Reducing building and design costs

Bigger isn’t necessarily better

“I would never have thought that putting the customer at the heart of the design process would have reduce building costs, but it has.”

Traditionally, buildings are designed within the parameters of cost, time and quality.  However, an increasingly important factor is the part the building plays in delivering a great customer experience; and the commercial benefits that can accrue form this. Significant costs savings can be achieved if the desired customer experience is understood clearly at the start and integrated into the brief. Many find this correlation surprising as they assume delivering a great customer experience only adds cost.  However, frequently the opposite is true. 

Sometimes this is happens because there isn’t the time, or lack of the necessary skills or experience to know this step is needed.  All too often problems arise further down the design process because this step has been missed.

Savings can be realised in a number of ways 

Customers are savvy and have great ideas. They are great at identifying things that don’t matter. This can manifest itself as a simpler design or a faster design process (saving consultant fees and make savings in areas like M&E). Similarly, this could also increase efficiency and create a flexible building.

For example, these factors were realised during the design on Terminal 2 at Heathrow. Agreeing how the building was going to work was instrumental to saving cost and creating a great customer experience.  Once the airlines had agreed the process, the footprint could be reduced by 20%. 

So, what stops this happening routinely? 

We find that many projects get bogged down towards the end of the design phase.  At this point stakeholders find it difficult to sign-off the building design because they aren’t able to visualise how their operation will work in reality.  In turn, the architects and designers get frustrated because they are not given a comprehensive brief by the client. This results in endless iterations of the design without a clear framework to assess each version.  This pushes up consultancy fees enormously and leads to decisions being made too late.  Familiar?

Another complication is that operators tend to be unfamiliar with the design process.  Whilst they are able to come up with some great ideas and insight, they often lack the ability to ‘vision’ 3-5 years ahead. This inadvertently leads them to make decisions based on what is right for them, not for the benefit the customer.  

A practical way around this to understand what the customer really wants from the building.

These people are going to be using it day-to-day. Many organisations think they understand what customers want but in reality this rarely proves to be the case.  We have seen that organisations lack the skills or incentives to really understand how to listen to customers and what they want.  The big advantage is that this objective insight can be used to drive the debate and reduce the amount of subjective views.

Once the customer need is really understood it can a huge impact on design.  Done properly, this skill can sit alongside the other skills needed during the design process. It always acts to foster collaboration between different teams (from engineering to finance, architecture and marketing) around a common business goal.