Concurrent Engineering Readiness Assessment of Sub-contractors within the Uk Construction Industry

A vital part of the corporate strength of any organization is the ability to respond to changing market needs rapidly, and effectively. Time-to-market has become a crucial measure of an organization’s business performance. Increasing demands for accelerated deliveries at a lower cost has put pressures on projects and processes within most industries. Therefore, with increasing competition, companies that want to survive in the market place have to improve in four key areas: product costs, product quality, time-to-market (from order to delivery), and customer satisfaction. One way to do this is to adopt a Concurrent Engineering (CE) approach to project delivery. CE is a way of working which enables the delivery of better, cheaper, faster products, using right-first-time methods and team working to enable concurrent consideration of all key lifecycle issues. It is evident that by adopting CE, the software and manufacturing industries have significantly improved their business processes. There is also increasing awareness of the benefits of adopting CE in the Construction Industry. CE has the potential to make construction projects less fragmented, improve project quality, reduce project duration and reduce total project cost. For a targeted and effective implementation, it is recommended to carry out a readiness assessment of an organization prior to the adoption of CE. Therefore, this paper discusses the adoption of CE within the construction industry, highlights the need of CE readiness assessment, and presents the details of the assessment of subcontracting organizations within the UK construction industry using a new CE readiness assessment tool for the construction industry, the ‘BEACON Model’.