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Characteristics of Bidding for Engineering Services in Public Construction Projects

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Collaboration and Integration in Construction, Engineering, Management and Technology

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Abstract

Engineering services to construction projects are essential to the proper delivery of construction projects. Engineering services include both design services before construction and engineering supervision during the construction phase of the projects. Procurement of engineering services for public construction projects is performed through competitive bidding. Several scholars investigated the bidding characteristics of contractors, while few or no research has addressed the bidding characteristics for engineering services. This paper presents an analysis of the bidding results of 450 invitations to bid for engineering services. The analysis revealed considerable differences in bidding between design bids and construction monitoring bids. Also, considerable differences in bidding characteristics exist between construction sectors that include: buildings, transportation, water and sanitary projects, and infrastructure projects. The performed analysis and the results obtained are expected to contribute to a better understanding of bidding behavior of engineering consultants for engineering services and the suitability of the competitive procurement approach to this kind of projects. Construction planners can evaluate these characteristics and consider other procurement approaches for projects that involved wide disparity in the received bids in competitive bidding. Selecting the proper procurement approach is expected to contribute to enhanced delivery of construction projects.

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Correspondence to Khaled Hesham Hyari .

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Hyari, K.H., Hiary, O. (2021). Characteristics of Bidding for Engineering Services in Public Construction Projects. In: Ahmed, S.M., Hampton, P., Azhar, S., D. Saul, A. (eds) Collaboration and Integration in Construction, Engineering, Management and Technology. Advances in Science, Technology & Innovation. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48465-1_63

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