Study On Contractor Selection For Engineering-Procurement-Construction Projects

"Engineering-Procurement-Construction" (EPC) procurement approaches roseup in the 80's of last century, which was usually applied to construction for industrialproject. Because of invitation to bid due to function, meanes of bid invitation and bidevaluation under the traditional procurement approaches are not suitable forcontractor selection for EPC projects. Even through twenty years have passed sinceour country experienced and generalized EPC procurement approaches, the suitableprocedure and methods of selecting contractors for EPC projects are not established.This article is focused on the subject of selecting contractors for EPC projects,based on the summarization of researches on EPC approaches and selectingcontractors in both China and abroad, systematically studies the reasons of thesuccess of EPC projects, mode, procedure and methods of contractor selection,emphasizes on the analysis of prequalification of EPC projects and selectioncontractors during the process of bid evaluation.Researches show that reasons of the success of EPC projects mainly includeprices, completing time, quality, and reliability. In order to make EPC projectssuccessful, owners should require contractors to accomplish project with "the mostsuitable quality standards" during "the most suitable construction period", meanwhileshould choose the contractor that is most reliable and provides the most reasonableprice to the client. With regard to the choosing the most suitable mode for contractorsselection, the characteristics of the draft projects, the scale and construction capabilityof EPC contractors of the industry, the relationship between the owners and EPCcontractors, the time expenditure of different bid modes, the expense of bids and thesituations of acquiring favorable quoted prices should be considered. The procedureof selecting contractors can be divided into seven phases: confirmation of projectstrategy, prequalification, forming the short list of candidate bidders, invitation to bid,bids opening and evaluating, negotiation and awarding the contract.This article also builds up a synthesized evaluation system of selectingcontractors of EPC projects during the phase of prequalification, and leads somedetailed analysis and in-depth research of the criteria of evaluation of contractorsduring prequalification, analysising and evaluating the criteria, conformating thecriteria weight, and integrating the criteria's evaluation. During the phase ofevaluation, it uses synthesized evaluate technical proposal and price proposal tochoose contractors. During the phase of evaluation of technical proposal, the projectexecution schemes adopted by contractors, and technical objections, suggestionschemes provided are evaluated. During the phase of evaluation of price proposal,thenet present value of the life-cycle of the project provided by contractors and thesponsion conditions are the mainly criteria of the evaluation of contractors.The research of this article is of great value to the selection of contractors by theowners of EPC projects of our country. The writer also wants to positively contributeto the popularization of the application of the EPC procurement approaches in Chinaand to the cultivation of the construction market of EPC contracting through thisarticle.