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Subcontractor Resource Management Essay

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Specialist contractors – generally known as subcontractors – perform the majority of the work on commercial construction projects. They face significant challenges in allocating their resources across multiple, concurrent projects (O’Brien and Fischer 2000). Despite their central nature to project performance, relatively little research has been performed to formally model their operations. Without such modeling, there exists little basis from which to measure or improve performance. This dissertation attempts to address the limited literature by providing a formal, information model for subcontractor resource management. There are three main contributions: First, addition to the general literature on subcontractor management as a …show more content…

For example, frequent delays result in schedule changes, so subcontractors face challenges to manage their resources. However, existing commercial applications cannot fully represent subcontractors’ (subs’) resource allocation needs well. As noted by Ibbs and Nguyen (2007), the need for representing and capturing the practice of resource allocation is “apparent and imperative.” Unfortunately, existing literature is missing a way which can detailed describe the processes of resource allocation. There is a pressing need to provide such a representation as a basis to improve subcontractor resource management performance.

1.2 Case Study: Ellis Air Subcontractor

A case study conducted as part of this research is briefly previewed . Ellis Air is an air/mechanical subcontractor located in Melbourne, Australia. Ellis Air currently has twenty three employees and works on seven to eight projects concurrently. The number of employees varies from eighteen to twenty eight because they may hire temporary employees.

Ellis Air manually manages schedules and resources. To perform resource allocation, the project manager and resource manager will sit down with a piece of paper. They will list all projects and activities, and then start allocating resources based on their experiences. In case of a

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