ABSTRACT

Bill of quantities and the engineer's estimates are the contents of the engineer's report on tenders for road construction projects. It also forms a proposal prepared for any road rehabilitation. This research work looks into the possibilities of providing a fast and efficient means of preparing bills of quantities and engineer's estimate for routine maintenance road works in the highway division of the Federal Ministry of Works and Housing, Abuja field office. I aimed at producing a functional, accurate, reliable, automated, flexible, portable and user-friendly system for preparing bills of quantities and engineers' estimates. To achieve, the aforementioned objectives, I carried out a feasibility study of the existing system and designed an improved system based upon the use of computers; to overcome the problems of the manual system. In order to get to the root of the existing system problems, senior engineers of FMW&H highway divisions were interviewed and a study was also made on vital documents used in the highway division of the Ministry. System analysis tools such as organizational charts, system flow charts, decision tables, decision trees and data flow diagrams were used to a na lyse the current system. At the end of the analysis, the researchers designed the new system to receive site measurements and contents of the bill of quantities into the new system database and carry out all computations of quantities and estimates of various items of work as spelt out in the bill. Algorithms were used as logical steps in coding the new system in the PASCAL programming language. v A positive result was obtained when I used a valid data type to test and ascertain the functionality of the new system.