A contractor profile (CP) is a collection of data sufficient for searching for projects best matching the contractor business, aiming at creating a preferred contractor list.
The crenger.com CP builder entirely replaces the contractor prequalification process employed in conventional project management.
It is a quantum leap forward for the following reasons. The contractor creates its profile once and uses it many times in different project tenders. The contractor owns its profile and grants access to companies (including crenger.com) wishing to invite the contractor to participate in bidding. As its outcome depends on CP relevancy the contractor is interested in keeping it up-to-date. CP is a big time saver during the project's execution.
Currently, the CP builder includes 5 standard interfaces.
- Questionnaire
- Work references builder
- Performance data aggregator
- Contractor team builder
- Expert ranking of contractors
The questionnaire is intended to rate the business fit to the project standards. It covers business sustainability, quality assurance management, contract processing, financial performance, safety, health, and environmental risks. It is an inventory check-up intended to screen out outliers. Questions are weighted, so they may be summed up to benchmark the contractor. A contractor is requested to upload documentation on the health and safety compliance, certificates, licenses, and insurance.
The work reference builder serves three distinct purposes - to describe the business domain of the contractor, establish its affinity to the current, past, or tender's works, and predict the impact of adding extra work to the business pipeline of works.
The first two objectives become trivial if constrained by the vocabulary used to describe the project schedule tasks. In the AI parlance, that vocabulary is a collection of topic models mentioned in the previous article.
Once the contractor work is added to the references list, crenger.com starts an automatic web search for the pages mentioning the referenced project. Links found are part of the contractor profile.
The third objective points to business dynamics - how quickly it can scale up or down and at what marginal costs. It is directly related to the level of business automation and digitization. The higher the level is the better the dynamics. Ranking business digitization is a task easily solved by AI. (How to match the business's existing pipeline of works to the project timeline is discussed elsewhere).
The performance data aggregator defines a minimum scope and a type of data needed to asses the business's financial health, maturity, and performance. The raw data is then used for calculating a set of KPIs like liabilities-to-EBIDTA, liabilities-to-assets, liquidity ratio, etc.
The contractor team builder collects data on the contractor staff to evaluate its professionalism and expertise. In addition, its goal is to determine whether a contractor has enough resources to complete the job successfully.
Here the works previously registered with the work references builder are linked to the staff members. There is an option for the member to upload a resume. Once the contractor staff has been registered, the selection of the best project team is straightforward.
The expert ranking of contractors collects feedback from the contractor customers. Scoring points include the staff expertise, management standards, equipment inventory state, automation level, subcontractors' net, compliance, etc.