Overview

Capital investments, especially in building and engineering, play a vital role in fulfilling organisational mandates and improving service delivery. Success depends on delivering quality projects on time, within budget, and aligned with broader socio-economic goals. This demands responsible resource use: effective, efficient, economical, and transparent.

Bills of Quantities (BoQs) are key tools for budgeting and cost control throughout a project’s lifecycle. This course equips participants to use BoQs for procurement, cost planning, budgeting, construction scheduling, valuations, and final accounts, across pre-tender, tender, and post-tender stages.

Why Should an Individual Attend?

• Build core competencies in using Bills of Quantities (BoQs) for cost planning, budgeting, and financial control throughout capital project lifecycles.
• Understand how BoQs align with different contracting strategies (GCC, JBCC, NEC, FIDIC), enabling more informed decision-making and risk management.
• Gain practical insight into legislative and regulatory frameworks, including South Africa’s Quantity Surveying Professions Act and CIDB standards, ensuring compliance and professional integrity.
• Learn to interface BoQs with project management tools, enhancing coordination between quantity surveying and broader project delivery functions.
• Explore the role of BoQs in bid evaluation and change management, including how they inform Bid Committees and support transparent procurement processes.
• Stay ahead of industry trends, including the digitisation of BoQs and their evolving role in modern infrastructure project governance.

Outcomes

On completion of this course, the delegate will be able to:

• Describe bills of quantities, composition and their purpose (vs other types of similar tools) in building and engineering projects.
• Preparation and use of bills of quantities in pre-contract, construct and post-contract phases in construction projects.
• Types of bills of quantities used in the industry and use with different contracting strategies.
• Evaluation of priced bills of quantities at tender stage.
• Use of bills of quantities as cost and project management tools.
• Trends in digitisation bills of quantities.
• Undertake an effective risk assessment of the preferred bidder.
• Evaluate the consulting engineer’s performance through the project.

Program Outline

Day 1: Purpose and use of bills of quantities

• What are bills of quantities in building and engineering projects?
• Purpose of bills of quantities in building and engineering projects.
• How accurate should a quantity surveyor/cost engineer measure? (How levels of design inform types and form of bills of quantities?)
• Legislative requirements and the standard systems of measurement currently used in South Africa (e.g. Quantity Surveying Professions Act (49 of 2000 and the Construction Industry Board Development Board (CIDB) Act, (Act 38 of 2000).
• Different Type of bills of quantities and their use in different contracting strategies and types of Contracts (GCC, JBCC, NEC and FIDIC) (advantages and disadvantages).
• Different types of bills including preliminary and general as per standard systems of measurements
• Preparation of bills of quantities including preliminaries, trade bills, budgetary allowance

Day 2: Assessment, Management of and use of BOQ

• Assessment of priced bills of quantities / QS Report to inform Bid Evaluation Committees (common errors and CIDB’ Standard for Uniformity and Practice Note #21)
• Management of and use of BOQ as a Cost control and projections measure in Change Management including approval processes by Bid Committees in the public sector.
• Software and digitisation of bills of quantities.

Who Should Attend?

• Engineers
• Architects
• Project / Construction managers
• Quantity Surveyors
• Project Auditors
• PMU/PMO Managers
• Procurement Managers
• Contract Managers
• Executives / Senior Management
• Middle Management
• Administrators / Support Staff
• Other project professionals