Florida Senior Living Archives - The Douglas Company - Senior Living and Multifamily General Contractor Located in Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, and Florida

If a picture is worth a thousand words, how many words is a complete and coordinated construction plan set worth?

Arguably, the most critical components to any project are the construction documents. Plans, specifications, engineered calculations, supplemental instructions, requests for information, narratives, addendums, sketches; the list goes on. These documents are used by thousands of people on each project; some who never step foot on site, but have a direct impact on the project’s success or failure. Whether it’s the framing crew laying out walls, the project superintendent coordinating overhead utilities, the delegated engineer designing the roof trusses, the window manufacturer providing design calculations to meet wind load requirements, or the countertop contractor providing samples for submittal review, each of them relies on the accuracy of the construction documents to contribute their component of the project.

With advancements in technology and speed of communication, updating construction documents takes a matter of minutes,...

Value Engineering is a term that has become so pervasive in the construction industry that the meaning of the phrase has been diluted down to the simple concept of saving money on a construction project, regardless of means and methods. A few years ago, I heard an architect say that most instances of contractor-initiated value engineering lack both value and engineering. At the time, I took offense to his statement, but I now find myself triggered when I hear the term value engineering used so flippantly within the industry.

While I acknowledge that true value engineering efforts often result in lowered construction costs, cost-saving initiatives like scope reductions or scope omissions are often mislabeled as “value engineering”. However, true value engineering attacks the project in ways which reduced costs and/or time to construct while still achieving the objectives of the intended use of the property and those of our clients. So...

Florida Senior Living

Document Control: How We Manage This Key Aspect of Every Project

Bringing Value Back to Value Engineering