A Methodology for Estimating Construction Unit Bid Prices

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2012-11-28

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Abstract

The internship company does not have a standard procedure for preparing an engineer?s estimate of probable construction cost document (engineer?s estimate) for municipal projects. Every project manager employs a methodology that is a slightly different variation of the historical data approach. The internship objective was to develop a construction unit price estimation model that provides more accurate results than the company?s existing unit price estimation methodology for the City of Fort Worth construction projects.

To accomplish the internship objective several tasks were conducted, including; gathering City of Fort Worth construction projects bid tabulation data (including all bids) for the past three years; developing three construction item unit price databases using the data collected; conducting statistical analyses using the unit price databases;developing tables and graphs showing the construction cost items and their appropriate estimated unit prices to be used by the project managers in their cost estimates; developing an approach to apply construction unit costs which adjusts for unique project characteristics; developing guidelines for using the developed tables and graphs to estimate unit prices for municipal projects; using one recent project to compare the company?s existing unit price estimation methodology and the new developed model with actual unit bid prices; and developing guidelines for updating the unit price database, tables, and graphs.

The study made use of both normal and log-normal distributions to model the unit bid price data collected from the City of Fort Worth. The factors that are perceived to influence a contractor?s unit bid price for a given item were identified and given a degree of impact on the project by the project managers. The factor that had the highest impact on the unit bid prices was discovered to be item quantity. The unit price estimating methodology presented in this study generated a better fit than the internship company?s original method for predicting the actual average unit bid prices for the one case study the methodology was applied.

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