The effect of the current procurement process on the milestones of the green building projects within Saudi Arabian vision 2030

Abstract

Saudi Arabia Launched a new Vision to be achieved by 2030 that is outlined by new sustainable world. Mega projects are planned and being executed nowadays that all are required to be LEED or Mostadam Certified that fulfill the strategy of the sustainable development goals. Notwithstanding, the current procurement process is not flexible to fulfill the market demands for the sustainable products/services that are mandatory to build green buildings. The old purchasing method is negatively affecting on the pace of the project execution and caused remarkable delays due to the increasing of the long lead items and to the weak capability of the subject organizations to manage the sustainable products/services on time without harming the projects milestones. Thus, a necessary intervention from the stakeholders to create a new procurement process that can treats the impacting factors and adapts to the market demands promptly.In order to reach out to the root causes, a questionnaire has been prepared to consult the subject matter experts about the factors that are holding the construction companies from adopting to the sustainable products/services within the competition with the traditional, cheap and available products/services. The factors are extracted from previous similar studies around the world. In addition, this research studied only the cost and innovation capability categories among the remaining other categories and has been analyzed by using the AHP method in order to illustrate the weight of each criteria. In conclusion, the cost of life cycle costing and the cost of green product/service are the major impacting factors that keep the procurement stakeholders in front of hard decisions between tradition and sustainable products. On the other hand, the effective knowledge sharing and technology adaptation were concluded as the most impacting factors within the innovation capability and confronted with the decision of the procurement officers/stakeholders prior to decide the type of product to be purchased. In conclusion, the policy makers within the construction organizations are encouraged to facilitate the introduction of new sustainable procurement process that would treat the above found impacting factors. This would lead to easier the procuring of the sustainable products and reduce the harms on the project completion schedule.