Reducing Construction Disputes through Effective Claims Management

Reducing construction disputes appears to be the main goal for many researchers in the last decay. Each of them has attempted to clearly identify the expected causes of disputes. Construction claims can be considered as a main source of disputes. This paper aims to identify the most important causes that converting construction claims into disputes. A proposed system that can help to avoid converting construction claims into disputes was provided. Factors that causing disputable claims were identified through four stages. The first stage 140 factors that causing disputable claims were collected from international literature. The second stage a brainstorming was used to reduce the number of these factors and get the most common factors causing disputable claims. Hence 31 factors were only considered. These factors were divided into three major categories: behavioral, contractual and operational matters. Through third stage, the thirty one factors were subjected to a further survey to identify their importance index (relative significance). One hundred and two interviews were conducted and their results are employed to develop an importance index score for these disputable claims causes. Furthermore, the thirty one disputable claims causes were then ranked according to their relative importance. The fourth stage, The 80/20 rule applied to the causes identified to get the eight most important causes that represented about 25% of the causes. The most important eight factors were considered as the factors that converting claims into disputes which identified as follows: 1) delay interim payment from client, 2) qualification of team work, 3) extension of time, 4) incomplete drawings and specification, 5) Poorly written contracts clauses, 6) change orders, 7) cooperation and communication nature among project team, 8) late supply of equipment and materials. A proposed system for avoiding converting claims into disputes was presented. Furthermore, a checklist was designed during construction stage and four actual case studies were considered and discussed.