A Study Of Client Feedback In China Construction Bidding

Construction bidding is a common mechanism used by construction clients to award contractsand allocate work to contractors. In order to have open and fair competition in awarding contracts, aswell as to increase transparency in China’s construction industry, a bidding mechanism wasintroduced to China in the20th century. A bidding mechanism is one of the international processesthat a construction company will go through in order to bid for a project. When the contract has beenevaluated and finalized, bid feedback information shall be given to all participants in order toimprove each bidder’s performance, as well as to produce a more reliable bid for constructionclients.Feedback is important in any learning process which applicable to all industries. It does notmatter what kind of industry it is; feedback is useful to correct mistakes. Particularly, when it comesto the construction industry, feedback should be given. Due to the nature of the project and theenvironment as well as the complexity of the industry, feedback helps to reduce errors. In theconstruction industry, most bidders may use feedback to review and evaluate past performance aswell as to improve their future performance.This paper considers the gap between the levels of bid feedback given by clients and feedbackthat bidders desire when a contract is awarded based on price or on a multi-criteria basis, as well asthe importance and purpose of bid feedback in construction bidding. It appears that the bid feedbackinformation given by construction clients is not the information that bidders’ want. In addition, thispaper will make some comparisons with past years’ research done by previous researches.A real case study has been used for this research. The methodology is divided into three parts;reviewing the annual report and past bidding performance, doing selective interviews, anddistributing questionnaires. A selective interview was conducted in order to have a betterunderstanding of one large SOE (Stated Owned Company) as well as the company’s background. Inthe second stage, a questionnaire survey was sent to that company. Different types of questions wereasked in order to understand the bidding process, whether feedback was given, and what kind offeedback was given by the client and desired by construction bidders.The results show that clients provide insufficient feedback, especially when contracts areawarded based on the lowest bid price. Most bidders will seek information from competitors or othersources. It appears, especially when contracts are awarded based on price only, that a bidder wouldlike to receive detailed information about all bid prices in either ascending or descending order. In amulti-criteria basis, most of respondents would like to receive bid information in an average overallscore for quality and price. It is surprisingly amazing that most of the respondents, regardless ofwhether they are experienced or inexperienced contractors, have considered feedback important. They would use the given information to analyze past bidding performance and as a reference forfuture projects.