Value Engineering & Design Reviews

We often carry out independent technical design reviews of other civil engineer’s design work to ensure consistency with applicable design standards and to understand whether any areas of the design can be value engineered to bring about cost, time or health and safety improvement.

We are often asked to carry out value engineering design reviews by contractors to inform their tender submissions when bidding for design and build contracts (RIBA 4 & 5 stages). We often identify tweaks or changes in design strategy which can be adopted leading to large construction savings. This allows our clients to submit their bids with a cost saving edge when compared to their competitors, many of which do not sufficiently interrogate tender package / planning strategy information and accordingly, generate non competitive bids.

Items we typically address when carrying out our value engineering reviews are as follows;

• Adopting inspection chambers or rodding access points opposed to full-sized manholes leading to cost savings
• Improving the efficiency of vertical alignments of roads leading to reduced earthworks and cost savings
• Optimising the thicknesses of proposed pavement construction (we often find proposed pavement build-ups either too thick for their application or not based on appropriate CBR / ground bearing / traffic number information)
• Improving the use of SuDS features leading to reduced development land take and reduced costs to construct
• Optimising pipe networks and bedding leading to shallower and shorter pipe runs and with more optimised bedding construction