Change orders often arise from variations to a project’s original scope of work, design errors and omissions, and unforeseen conditions. These situations frequently leave a facility owner with limited options to avoid delays and higher costs once a project has begun. By requiring contractors when a project is awarded to abide by defined prices published in Gordian’s Construction Task Catalog® for all change orders, the cost of each change becomes a simple function of the preset unit price, multiplied by the adjustment factor, multiplied by the quantity of the task.
COMS relies on Gordian’s localized and customizable Construction Task Catalog, which includes fixed-unit pricing based on prevailing wage rates and material and equipment costs for hundreds of U.S. metropolitan areas. Gordian’s highly detailed Construction Task Catalog compiles pricing from a construction cost database of over 260,000 tasks—the largest in existence. With COMS, these preset unit prices apply to virtually every imaginable construction task and are established at the beginning of a project to simplify the entire change order pricing process, reduce administrative effort, and avoid delays by eliminating the need to negotiate prices after the initial award has been made.
“With empirical data showing change orders account for approximately 8% to 14% of all capital construction dollars, controlling costs for those changes is a formidable challenge for facility owners,” said William Pollak, CEO. “Gordian’s newest construction procurement solution relieves the stress of negotiating pricing in the middle of a project. COMS takes what has historically been a harbinger of cost overruns and turns it into an opportunity to save money, giving facility owners peace of mind that they are paying a fair price.”
COMS is available now and may be applied to construction projects of all sizes. Like Gordian’s competitively bid Job Order Contracting solutions, COMS is an efficient and transparent process, which clarifies the pricing of change orders for contractors, eliminates project delays due to changes and restores price control to the facility owner.
About The Gordian Group
The Gordian Group (www.TheGordianGroup.com) created Job Order Contracting and a number of related construction-procurement systems, including ezIQC®. Gordian combines industry-leading expertise, technology and the world’s largest, locally priced task database to deliver rapid deployment and long-term cost savings in the repair, alteration and construction of buildings and infrastructure. Gordian introduced the Change Order Management System as part of the company’s mission to provide “innovative products and services to organizations pursuing efficient and effective repair and maintenance procurement and information solutions.”
