How Edrak cut technical submittal review from 11 working days to 3 at an engineering consultancy

The company

The consultancy employs around 300 engineers across structural, mechanical, electrical and civil disciplines, supervising infrastructure and energy projects for public and private clients.

On a supervised project, contractors submit materials, shop drawings and method statements for approval, and raise RFIs when the design needs clarification. The consultancy’s engineers review each one against the specifications and drawings.

A single project can carry thousands of specification sections, hundreds of drawings and a contractual clock on every response.

Review time went into searching, not engineering

For every submittal, the reviewing engineer had to establish:

• Which specification sections and drawings governed the package
• Whether the submitted product matched every required property
• What had been approved on the package’s earlier revisions
• Whether a similar item had been approved elsewhere on the project
• Which comments other disciplines had already raised

The material lived in specification volumes, drawing registers, transmittal logs and the project’s correspondence history.

Senior engineers spent evenings cross-reading documents. Deadlines slipped, contractors resubmitted packages that failed on requirements nobody had cited, and the same clarification was answered twice on different parts of the site.

Starting with submittals and RFIs

The consultancy deployed Atlas on one supervised infrastructure project, around two processes: submittal review and RFI response.

Foundry indexed the project’s controlled documents:

• Specifications, drawings and design reports
• The submittal and transmittal registers, with full revision history
• Approved materials and prior dispositions
• RFI history and issued clarifications
• Applicable codes and standards referenced by the contract

The consultancy defined the review checklist per package type, the disposition categories, and the rule that every comment must cite its source.

Atlas learned the project’s documents the way a reviewer would, then did the reading at machine speed.

From package to prepared review

When a submittal arrived, Atlas identified the governing specification sections and drawings, extracted the submitted properties, and compared them line by line against the requirements.

The reviewing engineer opened a package that already contained:

• A compliance table: each requirement, the submitted value, and a match or deviation flag
• Every deviation linked to the exact clause or drawing it fails
• The package’s revision history and previously raised comments
• Approvals of similar items elsewhere on the project
• A drafted disposition with proposed comments, ready for engineering review

RFIs followed the same pattern: Atlas retrieved the relevant design intent, prior clarifications and affected drawings, then drafted a response with citations for the engineer to review.

Engineers signed every disposition

Submittal review is a professional judgment with contractual weight. The consultancy kept that judgment with its engineers.

• Every disposition was reviewed and signed by the responsible engineer
• Deviations affecting safety or design intent were escalated to the discipline lead
• RFI responses touching design changes required the design engineer’s approval
• Atlas’s compliance tables carried their sources, so any flag could be verified in one step

The audit trail recorded what was checked, what was flagged, who decided and on what basis, for every package.

The consultancy accelerated the reading. The engineering authority did not move.

Measured across two quarters

The consultancy compared the pilot project’s registers against the two preceding quarters of the same project, same contractor, same package mix.

• Median review cycle fell from 11 working days to 3, measured from package receipt to issued disposition
• Average submissions per package fell from 2.4 to 1.3, because first-round comments cited every failed requirement at once
• 100% of comments cited the governing clause or drawing, up from a practice that depended on the individual reviewer
• No contractual response deadline was missed during the measured period
• 100% of dispositions carried an engineer’s signature, confirmed by the register

Fewer resubmission rounds also cut the contractor’s idle time on affected work fronts, a gain the client saw directly on site.

A different week for the review team

Reviewers stopped spending their days locating requirements and started spending them on the deviations that need an engineer: the substitution that changes a load path, the method statement with a sequencing risk.

Discipline leads gained visibility they never had: which packages were waiting, on whom, and against which deadline, without asking anyone.

The project’s memory stopped leaking

Foundry retained every disposition, deviation and clarification, linked to the clauses and drawings behind it.

When a similar package arrived, the earlier decision surfaced with it. When a clarification had already been issued, the RFI draft started from it instead of contradicting it.

Consistency stopped depending on which engineer remembered which decision.

Extending the operating model

After the pilot, the consultancy rolled the workflow onto two further projects and began applying Atlas to adjacent supervision work:

• Non-conformance reports and their close-out tracking
• Monthly progress-report assembly
• Interface and design-change registers
• Handover and as-built documentation checks

Each follows the same model: Atlas reads, checks and drafts; engineers judge, sign and remain accountable.

The outcome

The consultancy needed its engineers’ judgment applied to more packages in less time, without loosening the standard of review.

Atlas and Foundry cut the review cycle from eleven days to three, halved resubmission rounds, and put a citation behind every comment.

The engineering stayed with the engineers. The reading went to the machine.