September/October 2009

DCD InSights
Riverbend Elementary School – a Model for Energy Self-Reliance
    The new 86,000-square-foot Riverbend Elementary School designed by Nacht & Lewis Architects, a leading architectural firm in Northern California, is a model of energy self-reliance. But Riverbend Elementary isn’t just a model of energy efficiency it is also a school that carries the prestigious moniker of a CHPS designed school – a school designed to meet the sustainable standards set by the Collaborative for High Performing Schools.
    Founded in 1999 as a collaboration of California utilities to address energy efficiency in schools, the Collaborative for High Performing Schools is a non-profit organization dedicated to make schools better places to learn. Shortly after its inception, the program quickly expanded to include many aspects of school design, construction and operation. Eleven other states seeking better designed and healthier facilities for their students have adopted the program.    
Insights Archive |  Read more

Corporate Online Social Media Policies: A Necessity in Today’s Business Environment
    Social networking is the leading phenomena in modern society. You likely hear mentions of Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Digg, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube on a daily basis, regardless of whether or not you participate in this new media. These tools are the new way of networking. Simply, online social media is about dialogue, two-way discussions that bring people together in order to discover and share information. According to web-strategist.com, on average, each adult with a social networking profile is on 1.6 sites and 39 percent of adults have profiles on two or more sites. Further, 57 percent of adults have joined a social network, making it the number one platform for creating and sharing content.
    Whether or not you personally participate in social media, it is likely that others at your company do. Maybe more important, it is likely that your customers or potential customers also participate in social media. Forrester recently released a report stating that buyers in the business-to-business (B2B) arena are one of the most social groups around.     
Insights Archive |  Read more

Four Ways to Pre-Qualify the Quality of Roof Systems
    In a tough economy, both manufacturers and customers are tempted to cut corners when it comes to quality.
    From the manufacturer’s perspective, reducing the cost of raw materials is the easiest way to improve shrinking margins. However, altering key raw materials poses a significant performance risk, frequently precipitating production and/or field failures.
    From the customer’s perspective, quality is too frequently an out-of-sight, out-of-mind consideration. When competition is fierce, it’s easy for customers to push back on pricing without applying due diligence to ensure that cost comparisons are being made on an apples-to-apples basis. Two “or equal” products may perform quite differently in application, according to the quality of the raw materials used.
Insights Archive |  Read more

DCD Cost Trends
Construction Cost Trends for 2009
    Housing is showing slight glimmers of hope. The prices are still down but sales activity of both new homes and resales is inching up. After a slow start this year, public construction still continues to be the bright spot. It is up 5% but not enough to counteract a combined industry slide of 10%. Except for the small sectors of power plants and manufacturing, all of commercial is down overall by 10%. Hospitality spending, once the darling of this segment, is now suffering the same as other sectors and is down
5-7% and we should watch for further decreases. At publication, the total construction industry is 8-10% off of last year’s mark. The good news, however, is there are signs that the slide is now stopping and once the stimulus money finally hits the street (only 3-4 billion dollars of the allocated 150 billion has been spent to date) we should see some marked improvement.
Trends Archive | Read more

DCD Cost Guides
The DCD Sq. Ft. Cost Guide for Buildings with Metal Construction
    Design Cost Data™ magazine includes a new Square Foot Cost Guide in each issue. These square foot cost guides have been assembled from projects in our database, the DCD Archives online at DCD.COM. These guides are provided to the industry by DCD as a benchmark for future building costs.
DCD Cost Guides Archive | Read more

©2010 Copyright DC&D Technologies, Inc. All rights reserved. | DCD Construction Magazine | Email: webmaster@dcd.com