Site Surveys and Systems Design
Whole Systems integration
This design-centric perspective approaches productivity from the system level, achieving a greater overall yield than contemporary design, organization, and budgeting approaches. Sometimes referred to as Holistic Budgeting and Management, this is a counterbalance to the industrial trend toward hyper-specialization and the maximization of efficiencies of those components. Instead it takes the entire endeavor into account in decision making and budgeting.
From both a design and a financial perspective, by focusing on potential interconnections between departments (in an organization) or components (in a system) this approach finds synergies between traditionally isolated energy flows and budget silos to save money and increase revenue in ways not available to the individual, component oriented (“efficient”, line item) approach.
The majority of the life-cycle costs of a system are committed by decisions made (or not made, by default) in the design phase (where typically budget allocations and cost cutting are being decided simultaneously). The importance of this can not be understated. While there is such a thing as “planning yourself out of business”, all too often, we want the shovel to hit the dirt, to show “progress”, heralding doing! and iterations over planning and talking. However, by then it is often too late (or at least, much harder) to change the lifetime expenses already incurred by nature of decisions made (or again, not made) in the design phase. Spending a bit more time and money during this phase can yield great returns, saving the project unnecessary expenditures and increasing its yield over the course of its lifetime.
