Cost Control of Construction Industry In Sudan

Abstract

The target of this research is to identify the methods of cost control followed by the Building & Road construction contractors in Sudan, as well as the factors that affect the level of control exerted during construction. In the light of the literature study, a survey questionnaire has been developed and conducted by series of structured interviews with 36 contractors. The survey questionnaire included four areas of study: 1) Questions about the contractor's firm. 2) The procedure of cost control. 3) The level of cost control. 4) General evaluation for the situation of the construction companies in respect of their knowledge about the cost control. The results of this study have been post-stratified according to three contractors' grades which have been classified by analyzing the responding companies ability according to the manpower strength, equipment value that is owned by the company and Average of value and the duration of the projects that are being handled by the company. The study revealed that the contractors in Sudan follow a basic logic sequence when proceeding cost control. The stages of this sequence are: 1) Preparing cost control Base-line. 2) Planning, Measuring & Reporting. 3) Analyzing for cost date. 4) Identifying Cause of deviation & taking corrective action. The tools used for achieving these stages vary according to the contractor's grade (size)… and it has been identified according to the phenomena of each grades of the respondents. It was found that, the bigger contractor's grade leads to more sophisticated and complicated cost control system. Furthermore, project of small sizes always need to be carefully controlled to avoid any discrepancy that could happen or affect the tiny budget. The level of control has been presented by studying three parameters: 1) Work breakdown structure. 2) Organization breakdown structure. 3) Frequently of reporting. These parameters have been examined by 25 potential factors grouped into six categories: Project characteristics, Project documents, Labors characteristics, Equipments characteristics, Company characteristics and Outside influences. The severity of those factors was measured by the level of importance and ranked according to the importance index. It was noted that project characteristics and company characteristic are the common dominating categories among deciding the applicable level of cost control. Upon obtaining valuable data, it was found that in General the Contractors in Sudan have a good awareness level of cost control procedures. On the other hand, they suffer from the lack of knowledge in so many related areas such as risk allocating, preparing of breakdown structure, utilizing of coding system and integrating cost with other functions. Finally, a set of recommendations and topics have been presented for further studies (focusing in one type of construction building, one type of contract, one stage of project life cycle …etc) and suggested to improve the construction cost control practices in Sudan.