Perceptions of Turkish construction firms about the marketing concepts

Competitive marketing environment requires construction companies to come up with the right strategies to progress. This only becomes possible by preparing rigorous preconstruction feasibility studies. Additionally, the effectiveness of promotion activities of the company is important to acquire a market share which can be realized by having systematic marketing concept. In this study, the perception and application level of marketing concept of construction firms are investigated. The promotion strategies which enable the companies to have systematic applications of marketing concepts in order to compete with other companies in the sector are discussed. To evaluate the marketing attitudes as applied by the companies, a questionnaire was performed with forty nine Turkish construction firms. The perception and application of the marketing are discussed based on the organizational structure and key interest areas of construction companies. The overall result deduced is that the construction companies do not have a systematic approach to marketing. The companies have primarily adopted the approaches to keep their current places in the sector

Pricing policies as a marketing strategy in the construction industry: case study of turkish companies

The firms in the construction industry have to determine pricing and promotion policies, then these policies must be carefully and systematically integrated with the marketing strategies. Not only the demand and cost are important in pricing decisions but competition is also a significant variable to be considered. To determine the difficulties and the affecting factors in applying pricing decisions within the marketing concepts in construction sector, a survey was carried out among the Turkish companies as a sample group. In total 49 companies, mostly medium-size firms have been surveyed. The responses of firms are considered based on their actively engaged subsectors, namely, residential, commercial/public buildings, and infrastructure construction. The answers of firms are also evaluated based on their stated organizational structure, namely, simple, hierarchical, project, and network. The views about the various aspects of pricing policy development in phases, for example before and during bid, differ in the construction companies depending on their actively involved fields and their organizational structures

Modelling masonry crew productivity using two artificial neural network techniques

Artificial neural networks have been effectively used in various civil engineering fields, including construction management and labour productivity. In this study, the performance of the feed forward neural network (FFNN) was compared with radial basis neural network (RBNN) in modelling the productivity of masonry crews. A variety of input factors were incorporated and analysed. Mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) and correlation coefficient (R) were used to evaluate model performance. Research results indicated that the neural computing techniques could be successfully employed in modelling crew productivity. It was also found that successful models could be developed with different combinations of input factors, and several of the models which excluded one or more input factors turned out to be better than the baseline models. Based on the MAPE values obtained for the models, the RBNN technique was found to be better than the FFNN technique, although both slightly overestimated the masons’ productivity. First published online: 22 Oct 201

Evaluation of plastering crew performance in building projects using data envelopment analysis

The research question addressed in this study was how the performance of construction crews working in a certain project or locality could be evaluated, ranked and improved. To develop and demonstrate the relevant framework, data envelopment analysis (DEA) was applied to establish the relative efficiency of plastering crews working in building projects located in different cities around Turkey. Data were collected from 40 crews of varying characteristics, and their technical efficiency scores were computed using the Banker, Charnes and Cooper (BCC) model, which is based on variable returns-to-scale (VRS). The model yields efficiency scores that range between 0 and 1, and a company or crew is considered efficient if its score is 1.0 (100%). Efficient and inefficient crews were identified and ranked on this basis in the study. Cross tabulation analyses were subsequently conducted to gain further insights into the relationships between the efficiency scores and input factors of numbers of skilled and unskilled laborers, daily labor unit costs, work hours, average age of crew members, total crew experience, plastering location, plastering technique, and plaster type. No discernible relationship could be identified between the efficiency scores and productivity outputs of the crews. It was found that plastering technique, plastering location, and total crew experience had a significant association with crew efficiency. Efficiency improvement strategies identified included training, hiring experienced plasterers, adopting more advanced plastering technology, implementing better jobsite management practices, and enhancing workers’ knowledge, skills and attitude towards productivity and quality. First published online: 25 Sep 201

The effect of current public procurement law on duration and cost of construction projects in Turkey

The current public procurement law (Law No. 4734) was established in Turkey in 2003. The current law has fundamental differences from the previous one, Law No. 2886, in that the current law's main objective is to increase the effective use of public resources. Although the current law was enacted nine years ago, no in-depth research has been undertaken related to the extent of public savings. Thus, the aim of this research is to analyze the performance of public investments for construction with respect to their success in achieving on time and within budget completion. Additionally, a comparison between the completion duration and budget of construction projects undertaken under the current and the previous law is presented. To achieve these goals, historical contract documents addressing 878 and 575 public construction projects undertaken under two laws, respectively, were analyzed. In this context, the data mining method, including decision trees, artificial neural network, and support vector machines, was applied to predict the duration and cost deviations of the construction projects during the tender process, and the results were compared. It was demonstrated that the current law has contributed substantially towards the completion of the projects within estimated or envisaged durations and costs. The findings of this research can be generalized to countries with similar economical and organizational structures with Turkey

Circular eco-industrial park design inspired by nature: An integrated non-linear optimization, location, and food web analysis

Industrial symbiosis (IS) is one of the alternative ways of using natural resources in industrial processes. Eco-industrial parks (EIPs), as commonly known areas of IS practices, increase resource efficacy and reduce environmental effects by implementing waste/by product exchanges among tenant plants. Although there is an increasing but limited number of EIPs around the world, their circularity is not ensured due to high dynamic market and business conditions. This paper aims at offering an innovative design approach for EIPs taking into account the potential waste exchanges between the plants potentially to be co-located within EIPs with the goal of eliminating adverse impacts of market and business dynamicity. To this end, first an analysis of an existing IS database is conducted and the sectors potentially to be co-located are identified. Second, inspired by natural eco-systems, the food web (FW) metrics are defined to measure the potential EIPs' circularity. Third, a non-linear optimization method, namely branch and bound algorithm, is adopted to decide which plants should be included in the EIP designs to maximize the cyclicity of the networks. Lastly, a location analysis is conducted in order to co-locate the plants and to minimize the operational costs of implementing and running the EIPs. The use of this integrated approach is illustrated in a scenario analysis for four theoretical EIPs, two taking the construction industry as an anchor industry and two considering the random inclusion of various industries that can exchange wastes with the constructions industry. These EIPs' FW metric values are compared with the biological FW averages of natural ecosystems. The results support the method's ability to design sustainable and circular EIPs and point out practical implications for practitioners and policy-makers. The study is a seminal one integrating three methodologies for the first time to design IS networks in the form of EIPs

Industry financial ratios - application of factor analysis in Turkish construction industry

WOS: 000241590600040Turkish economy has been hit by various economical crises between the years 1998 and 2001 and the economic stagnation still continues. Past experiences in various countries show that it is vitally important to encourage construction activities in order to get out of stagnation, as construction output directly affects about 200 other sectors and industry financial ratio analysis is a means to provide a basis for the governments to undertake corrective action. However, there are over 50 financial ratios that can be used during analysis and some are more important than the others for different industries. Previous research has shown that there are about 25 factors that are important for the construction companies. This, in turn, requires elimination of unrelated data. Factor analysis is a data reduction and classification technique, which can be applied in financial analysis. Factor analysis was thus applied to the financial data collected from Turkish construction companies for a 5-year period in order to determine the financial indicators that can be used to analyse the financial trend of the industry. Five independent factors, i.e. liquidity, capital structure and profitability, activity efficiency, profit margin and growth, and assets structure were identified to be sensitive to the economical changes in the country. The results of the factor-based analysis can be used both by the government to analyse the changes in the industry with respect to time and by the construction companies to analyse their financial state with respect to their rivals. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

A socio-ecological approach to improve industrial zones towards eco-industrial parks

One of the concrete examples of industrial symbiosis development is eco-industrial parks, which improves resource efficiency and minimizes environmental impacts by adopting models for waste exchanges between industries. Despite past efforts, many industrial zones around the world are not yet considered as eco-industrial parks because of the low number (or total lack) of symbiotic relationships among industries. A promising strategy is to develop those existing industrial zones into eco-industrial parks. However, there is a lack of studies addressing how to assess environmental improvement in relation to network sustainability. This study demonstrates such an assessment approach using an integration of food web analysis and social network analysis. These two methods can assist in assessing differences in network configurations with respect to potential implementations of industrial symbiosis, and in analysing the resilience, redundancy, connectance, and cyclicity of eco-parks. The use of the methods is illustrated in a case study of an industrial zone in Turkey. Four potential future scenarios are proposed, including potential future co-location of companies in the industrial zone in order to foster industrial symbiotic network formation. These scenarios are compared with the current configuration. The results indicate the method's ability to assess the resilience of an industrial network. Moreover, the case shows an improvement of network sustainability and follows some sustainable properties of natural ecosystems as a result of implementing the industrial symbiosis