Jaillon and Poon studied sustainable construction issues related to the design and use of prefabricated building components in Hong Kong. They conducted a questionnaire survey together with detailed case studies of seven recently completed building projects, and interviews with experienced building professionals in Hong Kong. Their purpose was to assess the use of prefabrication with reference to the sustainable construction approach. They found that prefabrication techniques had been adopted for the last two decades in public housing projects in Hong Kong, but its use in the private sector was encouraged only after the implementation of financial incentive schemes in 1992. Although a number of studies acknowledged the environmental benefits of using prefabrication, the authors found that few studies had addressed sustainable design concepts (closed‐loop) when adopting pre‐cast construction. They reveal that prefabrication, combined with modular design and standard components, saves time and construction/design costs. However, in some projects, specific site conditions restricted the use of similar prefabricated building systems across projects. Only a few construction participants had addressed life cycle design concepts such as design for deconstruction when using pre‐cast construction. Also, although it was common knowledge that flexible and demountable prefabricated building systems would result in efficient use of resources, it was seldom practiced in Hong Kong. The authors recommend that future research should include the study of life cycle environmental assessment and costing approaches when using prefabrication. Additionally, policy measures, such as the effect of higher disposal charges and tax advantages, could be examined to promote life‐cycle design concepts when adopting prefabrication.
If building maintenance were easier, modern commercial buildings would provide a higher rate of return on investment. Das, Chew and Poh argue that there should be a scientific method of decision‐making to enable designers of buildings to take this into account. They have identified nine major building elements that contribute to overall maintainability of buildings and used these to develop a conceptual model using analytic hierarchy process. Working with experts in facilities management, they conclude that building maintainability depends on the technical viability of services and business profile, controlled by building height and location respectively. The relative importance of nine factors is deduced relating to various location‐height combinations for commercial buildings in Singapore. Finally, the authors suggest that the framework provides the basis for a multi‐criteria decision analysis tool during design, construction or maintenance stages for both new and existing commercial buildings in Singapore and can be extended to other building types and other climates.
Shan, Garvin and Kumar discuss the implementation of collar options in real toll PPP highway projects. The revenue risk is often problematic in such projects. Among other techniques, past literature and current practice have explored minimum revenue guarantees to mitigate this risk. A collar option is an attractive alternative since its structure – the combination of a put and a call – offsets the downside revenue risk with the upside revenue potential at little or no cost. As a class of derivatives from finance, collars come in many varieties, so significant flexibility exists in their potential utilization. A conceptual framework developed from finance theory and contemporary risk management practices is presented to investigate the characteristics, benefits and dynamics of collar options while a numerical example demonstrates an approach for establishing a collar with zero cost. While a risk mitigation tool with zero cost may have commercial appeal, the viability of collars as products underwritten by third‐parties deserves further investigation. Regardless, public authorities and concessionaires could consider them as mechanisms to provide downside risk protection and upside profit sharing in PPP deals, provided that the parties could agree on the strike prices for the put and call respectively. Collars appear particularly suited for projects with moderate cash flow forecasts and high demand/revenue volatility.
Nordin, Öberg, Kollberg and Nord explore the challenges of implementing innovations that require companies to build new positions in a construction supply chain. They argue that, since many construction companies struggle with their competitiveness and business models, knowledge of such challenges is an important issue to address. Three in‐depth case studies on the construction of timber‐based multi‐storey buildings are used to illustrate different challenges that arise with moving either backward or forward in the supply chain and with doing so based on organic growth, collaboration, or acquisition. The authors show that pre‐existing competencies and relationships differ greatly from those challenges experienced by the firms. Companies that have previously been technology‐oriented tend to remain so although they reposition themselves to create closer customer contacts, while market‐oriented companies instead find it difficult to develop their technological skills. Challenges emerge with regard to establishing business relationships at new positions or connecting to business partners of acquired or collaborating firms. The authors suggest that an increased focus on off‐site construction would make it easier to develop and maintain business relationships, and that such a development would also improve the capabilities for continuous innovation.
Lingard, Francis and Turner present an analysis of work‐family experiences of workers at a large civil engineering construction project in Melbourne, Australia. The authors utilized a diary‐based data collection technique that overcomes limitations inherent in survey‐based research and is ideally suited to capturing data about experiences in the context of the kind of fluctuating workloads that are inherent in a dynamic project environment. Their analysis reveals that weekly work hours and the timing of project events, including the achievement of project milestones, were strong predictors of work‐family experiences over time. Opportunities for rest and recovery afforded by rostered days off also added to the predictive capability of the time series models. The authors recommend careful consideration of work‐family issues in the development of the construction programme to provide sufficient recovery opportunity in relation to pre‐determined project events.
Lingard, Cooke and Blismas develop a two‐dimensional typology of group safety climates based on the two dimensions of strength and level. Although research has previously shown that workgroups develop unique safety climates, most researchers have not considered the extent to which group members share similar safety climate perceptions as an important dimension of group safety climate. The authors point out that a safety climate can be classified as being either high or low in support for safety, as well as being either weak or strong in group consensus. Survey data collected in the Australian construction industry seeks to position workgroups in the two‐dimensional climate schema. Using retrospective injury data, the authors examine whether safety performance varied significantly by climate ‘type’. Although few statistically significant differences were found, workgroups with strong and high (i.e., strongly supportive) climates related to ‘supervisors’ safety expectations’ and ‘coworkers’ actual safety responses’ reported injury frequency rates approximately two thirds the magnitude of other workgroups in the analysis. The authors claim that the research highlights the potential usefulness of treating within‐group ‘sharedness’ as a safety climate dimension worthy of measurement.