A COMPARISON OF CLIENT AND CONTRACTOR ATTITUDES TO PREQUALIFICATION CRITERIA

Contractor prequalification is concerned with assessing the likelihood of contractors meeting client and project requirements. The criteria used in this assessment have been developed in a largely idiosyncratic manner to date and with little or no consultation with the contractors affected. As a result, contractors are faced with a variety of calls for information by prequalifiers, the collection of which can be quite costly. This is leading to expensive duplication of effort by contractors in providing what is often similar information but in different formats. Furthermore, previous research has shown that the benefits of the information to prequalifiers are uncertain- many prequalifiers analyse the information in only a cursory manner. What is needed is some form of cost-benefit analysis to be carried out which will establish a common set of criteria for all to use. As a precursor to this, the research described in this paper compares the different attitudes of both prequalifiers and contractors to prequalification criteria commonly in use in the Australian building industry. This wa