A good value engineering team will take all things into consideration and find you the best quality options at the lowest available cost.
When evaluating these suggestions, keep these three main criteria in mind: cost reduction, added quality, and life cycle/maintenance.
COST REDUCTION
Cost reduction is what drives many value engineering processes. Your value engineering team will bring ideas of less costly materials or systems to your project for your consideration.
Whether that’s finding a similar fixture that costs less or alternating an unnecessary feature, these suggestions can bring value to your project.
However, without the next criteria, value engineering would just be called cost-cutting. Added quality ensures that the cost cuts made do not diminish the value of the project.
QUALITY
Before making any decisions on your value engineering options, you need to consider quality.
Quality can have a lot of different meanings. Quality of the environment you’re creating. Quality of the products that make up that environment. Quality of the team you’re choosing to create that environment.
While some equipment or design elements may have a higher cost, they could be justified by the quality that they bring. Higher-cost items and elements may allow you to charge more for your services. They may have a positive impact on the productivity or happiness of the people who will use the space.
A quality product could have more overall value than a low-cost product.
LIFE CYCLE/MAINTENANCE
Similar to quality, it’s important to consider the long-term implications of these value engineering decisions. While a low-cost flooring may seem like the most valuable option initially, if you need to replace it twice as frequently as a higher-cost flooring, it could end up costing you more money in the long run.
However, if saving that extra money upfront is the difference between getting your project off the ground or having it stall out in design, then making that decision may very well be the best option.
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