Web-Based Benchmarking System for the Construction Industry

Abstract

The construction industry has been slow to adopt competitive benchmarking as a tool for continuous improvement. The nature of the industry, its projects, participants, and methods of execution differ widely from the manufacturing sectors making traditional benchmarking models developed for manufacturing difficult to adapt. This paper presents a benchmarking system developed by the Construction Industry Institute (CII) for broad application in the construction industry. During the past couple of years, the CII Benchmarking and Metrics (BM&M) system has been ported to a web-based system of data collection, performance and practice use reporting, and industry analysis. CII serves as a third-party facilitator and data clearinghouse to permit the sharing of highly confidential project data in a competitive environment. Cost, schedule, safety, practice use, and productivity data are now collected on-line during project execution 24/7 from the most remote project sites. Confidential reports are returned online showing metric scores, performance quartiles, and graphical comparisons of individual project performance to a database of similar projects. This paper addresses many of the issues that have served as barriers to benchmarking for the construction industry and provides an overview of how CII is confronting these issues. A background and a descriptive discussion of the database is provided and a few key findings from the data analyses are presented.