PART 1: ENERGY CODES AND STANDARDS   PART 2: DESIGN TEAM ORGANIZATION

PART 3: DESIGN APPROACH

PART 4: THE PROCUREMENT PROCESS

It is disconcerting to consider the degree to which building performance can be compromised by the process of procurement. For "plan and spec." projects, the integrity of a design can easily be undermined by the lack of continuity between the design and construction processes and the unreasonable institutional constraints some owners have against accepting anything but the lowest bid contractor and equipment. When newer technologies are involved, low bid procurement procedures are entirely unsuitable. Even when contractors do their very best to meet the full design intent in such a low bid process, they are rarely successful. The problems often stem from the lack of knowledge contractors and, at times, equipment representatives themselves may have about the equipment involved, and in interpreting and applying elements of a high performance specification to the equipment and systems being procured. Contractors are not technology experts. Their lack of knowledge often leads to manufacturers' whose equipment does not fit the design being invited to provide pricing. It can also result in manufacturers' proposing equipment that is poorly suited for an application as the only way to be price competitive with another manufacturer whose equipment may be better priced in the desired configuration. These potential pitfalls, coupled with the distance the design team usually has from the procurement process often gets projects started down the wrong path. And that initial misdirection is sometimes very difficult to get set right.

Because many procurement processes are so powerfully focused on price, very little, if any, review of the relative performance capabilities of the various bids is made when they are received. Any in-depth review of the equipment content of the successful bidder is often delayed until the submittal process, which may not take place for some time until after the contract is signed. By that time the project schedule and project politics can help the contractor exert a certain amount of leverage on engineers "not to sweat the small stuff" when reviewing equipment submittals. Further complicating the situation is the fact that the submittals themselves may not be particularly forthcoming about information of importance to evaluating the specified performance requirements. While design teams can rise to these pressures, it may not be as easy to fend off the efforts of manufacturers to badger the designers into approving their equipment through add-ons and poorly conceived reconfigurations that add unforeseen complexity to the unit or system in ways that would have been difficult to anticipate in the specifications.

In today's building projects a major source of underachieving projects is the improper application of building controls. But with the demands on building performance growing and the ever expanding menu of available technologies that can improve building performance, the problems associated with misapplied technology systems is a growing one. More and more equipment is being manufactured with internal controls that employ gateway connections to the building controls. The need for careful coordination among controls and equipment is growing, and this need is well beyond the capacity of many standard construction contracting and procurement procedures.

The result is that plan & spec projects are very vulnerable to being sidetracked by the procurement process. However, design/build processes may not fare any better. In these projects, price may play even a larger role. In some design/build projects the contractor may have even a greater influence on equipment selection since the contractor is on the hook for guaranteeing the gross maximum price (GMP). Also, with their limited knowledge of details, contractors can be very resistant to change. If a contractor has had success installing one type of chiller, boiler or control system and equipment interface, he or she may resist switching to one that is of higher performance and better suited to the application simply because it is different than what has been done in the past.

To avoid procurement pitfalls, designers need to work with their clients to ensure their efforts toward a higher performing building design will survive the procurement process. My recommendation is to encourage owners and design teams to separate "technology" elements of a project from the "bricks and mortar" elements of the project for which equal sources of materials are readily available. There are a number of methods that have been applied to accomplish this separation effectively, perhaps the most applicable for building construction projects is the use of a cash allowance as a bookmark in the general contract to take the place of a subcontractor that will be selected by a separate process and inserted in that place at a later date. In this way, a separate procurement process, one that entails a careful assessment of the relative value of the different contractors and equipment vendors can be made and the one determined to be of best value for the application can be chosen.

Some owners, particularly public agencies, feel constrained against anything but low bid processes, but my experience is that there is almost always some method that can be applied to the technology elements of a high performance project that enable the owner and design team the flexibility needed to select the technology equipment and systems that represent the best value for the project. When I meet such resistance, I usually ask how that owner is intending to procure other high technology equipment such as their information technology equipment and services that will be installed in the building being designed. Usually we find well established procurement processes that employ vendor selection based on value analysis techniques are flourishing within organizations whose construction department may have been unaware of their existence.

Procuring the advanced technology equipment, systems, or services with one of owner's established value analysis procurement processes and inserting it into the general contract via cash allowance, can usually solve the "procurement problem" for building designs that incorporate the use of advanced technologies, because it really solves two problems. First, it removes the selection of technology components from the non-technical effort of putting numbers together to obtain the lowest possible pricing for the bid process. Second, and more important, it brings the design team in before the technology components have been procured to evaluate the relative merit of various options. So, developing and supporting an effective procurement process along with the high performance design is essential in order to be certain the design will actually be implemented properly and the owner will see the benefits of all the design team's hard and innovative work!

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