So which is the best delivery method?
Both Design-Build and Design-Bid come with their fair share of pros and cons. Next, we’ll review those pluses and minuses to see if there’s a clear winner.
Benefits of Design-Bid:
–Cost: Design-Bid is most often used when your project has a fixed budget. This process elicits the most competitive proposals from competent builders.
–Control: In this delivery method owners have much clearer control over pricing, design, and approvals.
–Transparent: Design-Bid captures a client’s upfront wants and needs.
If you ask D&B Construction’s Project Executive, Jim Aylmer, he’ll tell you that he prefers Design-Bid-Build for larger projects because it “creates an accurate pricing exercise as it relates to a client’s budget, it allows time for value engineering and more cost-effective budgeting, and the end product is mapped out.” Whenever he has been involved with Design-Build projects they have been for smaller-scale projects, as these designs tend to be more simplified and there is more involvement from the owner throughout the build process.
Negatives of Design-Bid:
–Disputes and Delays: When you do a competitive bid process you will only get pricing on exactly what is on your drawings. If your design team misses anything on the construction documents that were used for the bid, you will often end up with finger-pointing in the field and costly change orders.
–Time: It can take a long time to organize a design team, create documents, put the project out to bid, go through rebidding and post-bid value-engineering, identify a contractor, and enter into agreements all before you get a shovel in the ground.
–Disjointed: Due to the number of disconnected parties in a Design-Bid construction project, you may encounter communication issues as the owner, designers and builder, along with their trades, all act independently, worried about covering their own portions of the project instead of the entirety.
Drawbacks of Design-Build:
–Non-competitive: The non-competitive nature of this process doesn’t result in a lowest cost proposal from multiple bids.
–Trust: Due to the amount of control a developer is giving up to the Design-Builder, you need to have a lot of trust in the team you’ve selected.
Benefits of Design-Build:
–Efficiency: Consolidating the entire process in one entity allows the most coordination throughout the entire construction process from design to completion. The simplification of design-build allows developers to focus on multiple projects at once.
–Customization: This delivery method is great for projects that are unique in finishes and structures. Linking the construction and design teams from the beginning ensure constructability with real-time cost adjustments. This allows owners to effectively manage budgets before breaking ground.
–Flexibility: Both to the budget and final end product
–Value-Engineering: Throughout the process, developers can monitor and adjust various components of the design for substantial equivalents that can save time and money during construction.
–Enhanced Communication: Having one central decision entity (the design-builder) allows for free flow of information from the start of a project. All trades, designers, and owners are communicating through the contractor, which ensures unified messaging and vision through one cohesive team.
Tim Cox, President and CEO of Meister-Cox Architects, emphasizes how he “really likes how it is a team effort when doing design-build projects,” explaining that in these types of projects he works with D&B, the client, and at some point will bring in the subcontractors if they are going to do the design and the drawings for the mechanicals, electrical, and plumbing systems. “It’s a give and take and just part of the value-engineering process really, he explains.”
–Timing: Utilizing a design-build approach provides a project that is well scheduled and designed before the start of the construction. Having an early jump on a project’s components allows the builder to coordinate the trades further in advance. This allows the various stages of active construction to flow seamlessly.