Civil Engineering nOVEMBER 2021 | Vol 29 No 10

Contrac ts I t is unlikely that a conventional construction contract will be ex- ecuted without any claims from the contractor to the employer, or from a subcontractor to the contractor. Typically, claims are for additional time, money, or both. The nature of such claims would vary if the cause of such an event applies uniquely to one or two subcontractors and the contractor, compared to the con- tractor and the employer where the whole works may be delayed. Claims, in this context, are deemed to be routine contractual notices for regular payments and/or the assessment of ad- ditional (or omitted) work, separate from claims arising from disputes. The employer may have cause to claim from the contractor – dealt with in most Standard-form Contracts (SfC) as a speci- fied penalty – but are not the subject of this discussion . Clearly the (sub)contractor cannot claim for his/her poor workmanship or performance. The adjudicator of a claim (AoC, who is likely to be the engineer when using a FIDIC SfC, the employer’s representative using GCC, the principal agent using JBCC or the project manager using NEC) must use his/her professional skill, experience and knowledge of construction contract law to resolve issues fairly and speedily. All SfCs in common use require the contract administrator (CA) to act as a neutral agent, even though he/she is appointed by the employer. The contractor may be less sympa- thetic to the cause of a subcontractor than the CA assessing the contractor’s claim vis-à-vis the employer. Some contractors employ persons specialising in the formu- lation of claims, who may be more skilled than the CA as a claims’ adjudicator. In practice, not all AoCs/CAs are equally skilled to assess contractual claims. ADJUDICATION TOOLS Analysis of the programme is generally accepted to be the first step to determine what should have been done within a given time period in a defined sequence. The programme may be a freehand illustration on a piece of graph paper Uwe Putlitz Pr Arch Pr CPM Former CEO of the JBCC uwe@buildstrat.co.za Contractual claims: the contract administrator’s role 18 November 2021 Civil Engineering