Submittal Review

Another big part of what you're doing onsite or what you're doing during the CA process is submittal review. Submittals come in a lot of different forms. They can be shop drawings, samples, mock ups, product data, test results and even sometimes meetings with the subcontractors you're involved with. The key thing is that you are evaluating what the subcontractor or what the contractor plans to put in place relative to the specs and the drawings. You're evaluating the products they selected. Are they the products that we specified?

This mock up is acceptable per the specifications. Does this match this detail? It's a whole lot of information. A usual submittal, again, will have kind of the general project information. It will have a submittal number which references the specifications. It will have a title, generally related to what it is. It will have a date that it's given to you. Something that you've got to keep in mind is there is actually a time crunch on these.

So, generally, a contract's going to have 10 business days to review submittals. Sometimes that's not enough. Sometimes things need to be rushed. But, that's all about making sure that you have a relationship with contractor and say, hey, can you hurry this up? Or can we do this in a hurry? It's like, hey, I'm a little behind. Can I get a few extra days and things like that. So, that's kind of an important thing right there, is remember these are time constrained. They do schedule based off this. There will be a stamp generally from the contractor.

The contractor is supposed to review it first, make sure that it complies, in general, with what the design is calling for. They will tell you what the submittal is, what type it is and then you will, generally, kind of make your response after you've reviewed the submittal, checked it against the contract documents. There's a few things you want to be careful about here. You don't want to say something is correct or complete or anything that implies ownership, taking ownership of what this is.

You want to say that this complies with design intent. You don't want to say this is correct. It's a careful line you have to tip toe, not to dive into that too deep. But that's kind of an important thing, not to expose yourself in that respect.

Log in to access files