Performance Evaluation of Construction Sub-contractors using Ordinal Priority Approach

Abstract

The construction industry has been recognized as one of the crucial industries of a country. In large-scale public projects, it is frequently observed that the client, who serves the public, seeks the services of several sub-contractors (project outsourcing firms) to execute projects. It also seeks the consulting firms' services to monitor the progress and performance of these sub-contractors. However, performance evaluation of a large number of sub-contractors is not only a challenging phase but also a source of conflict and mistrust between the evaluators and evaluatees because of the subjectivity in the evaluation process. The current study classifies perceived organizational performance into two streams, arguing that the one involving the opinions from the independent evaluators is more objective than the self-evaluation one. The study also makes a pioneering attempt in post-qualification performance evaluation of sub-contractors through the Ordinal Priority Approach (OPA), a promising multi-attribute decision-making methodology. The deployment of the OPA allows the decision-makers to estimate the weights of the evaluation criteria, the sub-contractors to be evaluated, and the experts who evaluated them simultaneously. Thus, the methodology can minimize the causes of mistrust by uncovering unreliable experts and inappropriate criteria. Also, a novel Relative Performance Index (RPI) has been proposed to standardize the performance evaluation system. The results show that evaluation of the firms does not end at their evaluation as without evaluating the evaluators, such an evaluation is only partially effective.

Keywords: Construction project execution; Multiple criteria decision-making; Ordinal Priority Approach; Performance evaluation; Relative Performance Index; Sub-contractor.