The Involvement of Purchasing in the Design Process A Case Study at NCC Building Sweden

Abstract

To succeed in a construction project, time, cost, and quality needs to be taken into consideration. Many projects currently overrun in both budget and time. To reduce this, collaboration and communication between the involved parties needs to be improved. Purchasing is handled as a separate process in the design phase. This causes lack in the collaboration between purchasing and the design team in the design process which must be addressed to improve the results of the project in terms of time, cost, and quality. In this study, purchasing involvement in the design phase was investigated on two of NCC's building projects, where the focus of the study is on the collaboration between the purchasing and design team during the design phase. In this study it was investigated how collaboration can be improved to produce better basis for purchases and construction documents. The study also examines how collaboration between purchasing and design is affected by increasing the involvement of purchasing in the work on digital models. The study was conducted through qualitative interviews on the two projects, where parallels and comparisons have been drawn from academic literature that exist on the topic.

The study has concluded that purchasing needs to be more involved in the design process, but for this to happen, an incentive must come from the company and its core processes. If there are no clear core processes that describe when and how purchasing should be involved in the design, there will be variation in the result from project to project since only past experiences can be drawn from. In the two investigated projects, purchasing had a large workload. This leads to unprioritized design meetings, where purchasing does not participate, in order to save in on resources. It has been discovered that instead of thinking primarily about resource efficiency, it is more effective to move towards a flow-efficient way of working. By having the purchasing team use BIM more, the team’s workload will be reduced, and the time can instead be spent on collaboration which will improve the quality of the project.