The industry standard for reducing capital costs is Value Engineering (VE), which promises to maintain or improve performance of assets while reducing costs using a function-based assessment of engineering designs. VE is often required for large scale projects using government grants or loans, to keep costs down and prevent waste.

With water infrastructure needs expected to reach $300 billion over the next twenty years, it is vital that facility owners maximize the value of infrastructure projects, and reduce costs where possible.

While the core drivers for VE are essentially to meet the required function at the lowest cost, the Reliability Centered Design (RCD) methodology includes those same drivers (cost, performance) while also introducing the evaluation of risk. The introduction of risk (the probability of failure x the consequence of failure) is the key to identifying the systems and assets that are critical to sustaining the total system function and avoiding significant environmental, economic, and/or life‐safety consequences.

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