Vol. 29 No.3
MARCH 2004

Vice-President Files
Chapter Chatter

SOCIETY NEWS


Surface Transportation Reauthorization May Require Value Engineering
International Conferences


SURFACE TRANSPORTATION REAUTHORIZATION MAY REQUIRE VALUE ENGINEERING

As many readers know, there are three bills competing to be the successor to "TEA21", the act that has authorized and guided transportation funding for the past six years. The Administration, the Senate and the House all have a bill. We are actually in the first year of the new authorization period, but the Department of Transportation is working with temporary authorization until the actual bill becomes law. Of course, the fact that this is a presidential election year complicates things greatly. Acting on some information received informally from the American Council of Engineering Companies (ACEC), we found that the Senate bill has a value engineering requirement that goes beyond the existing one. At present, VE requirements are applied to certain projects on the National Highway System, which includes interstates and other major roadways. The Senate bill, however, would require VE on larger projects on the Federal Aid System, a much larger number of roadways. The act also would allow the feds to require VE on any project deemed appropriate for VE. Unfortunately, perhaps, the Senate bill is also the largest one in terms of money authorized and has drawn fire from the Administration. To our knowledge, the other two bills do not have a value engineering requirement - - but all this is subject to change of course! Check it out at http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/reauthorization/index.htm "Legislation" link, then Section 1802.

Doubtless some SAVE members have forgotten more about this than humble Interactions reporter has learned. Please let us know the latest so we can share with the membership!!

International Conferences

The International Conference of Value Engineering and Technology Innovation of Enterprise will be held October 2004 in Hangzhou, China.

It is a forum for scientists, engineers, managers, consultants and practitioners throughout the world to exchange ideas and research results related to the VE/VM/VA or TI (technological innovation) in enterprise. The 1st ICVETI was held in 1999, and the second was originally planned to take place in November 2003, but postponed because of SARS, which affected the submissions.

The conference encourages contributed papers. With your participant, we can make this a world-class conference. If you (or a panel or a team) have experience in the Value Methodology (Value Analysis, Value Engineering, Value Planning) and Technology Innovation, you are encouraged to send a proposal to make a presentation. Also, we want to expand opportunities for networking and partnerships with other disciplines. Thus, we invite experts from related disciplines, such as total quality management, concurrent engineering, creativity, human behavior, communications and other consultant-based methodologies. If you have no paper, you are also welcome to participate in this conference.

We hope to receive your paper. If you have any questions, please contact our Events staff by phone at 0086-571-87951838, or by e-mail at kevinwxy520@sina.com.

Sometimes we don't see the forest for the trees...

When NASA first started sending up astronauts, they quickly discovered that ball-point pens would not work in zero-gravity. To combat this problem, NASA scientists spent a decade and $12 billion developing a pen that writes in zero gravity, upside down, on almost any surface including glass and at temperatures ranging from below freezing to over 300 C.

The Russians used a pencil.