What is value engineering in construction?
Done early, value engineering finds a better way to build the same design. Done late, it takes the design away to save money.
What is value engineering in construction?
Value engineering is a review of a design to find a way to deliver the same function and quality for less cost, time or risk. It works best during design, while a change is still a line on a drawing. Done after the tender, it often turns into cutting scope or specification to reach a budget.
Value engineering is a structured review of a design that asks one question of each part of it. Is there a way to deliver the same function for less cost, less time or less risk? The answer can be a different material, a simpler detail, a better sequence or a change to how two trades meet.
The term gets used loosely, and the difference between the two ways it is used matters to anyone paying for a building.
The real meaning
Done properly, value engineering keeps what the design sets out to achieve and finds a better way to build it. A wall that reaches the same acoustic rating with fewer layers is value engineering. So is a service route that avoids crossing a joint between two modules.
The function, the amenity and the compliance stay where they were. What changes is the cost, the programme or the chance of getting it wrong on site.
The loose meaning
Late in a project, the same words are often used to mean cutting. The tender comes in over budget, and the design is stripped back until the number fits, with a lesser window here and a smaller living room there.
That is cost reduction. The owner usually pays for it later, in maintenance, in lost amenity or in a building residents like less.
When it should happen
The time to look for value is while the design is still being drawn. A change at that point costs a revised drawing. The same change after the construction documents are issued costs a redesign, and after fabrication has begun it costs rework, as set out in changing a design after fabrication starts.
That is why we bring construction input into the design at critical points of the programme. Early Construction Involvement lets value engineering happen in real time, so the review is a habit of the design rather than a rescue of the budget.
The design idea
Every project we design opens with one big idea, and once it is set it is never broken. Value engineering is tested against that idea. A change that keeps it and saves cost or time goes in, and a change that breaks it stays out, even when it would save money.
Speed and compliance drive the programme. Design is never given up to hit a deadline or a budget, and the three are held in balance on every project.
What it looks like on a modular project
Hybrid Volumetric Modular gives value engineering more places to work. Repeating a dwelling type across a development means one well-resolved detail gets built many times, and the split between factory and site works is set for each project so the base structure answers the ground in the simplest way.
Both decisions sit early, in the design stages, and both move the price more than a late change to a finish ever will. The wider list is in what moves a price on a modular project.
What a client should ask
When a change is put forward as value engineering, ask what it does to the function, not only what it saves. If the saving comes with less space, a shorter life or a lower standard of accessibility, it is cost reduction under another name.
A good value engineering change leaves the building just as good to live in and makes it easier to build.
MADEmodular / MADEbetter.
MADEmodular / MADEbetter.