Engineering, Procurement, and Construction Cost and Schedule Performance Leading Indicators: State-of-the-Art Review

Construction projects have been rarely completed at the estimated cost and time as it is forecasted approximately more than 50% of projects face significant delay and major cost escalation. Hence, it is of importance to investigate the main schedule and cost performance indicators of engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) projects and address these challenging issue. In spite of the fact that a vast range of studies conducted to identify the leading performance indicators (LPIs), lack of consistency between these indicators has been a matter of debate among construction practitioners and scholars. Furthermore, since construction phase activities consume the largest portion of the project budget and time, most of the previous studies concentrated solely on the performance of construction phase. As a result, the performance of engineering and procurement phases has received the least attention. Therefore, this study will review numerous existing research documents to collect the identified leading time/cost performance indicators and then prioritize them based on their frequency of occurrence in the literature. To accomplish this objective, over 200 peer-reviewed papers from different parts of the world have been studied and a vast range of LPIs in each EPC phase was identified. This study concludes that the principal common cause of delay and cost overrun in both engineering and construction phases is “design change.” Moreover, the schedule and cost performance of procurement phase can be highly affected by “resource shortage” and “price fluctuation” respectively. Although, it is proven that any delay in the project causes cost overrun, the other root causes of cost escalation lie in “poor economic condition,” “poor communication between different stakeholders” and “severe weather condition.” The findings of this review assist construction practitioners to provide required resources properly and help academic researchers to conduct their future studies by presenting an extensive phase-based review of time/cost performance.