All of the global players do have their own engineering offices engaged in planning, technical calculation and design of construction objects. Some of them show that in their chosen name, others don’t (see my last post). Anyhow normally these engineering services are outsourced into subsidiaries operating as their own companies and offering their service to the public, so the tagging would be same as below…
Smaller constructions companies do not offer engineering services, they just do the physical work based on the plans of a separate engineering office. In such cases I would tag 2 different objects
I would not use civil_engineering as this is more generic and also includes lot of engineering disciplines not related to construction at all. Another option would be of course to go for the more generic tag office=civil_engineering and add a subtag for construction_engineering.
sure, the big global players usually can offer any kind of work and planning — and consulting, controlling, management, whatever, but it doesn’t mean any company is offering all of this, so we should sort it out and develop tags for the different situations.
Further reading suggests that the German “Generalübernehmer” is called general transferee in English, in this constellation the company is the sole contractor of the owner and subcontracts and controls/coordinates all necessary work to other companies (planning, construction), including organizing the financial part, as opposed to a general contractor who usually has some own workforce and does not do the planning/design.
As a disclaimer, I don’t work in this field either, but I have never seen “general transferee” in English. It looks like some German translation only. I read it is said as “prime contractor” too Parties to a construction or engineering contract in Germany - DLA Piper REALWORLD (top law firm)
But that’s often mixed with “general contractor” in English. Looking purely at doing planning & design, is that a design & build (DB) contract firm?
Regardless, I prefer to stick with simply office==engineer or the 465 office=engineering | Tags | OpenStreetMap Taginfo (or the existing =construction_company) for all engineering and construction until there are better formulations.
I have not heard the term “general transferee” in construction business so far and “Generalübernehmer” is not a very common term as well. Anyhow this term does not reflect a subdiscipline of construction business but is merely a special form of a contract between the client and the contractor. Every construction company or engineering company can act as “Generalübernehmer” for a certain contract so we surely do not need a tag for that.
this is about companies whose business is providing these services as an all inclusive package (financing and planning and construction), usually with subcontractors, not about construction companies who could in theory also offer this. These are different companies, but I agree we probably have them already covered in the finance field (but could have subtags to map the specilization)
construction engineering companies (doing planning, calculation, supervision, controlling etc. but giving all the physical site work to contractors)
civil construction companies (doing all the same plus the physical site work or at least a part of it)
I don’t know a company which solely executes such contracts, all the ones I am aware of do this as part of their business. And as I said before, this is a special form of contract stipulated by the client and not a subdiscipline of construction business.
Any company taking over such a contract acts as EPC contractor (in german Generalübernehmer = 1. or Generalunternehmer = 2. whereas in english this difference is not made afaik).
The company I have been working for many years called itself “construction company” and “construction” was even part of the name. We did act as
general contractor (doing all the physical site work but not the engineering part)
subcontractor (doing parts of the site work for another general contractor)
partner in joint venture contracts
partner in PPP projects (public-private partnerships)
but we also handled many EPC contracts and moreover acted form time to time as real estate developer (where the company executes a project completely on its own, not as a contractor for a client).
To my understanding we are only talking about 3 different kinds of business here:
construction engineering
construction company/contractor
real estate developer
whereas the kind of contract handled should not be subject to tagging.
there is also the financial part, I don’t know if it is possibile or customary that one company does all 3 together (financing, planning, controlling and execution), but there are companies specialized in contracts and finance in the building industry who do just this (“Geschäftsbesorger” in German). I guess even if you wanted to do everything, you would still structure it to use different companies, to better deal with responsibilities