By Debbi Madigan
SAVE International continues to Promote, Advocate and Educate the Arizona Chapter of the American Public Works Association (APWA) members about the process and overall benefits of formal value engineering. APWA’s membership consists of local government agencies; towns, cities and counties; many engineering disciplines, and contractors in the delivery of public works projects.
The theme for the SAVE booth at the conference was “Go for the Gold”, reflecting the recent Olympics, and the booth was decked out in colors! With an anticipated attendance of 1000+ people, it was a great opportunity to put the Value Methodology (VM) on display.
SAVE partnered with APWA to sponsor a half-day ABC’s of VE and A Deeper Dive class with RHA providing the training. The money collected for attendance will be donated to the APWA Scholarship fund. We had 23 attendees, both government and consultants. The initial workshop was a high-level overview of the SAVE 8-phase process, what each of those process steps entailed, and how this process could assist in everything from proposal, scope development to team building and value-added proposals for programs and projects. The Deeper Dive class had the attendees participate in a mini-VE, with a project provided by the Town of Gilbert. The team went through the Information, Function Analysis and Creativity Phases with a quick discussion on Evaluation during the class. Although we were told that the Town folks did continue with Creativity even into the evening, which is always a good sign!
The workshop was a great success and generated some great interest in Town of Gilbert, with Pima County, City of Tucson, Oro Valley, Coconino County and City of Scottsdale in attendance interested in seeing how Value Engineering can be applied, as well as developing a more formalized or structured program for each of their organizations. Understanding how to integrate VE into new Requests for Proposals for Architectural and Engineering services and have more of a systematic approach was also addressed. This is a big win for VM. The class was led by SAVE member Renee Hoekstra with additional support from Susanna Stuble, and Debbi Madigan, also members of SAVE.
APWA was kind enough to donate a booth for SAVE and with an impressive level of foot traffic, we were able to gather a large number of cards for the door prize and had a number of the presentation attendees coming by with more interest in SAVE and VM. Again, another win!
Print 
PDF