Russell Rowland’s Value Engineering Practices Promote Cost Effectiveness While Maintaining Structural Integrity

When planning any construction project, whether it be a luxury residential home or a commercial building, Russell Rowland will always utilize value engineering to evaluate ways to reduce costs while maintaining the quality and functionality of the structure. This common practice is called “value engineering” and is becoming increasingly important as architects, structural engineers and other project team professionals seek ways to overcome rising material costs and streamline processes to become more efficient. 

Value engineering is a systematic and organized approach to providing the necessary functions in a project at the lowest cost. It promotes the substitution of materials and methods with less expensive alternatives, without sacrificing functionality. Value engineering is used to solve problems, identify and eliminate unwanted costs and improve function and quality. The set of disciplined steps in the value engineering process is meant to optimize initial and long term investment, seeking the best possible value for the lowest cost.

Value engineering involves the following steps: 

• identifying the main elements of a product, service or project
• analyzing the functions of those elements
• developing alternative solutions for delivering those functions
• assessing the alternative solutions
• allocating costs to the alternative solutions
• developing in more detail the alternatives with the highest likelihood of success

The team at Russell Rowland has made it a part of our standard process to implement value engineering best practices. Value engineering is especially critical at this time due to the current lumber shortage that is driving building material prices sky high.

“We utilize the practice of value engineering on every project, it’s ingrained in the way we design”, said Jackie Rowland, President/CEO. “It can play an important role in allowing a construction project team to meet its goal of remaining within scope, under budget and on time.”

The best time to implement value engineering principles is at the project’s inception where the benefits can be the greatest. This reduces the possibility of redesign costs further down the road and ensures that the appropriate cost savings measures are being taken up front.