07-Str-B2 · May 2018
Nivaar worked solution (AI-drafted; not reviewed by a licensed engineer)
Paper format: National Exams, May 2018 — 07-Str-B2 Management of Construction. Three hours, closed book, one approved Casio or Sharp calculator permitted. Six questions of equal value (20 marks each); any five constitute a complete paper and only the first five that appear in the answer book are marked. All six are worked below so the paper serves as a complete revision set whichever five a candidate elects.
Reference texts: Hegazy, T., Computer-Based Construction Project Management (Prentice Hall) — precedence (activity-on-node) networks with start-to-start lags, forward and backward passes, total and free float, the late bar chart, and contractor cash-flow and overdraft analysis; these chapters carry Questions 1 and 5. Hendrickson, C. & Au, T., Project Management for Construction (2nd ed., Carnegie Mellon) — Chapter 5 (cost estimation and unit-cost data), Chapter 8 (bidding and contract award), Chapter 10 (fundamental scheduling procedures), Chapter 11 (advanced scheduling with lags) and Chapter 12 (cost control and financing of constructed facilities). Halpin, D.W. & Senior, B.A., Construction Management (4th ed., Wiley) — quantity take-off, crew productivity, bidding strategy, bonding and construction safety management. Peurifoy, R.L. & Schexnayder, C.J., Construction Planning, Equipment and Methods (9th ed., McGraw-Hill) — excavation production and the physical determinants of backhoe daily output, behind Question 2. R.S. Means, Building Construction Cost Data (annual) — the anatomy of a unit-price line: crew, daily output, unit, and bare material / labour / equipment / total columns. Sullivan, W.G., Wicks, E.M. & Koelling, C.P., Engineering Economy (17th ed., Pearson) — Chapters 5 and 6, present-worth analysis and the repeatability (least common multiple of lives) assumption for alternatives with unequal lives, used in Question 4. Canadian Construction Documents Committee, CCDC 2 — Stipulated Price Contract (2020), CCDC 220 Bid Bond, CCDC 221 Performance Bond and CCDC 222 Labour and Material Payment Bond, with the BC Builders Lien Act holdback provisions and the Master Municipal Construction Documents (MMCD) — the Canadian tendering and payment machinery behind Questions 3 and 5. WorkSafeBC Occupational Health and Safety Regulation (Parts 8, 11, 12, 13, 18 and 33), CSA Z259 fall-protection and CSA Z94.4 respirator series, and the Transportation Association of Canada Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices for Canada — the Canadian rule set behind Question 6.
Check — how the two printed figures on page 2 were read. Network (Question 1): nine activity boxes with seven links — A → D carrying the printed SS = 3 lag (the line leaves A's top-left corner, runs across the top of the sheet and drops into D's top-left corner), then D → H, B → E, B → F, C → G, F → I and G → I, all finish-to-start with zero lag. No further arrows are drawn; A, B and C are the only start activities and E, H and I the only finish activities. Foundation plan (Question 2): an 80 m × 70 m rectangle with a rectangular notch 25 m deep cut into the top edge, one internal trench running the full width 20 m up from the bottom (the 50 m and 20 m dimensions meet on it), and one internal trench dropping from the bottom of the notch to that line. The notch width is not dimensioned on the paper, and Step 1 below shows the total trench length does not depend on it, so nothing is assumed. All plan dimensions are taken as trench centrelines; reading them instead to the outside face of the trench would shorten the total by about 1.6 per cent and change no conclusion.
Question text not reproduced: the examination questions are © Engineers and Geoscientists BC. Open the official past paper (linked at the top of this page) to read the question, then follow the worked solution below.
A bid package is the complete set of documents an owner issues to the bidding market, and it has to do two jobs at once: describe the work precisely enough that every bidder prices the same thing, and set out the legal terms on which the price is offered. In Canadian practice the package is normally assembled around a standard form — CCDC 2 for a stipulated-price building contract, or the Master Municipal Construction Documents for civil work — and comprises an instructions to bidders section (who may bid, the closing time and place, the form of security required, how addenda are issued, how errors and withdrawals are handled), the bid form itself with its schedule of prices, the agreement the successful bidder will execute, the general conditions and any supplementary conditions that modify them, the technical specifications organised by CSI or MasterFormat divisions, the drawings, a geotechnical and site-information package, and any appendices such as the schedule of unit prices, allowances, a preliminary construction schedule, a list of separate prices and alternates, and the bonding and insurance requirements. Bid security accompanies the bid — typically a CCDC 220 bid bond at ten per cent, backed by consents of surety to issue a CCDC 221 performance bond and a CCDC 222 labour and material payment bond on award. Anything the owner does not put in the package becomes a contractor assumption, so the completeness of the package directly determines the spread of the bids received.
The competitive bidding process runs from advertisement to award in a defined sequence. The owner advertises the opportunity, usually on BC Bid, MERX or a municipal portal for public work, and issues the documents, sometimes after a prequalification round that screens for experience, bonding capacity, safety record and financial standing. Bidders take off quantities, solicit sub-trade and supplier prices, price their own general conditions and site overhead, add a mark-up for head-office overhead and profit, and lodge a sealed bid before closing time. Questions raised during the bid period are answered by written addendum issued to every bidder, never informally, so that all bidders price the same scope. Bids are opened publicly for public work, read out and recorded, and then checked arithmetically and for compliance — security present, addenda acknowledged, bid form completed and signed, no qualifications attached. The award follows to the compliant bidder offering the best value, the contract is executed, performance and payment bonds are delivered, and the bid security is released.
What gives that sequence its legal force in Canada is the “Contract A / Contract B” doctrine settled in R. v. Ron Engineering and refined in MJB Enterprises and Tercon Contractors. Submitting a compliant bid forms Contract A between owner and bidder, an enforceable agreement carrying implied obligations of fairness and of accepting only compliant bids; Contract B is the construction contract itself, formed on award. This is why bids cannot normally be withdrawn after closing, why an owner who awards to a non-compliant bidder can be sued by the compliant losers, and why privilege and exclusion clauses in the instructions to bidders are drafted with care.
An unbalanced bid is one whose total may be competitive but whose internal distribution of unit prices does not reflect the true cost of the individual items. Two variants concern owners. The first is front-end loading: the bidder inflates the prices of early items such as mobilisation, excavation or site clearing and depresses the prices of late items such as landscaping or commissioning. The total is unchanged, but the owner finances the contractor's working capital interest-free through the early progress payments and is exposed if the contractor defaults part-way through, because the value certified will exceed the value in place. The second is the materially unbalanced bid, in which the bidder judges that a quantity in the schedule is understated or overstated and prices it accordingly — a high unit price on an item expected to overrun, or a nominal price on an item expected to be deleted — so that the apparent low bid is not the low bid once the work is actually measured.
Public agencies screen for these before award using a defined set of criteria rather than judgment alone. The bid schedule is compared item by item against the engineer's estimate and against the average of the other bids received, and any unit price that deviates beyond a threshold — commonly a factor of two or three, or a fixed percentage band — is flagged for written justification from the bidder. The cash-flow profile implied by the bid is compared against the value of work actually in place under the proposed schedule; if the difference is significant the bid is materially unbalanced. Agencies then apply a materiality test drawn from the standard US federal practice widely adopted in Canada: a mathematically unbalanced bid is rejected only if it is also materially unbalanced, that is, if there is reasonable doubt that award at those prices will result in the lowest ultimate cost to the owner. Owners also protect themselves structurally — by paying mobilisation as a capped separate item, by holding the statutory builders-lien holdback (ten per cent in British Columbia), by requiring performance and payment bonds, and by reserving the right in the instructions to bidders to reject any bid that is unbalanced or that contains prices the owner judges unreasonable.
Selection of the winner then rests on compliance first and price second. The agency confirms the bid is responsive (all required documents and security present, addenda acknowledged, no qualifications) and the bidder responsible (prequalified or demonstrably capable, bondable, with an acceptable safety and performance history and no conflict of interest), applies any arithmetic correction rules stated in the instructions, evaluates the unit prices for balance, and awards to the lowest compliant price — or, where the documents state a weighted evaluation, to the highest-scoring proposal on the published criteria. Debriefing unsuccessful bidders and releasing bid security close the process out.
