Pain Points in Preparing an Engineering Submittal – A Solution (4 min. read)

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The unsung heroes of any successful business are probably the engineers working on tens of hundreds of proposals & engineering submittals every month. Even if the conversion ratio is a bit disheartening, they still wade through that hurdle like a vanguard in a battle. Seriously, they are in the front lines of any business.

The pain points in putting together a convincing proposal or a water-tight engineering submittal is nothing to be looked down upon. Managing hundreds and thousands of documents is a walk in the park when you know finding the right documents is the first hoop to jump. Starting this strong, aren’t we? Let’s see what some other major difficulties are in winning a project and running it.

  1. Detailed Documentation Requirements: Engineering submittals generally require extensive documentation, including technical drawings, specifications, calculations, and compliance certificates. Making sure that all required documents are complete, accurate, and properly formatted can be labour-intensive and time-consuming.
  2. Document Management: Managing the large volumes of documents associated with proposal writing & submittals can be cumbersome. Top that with tracking revisions, versions, ensuring proper storage, and facilitating easy retrieval, it can be a significant administrative burden. Just sifting through hundreds of folders to find the right documents is a nightmare by itself.
  3. Time Constraints: Proposals and submittals are often required within strict deadlines. Balancing thoroughness and accuracy with the need to meet these deadlines can create significant pressure on the project team, which can lead to stress and rushed work. While the early bird gets the worm, this can compromise the quality of the submission, leading to errors and omissions.
  4. Quality Control and Consistency: This goes hand in hand with document management and time constraints. Maintaining high standards of quality and consistency across all documents is crucial. Any errors, inconsistencies, or discrepancies can lead to submittal rejections or project delays.
  5. Coordination Among Teams: Engineering projects usually involve multiple teams and disciplines. Coordinating the contributions from each team, ensuring alignment, and integrating their work into a cohesive document that makes sense requires effective communication and project management.
  6. Revision and Resubmission Processes: Proposals and Submittals often undergo multiple rounds of review and revision. Managing these iterations, incorporating feedback, and ensuring that each resubmission addresses all comments without chasing your own tail can be a tedious process.
  7. Approval Processes: Gaining approval from all necessary stakeholders, including clients, regulatory bodies, and internal reviewers, takes time. Delays in approval can hold up the entire project.
  8. Regulatory Compliance: Submittals must often comply with various regulatory standards and codes, which can vary by region and project type. Keeping up to date with these requirements and ensuring full compliance can be challenging. That’s putting it mildly.
  9. Budget and Cost Constraints: Ensuring that the proposal or the submittal aligns with the client’s budget while still meeting all technical and regulatory requirements is a delicate balance. Overestimations can make a proposal less competitive, while underestimations can lead to project overruns and failures. Cost overruns in the submittal phase can jeopardize the overall project budget.
  10. Risk Management: Identifying and mitigating risks associated with the submittal, such as potential rejections or non-compliance issues, requires careful planning and proactive management because things always like to go south, something every experienced professional can agree on.
  11. Integration of Supplier and Vendor Information: Engineering submittals often need to incorporate information from suppliers and vendors. Coordinating this external information, ensuring it meets project standards, and integrating it smoothly into the submittal can be challenging.

Let’s stop here in this unending list for both of our sakes. We all know the painstaking amount of time it takes to build a successful proposal or finish the perfect submittal. If there is a way, where you could eliminate most of the manual errors, save at least half the time spent and make the final document look consistent and professional, would you take it?

I know I would. I’ve spent considerable time in building proposals & finishing submittals to know there aren’t any tools to make all this easy for you, until now. If I told you that I’ve used a cloud tool which needs no special requirement but once set up, can reduce your documentation time by at least 75%, eliminate manual errors, handle revisions & versions better than all the folders and spreadsheets you can think of, and all it takes is a single click to cover your final document in corporate swag, would you believe me?

Seems too good to be true, right? Checkout IE Hub in our product page & see for yourself. If you’ve read my previous posts, all the foreshadowing ends right here. Welcome to the future, folks.

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