REP'S PERSPECTIVE
The Real Work of Value Engineering – A Collaborative Approach By DARREN LUCE, LC MIES
President, CDm2 LIGHTWORKS
compromise the performance, longevity, or intent of the original design.
When the Context Gets Lost
Photo Credit: Providence Health Care
It’s a situation most lighting designers have experienced: a project you spent months designing comes back with a request to review and accept a VE package. You’ve seen it time and time again, a package of substitutions with a carrot of cost savings and a deadline. There’s no true value engineering offered - only substituion, and that devalues the design. This distinction matters. True value engineering (VE) is a collaborative process to find cost efficiencies that don’t
84
designing lighting
The most common failure in the VE process is structural. Contractors weren’t part of the conversation when the owner outlined their operational requirements, or the lighting designer chose a specific downlight for its UGR rating, and its 150,000-hour life. Without that context, it’s difficult to know which elements of the specification are critical to the design intent and which ones could be considered for cost savings. That information gap is where projects can get into trouble. A luminaire with 1,300 lumens gets swapped for another luminaire with 1,300 lumens. On paper, it’s a one-to-one switch, but one luminaire has a UGR of 15 and the other has a UGR of 30. One carries a credible warranty from an