Value Engineering

The term ‘value engineering’ is greatly over-used and usually means someone somewhere in the process has made the end result worse in order to save money. I believe that value engineering doesn’t have to be that. It really is getting the most for the money spent, and if done properly and realistically, it shouldn’t have any impact on the brand perception. In the case of retail, the consumer shouldn’t even know it went on. One of the projects AT&T had us do while I was working with DMD is cut the construction cost of their stores down, with a target reduction of 50% from the original builds. This involved auditing all aspects of the design and build then making strategic changes to fabrication and process. The end result was a store that still has the brand feel while allowing them to justify the cost of building it in small rural towns.