Options for Evaluating Design-Builder Proposals - Design-Build for Water and Wastewater Projects - page 213

concerns can be minimized by making the qualifications and performance criteria match
the project's specific requirements and ensuring that the BVS process is published and
transparent to industry (Parvin 2001).
Technical Design
The amount of design required to develop a DB proposal can vary greatly (see also chap-
ter 13 for additional information on this topic). Some owners release an RFP with a few
design concepts, and this results in the DB teams responding with unique and innova-
tive solutions for the project. Other owners develop preliminary design documents and
include these with the RFP, ensuring that all teams are proposing on a similar design.
The less design that is included in the RFP, the more likely it is that the owner will
have to evaluate several different technical designs. For this reason, it is important that
owners identify and publish the criteria that will be used to evaluate technical designs.
Similar to qualifications and performance criteria, the technical design evaluation criteria
should match the project's specific requirements and project goals.
Time
The time criterion normally considers the overall project duration (e.g., time required to
reach substantial completion) but could also consider other time-related factors, such as
minimizing interruptions to current facilities or services. The RFP often requires propos-
ers to include a critical path schedule that indicates the proposed completion date as well
as any interim milestones that the owner deems important. The schedule provides a basis
for comparison when evaluating proposals. If a time criterion is included in the evalua-
tion criteria, owners must disclose in the RFP anything that they know that might have
an impact on the schedule.
Cost
The cost criterion generally has two categories: (1) initial capital costs of construction;
and, (2) operations and maintenance (O&M) costs that occur over the life of a project.
While many BVS award algorithms avoid awarding a project based on low bid alone, cost
does plays an important part in the overall decision. The noncost criteria that are used
to measure the value of a DB team's qualifications, performance, technical designs, and
schedule can be compared with the cost. This allows the selection committee to deter-
mine whether an increase in the project's construction cost and/or O&M cost is justified
by the enhanced value brought to the project by a particular set of noncost parameters.
Evaluation of both construction and O&M, or life-cycle, costs permits the owner to com-
pare the long-term advantages of competing proposals using an economic analysis. In
some cases, an owner might be willing to pay a marginally higher initial cost in exchange
for reduced annual O&M costs. The difficulty in using life-cycle cost criteria lies in ade-
quately defining the economic analysis and developing a relatively simple set of life-cycle
cost input variables. Selecting arbitrary values for such important variables as the dis-
count rate or the analysis period can have unintended consequences on the validity of
the output. An owner who intends to use life-cycle cost criteria should first complete an