Which procurement system? Towards a universal procurement selection technique

Abstract

Two approaches are described which aid the selection of the most appropriate procurement arrangements for a building project. The first is a multi-attribute technique based on the National Economic Development Office procurement path decision chart. A small study is described in which the utility factors involved were weighted by averaging the scores of five ‘experts’ for three hypothetical building projects. A concordance analysis is used to provide some evidence of any abnormal data sources. When applied to the study data, one of the experts was seen to be atypical. The second approach is by means of discriminant analysis. This was found to provide reasonably consistent predictions through three discriminant functions. The analysis also showed the quality criteria to have no significant impact on the decision process. Both approaches provided identical and intuitively correct answers in the study described. Some concluding remarks are made on the potential of discriminant analysis for future research and development in procurement selection techniques.