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How To Create A Successful Roadmap For Contract Compliance

Embarking on a new project is an exciting and daunting time for your team as you rise to new challenges and set the stage for the foreseeable future. Your team needs to hit the ground running on a number of concurrent tasks, all of which have an effect on each other. Providing your precon teams with project costs, quantities, and requirements; collecting bids from partners, vendors, and subcontractors; defining the scope of work overall and for each team; starting any of these off on the wrong foot can hinder progress at every stage in the project’s lifecycle. Your team needs a rock-solid jumping-off point at every stage, and that jumping off point should be your submittal register.

Estimating and Preconstruction
Pulling everything from a spec book into a submittal register upfront can seem like a lot of busy work, but is crucial for kicking off every other stage of the project, starting with estimating. Looking to place a bid on a potential project that’s feasible but competitive? Having all of the project’s available submittals, product data, QA/QC requirements, and more already pulled can allow you to line up potential subs and material or product sources for your bid. Creating a hyper-accurate cost estimate based on 100% of the information in the available specs will save you money down the line in change orders and project delays, and will impress the owners when you can back up your realistic estimate. Then, once you win your bid, you can focus your efforts on acting on the mock-ups, meetings, action submittals, basis-of-design products, and other communication items since they’ve already been pulled and can easily be added to your project management tool.

During the Project
Even when using a PM-tool, returning to the submittal register for review is invaluable to your build-phase workflow as quality control. A submittal in a project management tool may be marked as complete, but how do you ensure that it meets all of the contract requirements? A side-by-side comparison with the submittal register and the relevant page from the spec book can provide context to a requirement, helping PMs to better decide if an RFI is necessary.

New Spec Versions
Suppose an RFI is filed and a change order comes through- keeping track of an evolving spec book can be a logistical nightmare with on-site implications. Having a well-built submittal register for each version can make comparison far easier and far more accurate. You’ll be able to notify your crew on-site of all additions, deletions, or changes, preventing mistakes in work that would waste time to correct, and giving your trade partners early notice to new long-lead or sole source products.

Closeout
Project closeout is when everything comes to a head, from tests and inspections to turnover to payment. Mistakes made at any other part of the lifecycle come to light here, often having last-minute influence on your bottom line. If you have your closeout requirements pulled during precon with your other submittals, you can easily dive into closing out trades before they leave the site, and makes fulfilling all closeout requirements that much easier. Missed mock-up requirements can easily cost thousands of dollars per occurrence, a financial headache that could easily be avoided by weekly reviews of your closeout log.

Of course, creating such comprehensive registers and logs is a dreaded, tedious process that requires a lot of focus and time. Consider letting Pype AutoSpecs do it for you. Using Pype’s industry-leading AI and machine learning algorithms, AutoSpecs can scan your entire spec book in minutes, pull out and organize requirements and information by type, and let you upload new versions of your spec book to immediately highlight changes to your project. Your team needs a solid foundation to start their work. Your team needs AutoSpecs.

Sunil Dorairajan

Sunil Dorairajan is co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Pype, the construction industry’s premier SaaS provider for submittal log management and project closeout. Sunil drives the company’s strategic direction and overall product vision by bringing over a decade of experience working on residential and commercial construction projects valued up to a billion dollars. Under Sunil’s leadership, Pype’s patented solutions have taken the trillion dollar construction industry by storm, dramatically improving project performance and mitigating risk.

A tenured general contractor, Sunil was well acquainted with the inefficiencies that plagued critical project-based workflows. Seeing those pain points go continuously unaddressed, Sunil seized the initiative to pioneer technological solutions that bring construction processes into the 21st century. Since 2015, Sunil’s brainchild has evolved into four products that employ two patents (and counting) to help ensure contract compliance on billions of dollars of construction projects.

A graduate of IIT Madras and Virginia Tech, Sunil has championed new ideas and improved work processes every step of his career. He was recently honored as an ENR MidAtlantic Top 20-under-40 Young Professional, and enjoys teaching young entrepreneurs at George Mason University about product-based SaaS business principles. In addition to managing Pype’s daily operations, Sunil is an active member of Associated Builders and Contractors and Mindshare Alumni CEO Network.

Connect with Sunil on LinkedIn.

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