State-of-Practice of Warranty Contracting in the United States

Long-term Warranty Contracts for Pavement Construction or Rehabilitation for the Transportation Association of Canada Fall 2008 meeting. These types of questions must be answered to ensure that the bidding contractor ensures that they fully understand the risks and potential rewards of long-term warranty type contracts. This paper examines the risks and rewards of long-term warranty contracts from both the contractor and owner perspectives and provides recommendations for both sides to ensure that the process results in a cost-effective, high quality facility final product.

International Journal of Management and Decision Making, 2013

Choosing the most appropriate contract type (CT) for compensating major highway project contractors is a decision that has to be taken by highway procurement authorities within their country's legal, economic and social framework. The research carried out to date on the use of various CTs for the construction of infrastructure projects in general and for highway projects in particular is highlighted and utilised to determine the most frequently used CTs and the most commonly considered selection criteria (SC). The information obtained was included in a questionnaire survey that assessed the performance of each CT against each SC according to the perceptions of engineers with experience in highway procurement processes both in Greece and abroad. Ultimately, the initial results of the survey in comparison to the expectations resulting from the literature review are discussed.

2020

Quality defects are a significant source of the costs and challenges of project management in the construction industry. Due to the project delivery nature of on-site construction, they occur inevitably and are the primary causes of project schedule and cost overruns. A construction product manufacturer determined customer satisfaction warranty-based feedback can be a solution to mitigate the defects in the sense that it can help to identify the root causes of defects more systematically. The motivation of this study is to analyze and improve a quality control program for a major construction system manufacturer based on customer satisfaction warranty-based feedback. Customer satisfaction feedback was obtained on a 10-point Likert scale and analyzed. Statistical process control techniques were applied to check for root causes of defects. Analysis of contractor experience within the data set supports the principle of Best Value Procurement Information Systems (BV PIS), which emphasizes contractor performance and experience to manage project risks. The case study finding provides support that the warranty-based quality control system can enhance project efficiency. The study concludes with a description of the main findings, which can be efficient and effective when implemented in the construction industry.

Applied Behavioral Economics Research and Trends

Research focuses on the perceptions of engineers towards highway projects contract types' (CTs) performance and their respective selection criteria (SC). A questionnaire survey evaluated the CTs against the selected criteria. The SPSS database's sample consisted of 91 engineers from Greece and abroad. Factor analysis identified groups of selection criteria representing the performance of each CT and reflecting the engineers' perceptions. Patterns of changes in engineers' assessment of the contract types' performance were noted and justified. Apart from the total sample, analysis considered participants' subgroups, such as Greek and foreign engineers, and experienced engineers in the private and public sector. Nationality and experience of participants influence the factors' content. Moreover, a number of criteria tend to cluster together irrespective of CT and engineers' profile. These pairs of criteria include all uncertainties' criteria, Scope a...

Construction Research Congress 2014, 2014

2009

Prepared in cooperation with the Indiana Department of Transportation and Federal Highway Administration.

2015

One of the major responsibilities of state Departments of Transportation (DOTs) is to maintain their road assets so that road users can travel cost effectively, safely, and in a timely manner. Maintenance projects can be performed either by using the DOT’s own workforce or by outsourcing to private contractors. Recently, some state DOTs have started using performance-based contracting for maintenance projects. In this study, benefits of these types of maintenance contracts were collected by conducting a national survey. Moreover, this study compared the use of the state force (SF) and private contractors in Nevada regarding the cost and quality of such maintenance activities as chip seal, striping, culvert cleaning, and sweeping. Results showed that state DOTs were highly satisfied with work performed by the state force, followed by private contractors when using method-based contracting and performance-based contracting. The cost comparison showed that chip seal, striping, culvert ...

Frontiers of Engineering Management

The conventional Design-Bid-Build (DBB) construction contracting method has had various drawbacks exposed in highway construction practice, including lack of communication, inefficient design, antagonizing relationships, and increased disputes. To mitigate the negative aspects of DBB, several alternative contracting methods and alternative project delivery systems have been devised and introduced to the industry over the past 30 years. Five such innovations were tested by a research team from the University of Florida under the sponsorship of the Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT). To perform a realistic assessment, this study categorized FDOT projects built between 2006 and 2015 into groups according to current contract amounts. Both absolute and relative metrics were defined and employed. For comparison purposes, a collective analysis on all gathered data was performed. Additionally, the influence of outliers on the results was examined. The results showed that analyses based on individual cost categories are more convincing because large projects tend to impose stronger influence on the analyses. In addition, outliers must be identified and screened to reach realistic and reliable conclusions. With regard to the actual performance of the contracting methods, each performs differently within different cost categories.

Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, 2010

Highway agencies around the world strive to improve practices for infrastructure maintenance and rehabilitation, using project delivery policies that range from total 'in-house' responsibility to complete privatization, with a number of flexible contracting policies such as performance-based contracting, variants of design-build-maintain, and lane rentals among others between these two extremes. In this paper, we present a methodology that duly accounts for underlying spatial effects and estimates the expected cost savings of innovative contracting policies for highway maintenance and rehabilitation relative to in-house execution of these activities. Spatial econometric modeling is used to analyze highway contract data from 49 countries. We also investigate the marginal effects of key explanatory variables on contract cost savings using spatial multipliers. Our findings show that there are significant relationships between cost savings and contract characteristics, and that there is an apparent direct relationship between the average cost savings of contracts in a country and contract average cost savings and contract sizes in neighboring countries.