Evaluation of construction companies performance by using stepwise weight assessment ratio analysis RESOLUTION METHOD BY APPLYING NEW STEP ‐ WISE WEIGHT ASSESSMENT RATIO ANALYSIS

The extent to which the facility and the construction process meet and/or surpass a client's expectations is critical for client satisfaction. As a result, company evaluation is a well-established procedure in project management in the construction industry to ensure projects are performed in compliance with the contract documents and applicable laws and regulations. The purpose of this study is to present and debate certain criteria for evaluating the Iraqi construction sector companies’ performance based on Stepwise Weight Assessment Ratio Analysis (SWARA) to assess company responsibility and performance in support of future projects. The evaluation criteria of construction companies are studied in this paper. The criteria have been categorized into main groups: (a) organization and management; (b) time; (c) quality; (d) cost; (e) resource; (f) safety practices. The main criteria have been divided into forty-four sub criteria. The findings of this paper demonstrate that the most important criteria in evaluating the construction companies’ performance is cost, followed by time, quality, organization and management, resources, and lastly safety practices which ranked based on the weight of criteria (35.7%, 24.2%, 16.3%, 11.2%, 7.4%, 5.2% respectively) with the SWARA technique.


Introduction
The construction industry is a vital sector that has a significant impact on a country's economic development and national society. It has the potential to help the country create a large number of job opportunities. The construction industry's growth is inversely linked to the country's economic growth. [1]. In the management of construction firms, performance measurement is critical. It gives the required data for process control and allows for the setting of difficult yet achievable goals. It is also essential to support the business strategies implementation [2]. As a result, the most important evaluation criteria for the company's performance in the Iraqi field of construction is studied in this paper. Weight assessment is a significant subject in several MCDM problems. One of the new techniques is the SWARA approach. An expert's perspective on estimates and weight computations is important in this technique. Reference [3] state that, every expert selects the significance of every criterion. All the factors are ranked by each expert in descending order from the first to the last one. The expert makes use of his or her own implicit knowledge, information, and abilities. The most important criterion is ranked first, and the least important criterion is ranked last, according to this procedure. The key advantage of this decision-making process is that important problems are defined in some cases, based on company or country policies, and there is no need for a ranking factor assessment. As a result, SWARA may be effective for some topics where priorities have been established based on previous events. Researchers have investigated and employed SWARA in a variety of domains in the past such as for machine tool selection [4], facility location problem [5], architect selection [6], evaluating sustainability indicators of the energy system [7], personnel selection problem [8], evaluating the prominent criteria in high tech industry investment prioritization [9], evaluating the criteria for solar projects [10], project selection [11], [12]. Since there is no systematic study on the criteria for evaluating construction companies in Iraq, therefore this paper aims to fill a research gap by evaluating the performance of Iraqi construction sector enterprises using the SWARA method. The importance of research will be highlighted in this study by analyzing crucial performance evaluation criteria for construction companies. The following is a breakdown of the paper's structure. The data and methods used, as well as the procedural stages, are detailed in the following section. Section 3 demonstrates the results and discussion. Lastly, conclusions are drawn in the last section of this paper.

Identify the main criteria and sub-criteria
To identify the main criteria and sub-criteria for construction companies' evaluation, for construction companies' evaluation, the researcher studies the literature review related to the research and extract a number of criteria, and interviews with project managers, group of experts, academics, professionals and engineers in government institutions to find out the criteria from their perspective about evaluation of construction companies.

Use the focus group discussion (FGD) technique
Used the Focus Group Discussion (FGD) technique with experts and specialists and decision-makers to select the criteria and sub-criteria to be suitable with Iraqi environmental and requirements.
In the table 1, the six Main Criteria (MC) and forty-four Sub-Criteria (SC) for performance evaluation of construction companies captured and selected by theoretical study and field work [13], [14], [15], [16], [17]. This criterion is used to determine whether the company has good safety practices. Is the company following its safety program and complying with regulatory requirements?

Extract main and sub-criteria weights by used the (SWARA).
It is one of the techniques for determining weight values that play an important role in a decision-making process. The following steps will explain the essential principles of SWARA as well as the technique for determining the relative weights of criteria. [18]:

Ranking the criteria
The importance of each criterion should be prioritized. The experts rank the defined criteria in order of relevance throughout this phase. The final list of criteria is listed from the most important to the least important.

Determine value of (Sj)
Calculate the value of the average value's (Sj) comparative significance. Determine the relative importance Sj of criterion (j) in respect to criterion (j-1) starting with the second criterion, then repeat for each criterion. The criterion (Cj) is less important than (Cj-1) Sj = Significance of the average value J= 2,3,…. Cj= Current criteria more important than criteria h= No. of experts

Determine value of (Kj)
The value of (Kj) find by calculate the coefficient (Kj) as follows: Kj= Coefficient of criteria J= 2,3,… Sj+1 = Significance of the average value

Determine value of (qj)
Re-calculated weight q j as follows: qj= Re-calculated weight Kj= Coefficient of criteria qj-1= The previous re-calculated weight

Calculate the weight of criteria
Wj: denotes the relative weight of criteria.

Results and discussions
The main criteria include Organization and Management, as well as time, cost, quality, resource, and safety. are deemed the essential criteria that are utilized in evaluating the company's performance in Iraq. Everyone main criteria were broken down into sub-criteria. To evaluate the weights of criteria, the SWARA technique was applied to determine the main and sub criteria weights.

Ranking the main and sub criteria
The first stage is the one that all the eight experts rank criteria on their opinion, then a new (final) ranking is obtained by averaging the criteria rankings, which is shown in Figure 1, 2,3,4,5,6, and 7. The main criteria are listed in descending order by experts in Table 1. Through using the interval rating (1-5) Likert scale, where 5 denoted Very High, 4 High, 3 Medium, 2 Low, and 1 Very Low, each expert determines their preferred level of ratings for each single specified criterion. Experts have ranked the main criteria. Obtained rank of criteria indicate that the cost criteria are the first rank, while second criteria rank is time. quality has third rank, organization and management criteria was fourth rank, while the safety and resource have a fifth and sixth rank respectively. Figure 2, 3,4,5,6 and 7 illustrate how experts ranked the sub-criteria.          The results of sub-criteria ranking showed that, in the organization and management criteria, promptly resolve any issues after notification (OMSC4) is most important. In time criteria, the adequacy of initial project schedule (TSC2) is most important. In quality criteria, the compliance with plans and specifications (QSC5) is most important. In cost criteria, the practices change order avoidance and minimization (CSC5) is most important. In resource criteria, the Adjust resources in response to demands of the project delivery schedule (RSC4) is most important. In safety criteria, the Minimizes job-site accidents (SSC7) is most important.

Determine comparative significance (Sj) and weights (Wj) for main criteria
The second stage is similar to the first stage. Again, the criteria importance order was obtained as in the first stage form, decision makers made their own pair wise comparisons, but instead of taking the average of the weight values at the end of the SWARA Method, the process was continued by taking the average of the pairwise comparisons (sj) by application equation 1. The process and results are presented in Table 2.     After completing the (Sj) comparison between the primary criteria using equation 1, The next step is to use the equations 2, 3, and 4 to calculate the primary criteria weights. Table (3) show the main criteria weighting by using the SWARA.

Calculate sub criteria significance (S j) and weights (W j)
This stage is similar to the stage in section 3.2. Again, the sub-criteria importance order was obtained form, decision makers made their own pair wise comparisons. Table 4 show relative importance assessment for organization and management sub-criteria.   Table 6 show relative importance assessment for time sub-criteria.    Table 8 show relative importance assessment for quality sub-criteria.  The calculation of the quality sub-criteria weights shown in table 9.  Table 10 show relative importance assessment for cost sub-criteria.   Table 12 show relative importance assessment for resource sub-criteria.   Table 14 show relative importance assessment for safety sub-criteria.  Table 15 shows how the weights of the safety sub-criteria were calculated.

Final weights of main criteria and sub criteria
Final results of weights for main criteria and sub-criteria by using the SWARA technique illustrated by Table  16.

Conclusions
This study presented the SWARA technique to prioritize performance evaluation criteria. The SWARA tool play a significant impact in the making of a decision and to compute the final weighted values of performance criteria. This study identified six main criteria and forty-four sub criteria that directly influence the success of construction firms, and they could be utilized by practitioners in the Iraqi construction business to better assess the company's performance. As the Iraqi construction market grows, the conclusions of this study will aid international corporations in understanding the success criteria by which Iraqi construction firms are measured. The findings of this study can help guide the process of evaluating the performance of construction firms. The findings of this study demonstrate that the most important criteria in evaluating the construction companies' performance is cost, followed by time, quality, organization and management, resources, and lastly safety practices. The worth of this paper is to assist in determining the performance of companies in construction sector as well as the relative importance of decision criteria in measuring the performance of Iraqi construction sector companies using the SWARA technique.