How can supply chain management proliferate in South African construction?

Noted interdependencies affects how activity coordination is approached in construction as actors have to constantly adjust and direct activities and resources in and between numerous supply chains and construction sites. This is one of the reasons why process effectiveness and efficiency have been the focus of supply chain management (SCM), mainly in a project based context. Due to the documented need to enact efficiency in construction, an exploratory case study was conducted on a general contracting (GC) firm based in a South African region. Insights gained from the study show how the concepts inherent in SCM is understood within the firm; how the coordination of production processes affect the creation of value demanded by clients through the GC; and the transaction governance structures that are often used within supply chains by the GC. The insights from the case study suggest that there appears to be a major scope for the implementation of SCM in the practice of construction management in South Africa. In other words, the attempt to drive project performance improvement through a proactive management of the supply chain could prove to be valuable for project stakeholders in South Africa.