Construction method selection based upon the clients’ preferences

The construction industry is a complex sector that has to deal with a variety of concerns; Growing number of housing shortages, productivity problems, labour shortages, reduction of Green House Gas emissions and many more. These are some important aspects that must be taken into account. Since construction companies need to decide which construction method they should apply best for its type of client and their project, the decision making process contributes to the discussed variety of concerns. The choice for one particular construction method over the other is not made randomly, therefore it is interesting to examine this topic.

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate and uncover all reviewed factors related to the construction methods that are applied in the Netherlands from the clients’ perspective. In order to fulfil this purpose, this thesis focused on selecting the most important critical factors related to the construction methods – by using the Fuzzy Delphi Method.

To fulfil the purpose of this thesis, a literature review was conducted that gave insight into the related client types, building types, construction methods and factors. According to the literature review, for large construction companies these client types were considered to be the most interesting: the governmental bodies, healthcare bodies, educational bodies, housing corporations, developers and investors. Furthermore a distinction was made between six different building types, four different construction methods and fifteen factors. After the literature review has been made, interviews were conducted among the six client types to give a first indication of which factors, construction methods and building types the clients prefer. More importantly six new factors derived from the interviews that sums up the total list to twenty-one factors. To specify the important levels of the twenty-one factors and the relation between the client type, building type and construction methods, two questionnaires have been held whereby results of questionnaire (I) served as input for questionnaire (II). Results of both questionnaires on the respondents’ profile were compared to each other and scientific elaborated with the chi-square goodness of fit test. Among the clients mostly the residential building type was managed. The prefab construction method and the conceptual construction method are both the most preferred construction methods. Thereafter this is the modular construction method, followed by the conventional construction method. When all the crisp values of factors from questionnaire (II) – derived from the Fuzzy Delphi Method calculation – are combined together, it gives the following ranked list of most important critical factors. However, the rank order differs per client type.