Efficiency in the provision of production specifications for the South African construction industry

Abstract

In most developed countries production specifications are based on national standardised specification systems, such as the National Building Specification or NBS (Great Britain), the National Specification System or NATSPEC (Australia), Master Specification Systems or MasterSpec (United States of America and Canada), General Materials and Workmanship Specifications or AMA (Sweden), and the National Standard Building Specification or STABU (the Netherlands). Standard specifications are primarily designed to shorten descriptions in the texts of new projects, whether in respect of descriptions on architectural or engineering drawings and technical specifications or descriptions in bills of quantities, schedules of rates, etcetera. In some countries the development of computerised specification systems has reached the point that these systems are supplanting the traditional word processing method. These systems are also providing links or interfaces to other information systems of the construction sector, such as design, products and cost information systems, etcetera.
The South African construction industry, however, lags behind these countries that have been involved in the development of construction information systems or processes over the years. A call is therefore made to improve the efficiency of providing production specifications, as inadequate project information has been identified as one of the major causes of inefficiency in the building process.