DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF A COMPUTERIZED BILL OF QUANTITY FOR QUANTITY SURVEYORS (CASE STUDY OF OKOLO, OKOLO & CO ENUGU

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

A quantity surveyor (QS) is a professional person working within the construction industry.  A person who calculates the cost of materials and labour on a construction project based on an architect plans     

Bill of QUANTITY for quantity surveyors can be described the compilation of the raw Quantities required to produce any desired product.  This means billing the Quantities before surveyor so as to achieve a cost-effective production, avoiding less in buying the Quantities for production and also in the sale of products after production.

            There are a lot of problems encountered in the manual bill of martial surveyors.  It is difficult to maintain the relationship between raw Quantities at the lowest level and the in which this raw Quantities are combined to form final products are not shown in the manual Bill of QUANTITY for quantity surveyors.

            Most raw Quantities are used for more than one product.  It becomes difficult to determine the final products in which a particular raw Quantities is used unless a separate record of the usage of raw Quantities is maintained.

            Those involved are the production manager who is in charge of production.  He lists all the raw Quantities that are needed for production.  The stores manager takes Inventory of available raw Quantities and notes those that are not available.  He then notifies the purchasing manager.

            The purchasing manager who is the head of the purchasing department is also involved.  He is responsible for buying and bringing down the Quantities from the source.

1.1       STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM

A lot of problems have been encountered in the existing manual system of bill of QUANTITY for QUANTITY surveyors.  The particular raw Quantities used in a product and the quantity used cannot be traced because of the following:-

1. Inefficient surveyor and storage system for bill of Quantities information.
2. Wrong transcriptions and mutilations by accident or on purpose.  The information is very insecure and can be accessed by wrong persons.
3. Use of filling cabinets makes retrieval of information very difficult.  Also the filling cabinets are prone to termites and rats.
4. Management decisions are often based on incomplete, incomprehensive, incorrect and unreliable information and as such planning and other management activities are affected.
5. Duplication of tasks will be eliminated so that the staff will gear their talents towards more challenging and innovative tasks.