The challenge

The overall objectives of this study at a European level are to:

• Improve the competitiveness of the construction industry 
• Improve the industry’s awareness of the influence of environmental goals on Life Cycle Costs (LCC)
• Improve the performance of the supply chain, the value offered to clients, and clients’ confidence to invest through a robust and appropriate LCC approach
• Improve long-term cost optimisation and forecast certainties
• Improve the reliability of project information, predictive methods, risk assessment and innovation in decision-making for procurement involving the whole supply chain
• Generate comparable information without creating national barriers and also considering the most applicable international developments

The result

The project is currently being undertaken based on an agreed research methodology that includes:

• A systematic review of the available material on the topic area developed over the course of the last three years
• A series of telephone and face-to-face interviews with a wide group of LCC experts and practitioners
• An electronic survey of a wide cross-disciplinary sample of active construction industry participants
• Three online user-group style workshops
• Case studies: four public procurement projects and two private procurement projects
• A validation workshop

The findings of this study will be presented in the form of a progress report, draft guidelines for public procurement and a final report to the European Commission.