New project manual trims building costs

commercial and institutional structures’ construction specifications. Doing so could result in an estimated 5 percent to 10 percent savings in construction costs, according to CSI.

MasterFormat is the organizational

standard for specifications, the written instructions for construction, and other information for most commercial and institutional building projects in the United States and Canada.

The complete 2004 edition, the most significant rewrite in MasterFormat’s 40-year history, is due for release in November.

MasterFormat’s 2004 edition features expanded content that fosters fuller and more accurate specifications, which can reduce costly changes or delays in projects due to incomplete, misplaced, or missing information.

For example, the new edition provides for better specifications about modern buildings’ data, communications and automation systems.

Data in commercial construction project manuals about voice, data and video networks has often been deficient, misplaced or left out because of the limited capacity of MasterFormat’s previous version, the 9-year-old 1995 edition.

Its formatting structure doesn’t have enough locations for specifications in a construction project manual to address the tremendous growth in the volume and complexity of information about such fast-advancing systems.

Specifications writers have tried to make do by placing data in project manuals where they could, using their individual judgment about locations, if they could be found at all.

Many people have added non-standard slots for missing information, without reference to the MasterFormat standard.

Construction Delays

Resulting changes and delays during construction have driven up the cost of building voice, data and video systems as much as 50 percent, thereby adding 5 percent to 10 percent to facilities’ overall construction costs. Changes and delays have included:

• Tearing down walls to install cabling and/or cable pathways and then rebuilding the walls.

• Adding closets or rooms not in the building’s plans to house switches, servers and other components for such systems.

• Expanding the heating, ventilating and air-conditioning system to handle the heat generated by such systems.

• Paying for express delivery of large amounts of construction products, such as wire and cable, to minimize schedule delays.

• Paying crews overtime to install such systems to help keep the overall project on schedule.

• Using higher-interest money, such as a line of credit, to pay for such systems because they had to be addressed as a change order during construction. Lower-interest money, via the building’s mortgage, can be used for such systems when they are covered fully in the project manual’s specifications, developed during the design phase.

• Paying additional money to install voice, data or video systems after the building has been built.

Information about the publication is available at www.csinet.org.

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