December 2009

Since 1996, Alliances either "pure" or "Single TOC" or "competitive/Multi-TOC" have been representing the bulk of the collaborative methods used on larger and more complex projects.

for the last few years, we have seen infrastructure client organisations (purchasers) using Early Contractor Involvement (ECI) as an alternative to alliancing for projects of lesser complexity where the client and a designer are joined, at project design and scoping time, by a selected contractor. Once the project has been scoped and risks reasonably assessed and an estimated Target Outturn cost identified, the client then has the option to proceed with a normal tender-based procurement process and most of the time they do.  This is a good example of a hybrid procuremtn model, collaborative at the front end where the difficulty required the synergies of the participants and market driven in delivery once the project scoping has been ascertained with good accuracy.

Thsi alternative collaborative procurement method is testimony to the maturity of appraoch from our regional infrastructure agencies who are using a range of procurement methods offering various scale of collaboration to better reflect the need of various project. 
To be also noted is the GC21 collaborative contract which came to light few years ago in NSW (sponsored by the Department of Commerce) as a collaboratove version of the C21 procurment contract.

The paper provided below provides a short overview of the ECI and GC21 models with interesting comments from one of our regional practitioners.  We have in our Member Areas several more papers and presentations of the ECI topic.  We wish thank Mr. Michael Schoevers who was at time of writing Senior Engineer, NSW Department of Commerce Office of Public Works and Services
GC21 & ECI collaborative type contracts - paper- M. Schoevers