of small works can be problematic. This is due to the divergence of opinion about its nature and composition, which arises from the different perspectives of those connected with the small works sector of the construction industry. Definitions of small works, depending on the original source, may vary considerably in criteria such as scale and value, the latter being the most common source of variation.

That small works do exist as a distinct class of building work is indisputable. This chapter proposes a basis for defining small works in a more meaningful way than in terms of value alone, thus overcoming some of the differences in definitions stemming from distinct perspective...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Definitions and characteristics
• 3 The large organisation
• 4 The procurement and management approach
• 5 In-house or external procurement and management
• 6 Procurement approach
• 7 Selecting the contractor
• 8 Management approach
• 9 Works policy: principal considerations
• Select bibliography
• Index