Additionally, the construction industry is often characterized as project-based with
unique teams and rather limited knowledge dissemination and learning. Management
is often considered to lack familiarity with local resources and conditions due to the
geographical range of projects (Gidado, 1996) and projects also create their own
subculture because of the isolation of projects, resulting in difficulties of
communication between projects (Gluch and Ra¨isa¨nen, 2009). In addition, inherent
tendencies of sub-optimization throughout the projects and organisations as well as
their vast number and variety of suppliers sourced for every single project is another
often mentioned constraint. As these characteristics make the construction industry
quite different from other industries, findings from studies of the manufacturing
industry may thereby not necessarily be directly transferred (Errasti et al., 2007). This
motivates further investigation of the situation between contractors and suppliers in
order to sort out criteria for efficient relationships. Hence, based on the views of
strategic purchasers within a large contractor and drawing on the general literature on
buyer-supplier relationships, the purpose of this paper is to identify criteria for
achieving efficient contractor-supplier relations in construction.