09-05-2012, 02:46 PM
e-Tendering with Web Services: A Case Study on the Tendering Process of Building Construction
e-Tendering with Web Services A Case Study on the Tendering Process of Building Construction.pdf (Size: 570.18 KB / Downloads: 125)
Introduction
Nowadays, technology plays an important role in many
businesses, especially in roles such as automating many
business processes and facilitating better decisions. The
tendering process is a key business process in the construction
industry. Many information exchanges occur between
the clients and the contractors. The Internet has become a
popular platform where organizations and individuals can
communicate between one another in order to carry out ebusiness
activities. Further, Web Services [14][15] technology
is maturing and can provide a platform to facilitate
information exchange during the tendering process.
Background and related work
In the Hong Kong construction industry, clients usually
use tendering to find the most suitable contractors to construct
buildings or perform building expiations and renovations.
A contract between a client and a contractor is
formed when an express or implied offer is made by one
party and is accepted without qualification or amendment
by the other. The party making the offer is commonly referred
to as the offerer and the party accepting is known as
the offeree. The tender is an offer. The client invites tenderers
(here, contractors) to submit the details of prices at
which goods or services may be bought [2].
Conceptual model for CTS
There are two main processes in the CTS: the tenderout
process and the tender-in process.
For the tender-out process (cf. Figure 3), the professional
team members first need to prepare the tender content
for this process. For the architect, since nowadays the
drawings are usually prepared by using Computer Aided
Design (CAD) packages (such as AutoCAD [4]), all the
drawings can be outputted in their electronic formats.
Those tender drawings should be write-protected to prevent
unauthorized amendments. They are associated with
the drawing number and transferred via Web services in
form of SOAP attachment.
Bulk discount
In some cases, the tenderer may want to win the tender
by offering a final bulk discount to the whole tender. Usually,
this is in a discount rate format. For example, the final
tender sum is $500,000,000.00 and the tenderer makes
a bulk discount of 0.5% off. So, the final tender sum becomes
$487,500,000.00. In the CTS, it should be able to
handle this kind of discount. So it will provide a service
for the TPS to submit their discount.
Discussion and Summary
In this paper, we have presented an e-Tendering system
(ETS) based on Web services technology. The TPS provides
the tender document details for the tenderers, and the
tenderers submit their tender price via Web services. We
have also presented the conceptual design of the ETS. In
addition, we have also presented some of the exceptions
that the system can handle, such as withdrawal of the tender,
bulk discount, etc. Other elements discussed include
some issues regarding security. We have two main stakeholders
in the ETS, namely the clients and the tenderers.
We discuss our findings about their advantages as follows.