Design-Assist is Barker Kappelle’s approach to providing clients cost savings without limiting design creativity.
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Design-Assist is Barker Kappelle’s approach to providing clients cost savings without limiting design creativity.
It is impossible for the design to be perfect. Every plan will have some discrepancies or missing details. Without the extra eyes from a builder aiding the review of plans, fewer of these issues will be caught early. This leads to more plan modifications and cost increases during construction
Owners and designers spend months developing plans with thousands of unique and important details. When contractors are given mere days to review these plans for the first time, catching every single detail becomes a game of “Where’s Waldo.” If multiple contractors are bidding, it is highly unlikely that each contractor will see every one of these details, interpret them identically, and price them accurately. Evaluating various contractor bids becomes a guessing game of “was contractor A’s price really lower than contractor B, or did they miss important details that will surface later as change orders?”
It requires a lot of time and financial resources upfront for a design team to create bid ready plans and specifications. Whereas, the financial feasibility of a project scope can be established much earlier with less money down if the design team, owner, and builder are in communication from the beginning.
Finally, one of the biggest downfalls with the Design-Bid-Build approach is overdesign. Without input from a builder during the design phase, the plans and specifications lack realistic cost feedback and can swell and grow. In the past, we would see multiple Design-Bid-Build projects a year that would go out to bid and either not happen at all or require significant redesign because every bid for the project was way above the homeowner’s budget.
