Abstract

The Construction industry is facing an enormous number of challenges due to continuous advancements in construction technologies and techniques. Consequently construction management theories have to confront critical newly issues concerning market globalization and construction innovations. The key factor to address these challenges is to improve the competitive abilities of the competing construction firms. Literature reports that existing competitive practices for construction companies do not fully address the recent industry problems or consider the available technologies and challenges. Therefore, this research proposes a competitive assessment model with a wide range of essential factors and attributes that covers broad aspects of the present competitive market. Four new pillars (4P) for competitiveness assessment are proposed for construction firms: (1) Organization Performance, (2) Project Performance, (3) Environment and Client, and (4) Innovation and Development. These pillars have the potential to assist construction firms manage not only short term strategic plans but also long term ones. Based on the 4P concept, 21 factors and 80 criteria are defined and incorporated in the proposed company competitiveness assessment model. A questionnaire survey is conducted in the Canadian and Vietnamese market in order to collect 2 main sets of information. The first set includes pair wise comparison feedback regarding the relative importance of each factor, while the other set collects utility scores concerning their impacts. Based on the collected data, the AHP technique is used to calculate the factors' relative weight. In addition, the utility functions are developed in order to build the competitiveness assessment model using multi-attribute utility theory (MAUT). The developed MAUT model is tested via three case studies in which the results show that the model has a potential to demonstrate a detailed performance analysis pertaining to the competitive ability of any given construction firm.