The documents change while you comment
You spend an afternoon on a set of fabrication drawings, and by the time your comments go back the contractor has uploaded a newer set to the same place. Your remarks now refer to drawings nobody is looking at.
For architects and engineers
Reviewing contractor submittals as the design team
For the design team, a submittal is a question with a deadline: does this product, drawing or sample meet what we specified? The answer has to be clear enough that the contractor knows whether to order, revise or start again, and it has to stand up later when someone asks what was approved. This page is about the reviewer’s side of technical submittals in Fidrel: the four outcomes, the reasons that go with them, and the locks that stop the submission changing while you are looking at it.
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What makes submittal review hard for designers
Conditions lost inside an approval
An approval with comments is only useful if the comments travel with it. When the condition sits in an e-mail and the register just says approved, the fabricator builds what was submitted, not what was agreed.
Answers with no reasons
A one-word rejection forces a phone call, a second round and a delay. Reasons written against the outcome let the contractor fix the right thing the first time, and show later why the decision was made.
Four outcomes, and what each tells the contractor
Approve means the submission can be used as it stands. Approve with comments means the contractor may proceed, provided the comments are taken into account; Fidrel records the outcome as Approved with comments and keeps your text with it. Return for resubmission means the submission must be revised and sent in again before anything is ordered; the register then shows Resubmit. Reject means it is not acceptable, usually because a different product or approach is needed. Whatever your practice’s own wording, choosing between these four keeps every answer in the same vocabulary across the whole job.
Documents, drawings & models
Reasons kept with the decision
Every outcome except a plain approval needs review comments before it can be sent back. The comments are stored with the outcome, the date the submittal was returned is recorded, and the history gains an entry for the status change. When the contractor resubmits, the old comments stay against the revision they were written for, so the next round starts from what you asked for, not from memory.
A review in Fidrel, step by step
Step 1
See what is waiting for you
A notice in Fidrel tells you that a submittal is awaiting your action. In the technical submittals register, the Awaiting my action filter lists every item where the next step is yours, with its response due date.
Step 2
Start the review
Open the submittal and choose Start review. Its status becomes Under review, the documents of that revision can no longer be swapped, and the title, specification clause and type are locked while you work.
Step 3
Choose the outcome and give reasons
Under Review outcome pick Approve, Approve with comments, Return for resubmission or Reject, write the Review comments to the contractor and choose Return submittal. Fidrel asks for comments unless the outcome is a plain approval.
Step 4
Check the resubmission against your comments
A returned submittal comes back as the next revision with its own documents. The earlier revision, its documents and your comments stay on the record, so you can check the new issue point by point.
Who takes the review step
The submittal names one reviewer from the design team. The panel offers Start review and the four outcomes to that reviewer, to project administrators and, where no reviewer has been named yet, to any member who can write in the project. If two people act on the same submittal at once, Fidrel refuses the second change and shows the latest version, so nobody approves something that has just been withdrawn or answered.
Locks that protect the review
Once a review has started, the contractor can no longer withdraw the submittal to draft or change the documents of that revision; new documents can only be added to the next revision after a return. The title, specification clause and type stay locked under review and after approval. An approved submittal can then be closed, after which it cannot change at all.
What the review in Fidrel does not do
The submittal’s review comments are written as text; markups on the drawings themselves are made separately in Fidrel’s drawing review, not in the submittal. No approval stamp is added to the submitted documents. A submittal has a single reviewer, so consultants who need to comment in turn agree their answer before the reviewer records it. What an approval means for responsibility for the design is set by the contract, not by Fidrel.
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For architects and engineers
Frequently asked questions
Anything else on your mind? We are happy to help.
Talk to usThe contractor may go ahead, but must take the reviewer’s comments into account. Fidrel records the status as Approved with comments and keeps the comments with it.
No. Fidrel requires review comments for every outcome except a plain approval, so a rejection or a return always tells the contractor why.
No. Once the review has started, the documents of that revision are fixed. Revised documents can only be attached to the next revision after you return the submittal.
Not in turn. Each submittal has one named reviewer. The other consultant can add a comment to the submittal, and the reviewer records the agreed outcome.
In the submittal itself. Each revision keeps its documents, and the history lists every status change and comment with the date and the person.
No. The notice appears in Fidrel, and the submittal is listed under Awaiting my action in the register until you have answered it.