Credible Cost Formation of a Construction Investment Project at the Stage of Design Documentation Development

Abstract

Introduction. The credible cost formation mechanism of a construction investment project’s life cycle stages is considered. The cost of the project depends on diverse components: the duly designed project, the cost calculation method, the choice of suppliers and contractors, the construction time frame, etc. All calculations are based on the estimated cost of the project made at the design stage.Materials and methods. Transition to the input costing method turns to be an advancement in determining the estimated cost of construction at the design stage. The main problem here is the lack of a unified database providing the data on the cost of resources at the current price level for each region. The proposed solution is transferring the functions of replenishing the Federal State Information System of Pricing in Construction (ФГИС ЦС) database from the Ministry of Construction, Housing and Utilities of the Russian Federation to the regions of Russia.Results. The transition to the input costing method will allow the regions to hold the information on the credible estimated cost of facilities planned to be built in the forthcoming years. The increasing amount of standard design projects will enable solving a number of cost management issues at the design stage. The projects that proved to be successful can be reused many times because all possible errors were debugged, the proposed solutions were tested on the facilities already built. The use of the standard design projects will allow to prepare and verify the project design documentation quicker. The time assigned for designing will reduce and no additional questions will arise in the process of construction. The application of information modeling technologies fosters the projects’ quality enhancement.Discussion and conclusion. The mechanisms proposed by the authors will enable projects’ quality enhancement, reduce the cost and timing of design works, as well as make it possible to determine the credible cost of construction at the design stage, which is the basis for determining the volume of investment and calculating the cost of a facility at the stages of planning and implementation of the project.