Dee Davis (00:08)
Good morning and welcome to management under construction. I'm Dee Davis.
Brad Wyant (00:13)
and I'm Brad Wyant and today we're gonna talk about procurement, submittals, tracking, how it impacts the schedule and all that good stuff. So let's get into the basics and the advanced components as well of procurement. tell me about your experiences with procurement management, doing it yourself as an installing contractor, dealing with procurement as a manager or as a consultant. What's your experience with it?
Dee Davis (00:41)
Greatly varied. As an installing contractor, I was heavily responsible for my own procurement on my own projects. I was very involved with managing lead times and pulling submittals together and putting schedules together that reflected current lead times for different things. We had a procurement department whose job was to keep the project managers and the project engineers up to date.
So when I wanted to know, what's going on with copper right now, I'd pick up the phone and call my procurement manager. When it came to commodities, we would send it into the procurement department. They would place the orders directly with the vendors. And then we would manage those orders from the field with the vendors. When it came to equipment, we would, as project managers, place those orders directly, major equipment, air handlers, chillers, boilers, things like that.
It's a little different when you are a GC, your subs are doing all that in the background and you're trying to keep hold of the moving pieces and understand what's going on and making sure all of that's integrated into the overall schedule. As an owner, you may be procuring things as well as your contractors. There are some owners that have procurement departments that are really insistent on doing owner furnished equipment of some kind.
Some of it is very appropriate. Some of it is very not appropriate. Owners, in my humble opinion, really shouldn't be buying boilers, chillers, generators, things like that, technical equipment. There's lots of hazards there. But they're always going to be procuring things like office furniture. A lot of owners do their own IT. So they have their own components. And then there's specialty equipment, particularly if you're dealing with medical.
or pharmaceutical that they are absolutely going to have their own people managing and procuring lab equipment a lot of times, things like that, that don't necessarily go through the installing contractors. It's a pu pu platter of what's happening with procurement on a project at any time. It's just a buffet of things going on and GCs, you get the fun of keeping track of it all.
Brad Wyant (02:59)
Yes, keeping track of it was one of the first jobs I was given when I was introduced to the general contractor world. And I remember not even knowing what a submittal was when I stepped onto a job site. What is a submittal? It's a thing you submit. OK, but what is a submittal? Had these great conversations. Well, you take what's in the specification book. You go find something that complies with that, and you send it to them for approval. OK, so you're.
regurgitating what they said was okay and asking them if that's okay. That's what we're doing. seemed a little odd at first when I was first coming out of school. But then as I learned more about the process, about the importance of proving that you're going to comply with specifications, that it's an essential part of the business. Maybe there's room for improvement in the way that we do it, but there's certainly a need to do it. The way that I was asked to do it was I was asked to provide a submittal log for
owner's meetings where it listed the specification number, when it had to be on site, what it was, who had to approve it, how soon it had to be approved. And that ended up being an 11 by 17 piece of paper that I laid out like a placemat at every OAC meeting that I sorted by most urgent that I refined into this thing that made a lot of sense to all the people in the room. And that ended up expediting
the way that we did submittals as opposed to one email here, one email there, having a log to track the submittals on for the client, which is common practice obviously was the thing to do. I want to talk now about some tracking best practices about the different kinds of software we use to track procurement items. When I was working directly with the superintendent where he and I were the only ones on the job site, we used a combination of P6,
Procore and Excel, where he would give me dates by which something had to be installed on site per the schedule. And then I would input those into Excel. And then eventually we would get the documents in Procore. So we were doing the timing of it on P6. We were using a grid style layout just to make it a format people could digest in Excel. And we were processing all of the documents to save them.
effectively like a document management software in Procore. Looking back on that now, it was ridiculous double work because he's scheduling the job and scheduling procurement activities for things like procure tile or procure air handler in P6, but so am I. I'm doing that same thing in Excel. There were a lot of duplicated efforts there looking back on that because of the software separation.
How do you make your procurement list to begin with? Who reviews it? When you're starting off blank with a job and you're trying to figure out all the things you have to procure, are you just going through all of the drawings, all the specifications and listing out, okay, we're gonna need this, we're gonna need that, and throwing in Excel? How have you done that at the beginning of jobs?
Dee Davis (06:10)
I cannot tell you how glad I am you're asking this question. This is one of my very favorite topics. that is exactly what you do when you first get a project. You have a few things that you need to do. Number one is you need to read all of the plans and all of the specifications for your job. All of it, every word. It's a lot. There's a lot of specifications.
There's a lot of plan sheets with a lot of notes. You need to read it all because you are responsible for what's in there as a contractor, whether you're a GC or an installing contractor or an owners rep, you're responsible for all of it. So you need to make sure you know what it says. then starts the RFIs looking at the plans and looking at the specs. you're going to say, wow, I have some questions.
You start writing your RFIs or at least writing some notes about questions that you have. See if you can find it in there somewhere. Then one of the next things you're going to do early in the project is make your submittal log. You literally go into the specifications and you look at part one and part two because sometimes there's things that you need to submit in part one. There's sneaky.
Little things that are in part one of the specification. Sometimes definitely part two is product, so there's definitely everything you should be submitting in part two, but you also need to look at what's missing. That's one of the key elements that I find that people. Don't always look at if you're not looking at the plans and the specifications together, you may not realize you're missing something. And if you're missing something, you might be missing a whole spec section.
Brad Wyant (07:53)
want to clarify that. What do you mean by missing? Are you saying that there's something that's not shown on the drawings but is listed in the specifications or something that doesn't appear on either the specifications or the drawings that still has to be there to make the job work? How are you finding those missing things?
Dee Davis (08:10)
It may be that the spec section wasn't issued. Very well may have been just a clerical error, but that was a really obvious one where it's like, hey, all I got was the MEP specifications. But what if you get a bunch of architectural specs, but you're missing one that you need? What if you're missing joint sealants? That's one that I see failed to be issued more.
frequently than you would think. And it's a pretty important one, especially if you're working in any kind of specialty area like a hospital or a manufacturing plant. Looking for what's there and looking for what's not there because you may need to go ask to have things issued that were not issued. It could also be a case of I see this thing on the plan, but I don't have a spec for it. I've seen that happen as well.
So you're going to go through those part one and part two of the specifications and that's how you make your submittal log. This is before any submittals happen. This is how you know what submittals to expect from your contractors, from your vendors, from yourself if you're an installing contractor. This is how you know what to submit on. I have had some fairly recent projects. When I asked to see the submittal log, I get a blank stare.
And they're saying, well, this is everything that we've submitted and we're tracking. And I'm like, no, no, no. Where's the list of the things that you haven't submitted on yet? And they're saying, well, I'm just submitting on whatever my contractors give me. No, that is not how this is supposed to work. As a GC, as an installing contractor, you need to know what is coming because you need to know what might be missing.
and you need to be able to prioritize what's coming with what's in the schedule. Just like you said, if you wait for somebody to get around to submitting it, maybe they submit it, maybe they don't, maybe now you go install something that you've never submitted on and you have to rip it out. I've seen it happen many times. Or maybe you install something and it's completely wrong or you forget to install it. Do you know how many jobs I've been on?
A piece of equipment never got ordered. A widget never got ordered because it was never on a log anywhere. Nobody thought about it. They just forgot. And we get all the way down to the end and I'm like, Hey, where's this thing? And everybody looks at each other And now it's a mad scramble. You don't ever want to be in that position and you can prevent being in that position by getting in front of it.
during that submittal process and getting into those specifications, writing out everything that you're going to submit and then prioritizing it. You figure out what's the lead time, when do I need to get this in? Some things are gonna be more important than others. Some things are just gonna be commodity orders. Is it hard to get drywall approved? Well, for the most part, no.
but there's more than just plain drywall. There might be green board, there might be shaft wall, there's all these different things that are gonna take a little bit more time to review and have to be submitted separately.
Brad Wyant (11:37)
something you said there is something I wanted to dive deeper on. Doing the check with the plans on this side and the specifications on this side is a human driven process the way you're describing it. It's a proactive contractor approach to choose to take that on as opposed to being a broker contractor just to pass through where you just take what's given to you and you pass it on and you don't check to make sure that that covered everything.
Most people probably want to hire the proactive contractor, the one who's doing what Dee is describing here. But the proactive contractor is the more expensive one. The broker contractor is the one who might be cheaper, who's going to staff the job with fewer people because they're going to do less work. So it's one of the things you pay for when you're getting a quote unquote premium general contractor as opposed to somebody who's doing a different way and different approaches for different needs.
process that you're describing Dee is rife for human error. Let's say that you're hiring 21 year old me out of college and I don't know my sealants from my joint compounds from my clean room special stuff and I haven't been trained yet on how to check to make sure everything's missing or maybe I could be 20 years into the business doing something I've never done and I could miss something that
needs to be there that I didn't know needed to be there because I've never installed this particular thing before. What strikes me is that there's an opportunity there, I think, for technology to intervene where if there's a designer who knows what they're doing, they can take a bill of materials approach the way that a mechanical engineer might if they're designing a widget like a washing machine or something. AutoCAD, the Autodesk software that a lot of people design 3D objects in, if you
work it right will automatically spit you out a bill of materials for a washing machine or a computer monitor. And then it's a lot easier to check the boxes of, I got this, I got that, I got the other thing, I can build this washing machine today. So to me, there's an opportunity on the design side to expedite the submittal process by creating a digital submittal log in the design phase.
as opposed to making somebody manually read plans, manually read specs, and manually type things into a computer to put them into a list. Now, that doesn't mean that the project team is not responsible for later vetting that list, which is the most important skill to have, the most intellectual, the most challenging thing to do. The designer could still miss something if they make this bill of materials I'm talking about, but you're taking away
all of this manual data entry that ends up consuming time on a job where we know time is short. Do you think that that's something that we could see in the next 20 years as processes evolve in this business? Or do you think that that's something that'll never happen, that architects will never put out a draft bill of materials, submittal log type document for contractors to start with at least?
Dee Davis (14:53)
I don't think it's ever going to come from the design side for a few different reasons. Number one is they never draw anything in that level of detail. They draw things that are graphically detailed, but The software doesn't have the intelligence to know what exactly that penetration is. There's something going through the wall, but
The software on its own doesn't know what that thing is that's going through the wall exactly. So you can't produce a bill of materials without knowing exactly what it is. It's possible. We actually already do that in process piping all the time. It's not even just process piping. There's mechanical contractors that are out there doing it too. When you go through and you do a detailed BIM model, you can produce a bill of materials for fabrication off of that.
If you do it correctly and you use the right software is possible. That's actually part of producing an isometric drawing is it has a detailed bill of materials. tells you exactly what it is, how long it is, how wide it is, everything. Structural detailing can do that same thing. They produce bills of materials for their stuff, but you have to get to that level of detail and it has to have intelligence.
the object has to be specifically chosen. So that valve is not just a valve, it's a PBM model number, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that's how you know the precise dimensions of it. So you have to get to that level of detail to produce a bill of materials. Now, could it produce a bill of materials that says three, three quarter inch valves? Sure.
That's telling you you have to buy three 3-quarter inch valves doesn't tell you which ones. So does that really help you? Yes and no. It helps you to a point. There's a substantial difference between a plain old Nibco chilled water valve and a PBM process valve. There's a significant cost difference, lead time difference, material difference.
Brad Wyant (16:59)
even trade difference, it's going to be ordered by a different person.
Dee Davis (17:02)
Potentially. Is it possible to do what you're describing? Yeah, it's absolutely possible. I don't see designers doing that because they're not going to invest that level of detail. They're not the ones that are buying anything. So they're not making these decisions, so they're not going to take on the liability. Why would they?
Brad Wyant (17:22)
profit in it. And that's one of the things that I've talked about on the earlier casts where there are these conflicts of interests between parties that don't permit the maximum possible efficiency. And you're to see that in any kind of contracting situation inside and outside of construction, but it's just a funny one to bring up. So looking back on what we can do now as opposed to what we can do 20 years in the future, I think if I had to do that job all over again where my
superintendent was making a schedule and was developing procurement activities in P6. And I was doing an Excel report as opposed to manually reading his P6 schedule and typing things in to Excel once I knew what I had to order. Once I had done the thinking, I might have asked him to give me a Excel report out of P6 and written a spreadsheet.
for myself to pull that data into the display that I wanted to give the client so that when things moved, it would do it automatically as opposed to me having to do it manually. So let's talk about tracking and the other part of the process, which is calling subcontractors to get them to order stuff. This was one of the things I was shocked that became my job when I came out of college. It was...
to call every subcontractor and say, hey, have you ordered the drywall? Hey, have you ordered the valves? Hey, have you ordered the conduit you're gonna need for this job? And to have these kinds of conversations, conduit not so much, but the light fixtures, for example, that's a better example. When you're having a subcontractor procure something, but you're asking them to store it offsite, what's the trade off there, Dee? Do you think it's better in most instances to trust your subcontractors to...
store key pieces of equipment that are long lead, but that are fragile or large offsite and trust them to keep it? Or do you pay to store key items on site so that you can see that they're there? What are your experiences with that? Are people usually pretty upfront about saying, it still hasn't arrived? Or have you ever had a situation where somebody said, yeah, we totally got those light fixtures in stock. And then it comes to install them and they're like, no, we don't have them actually, sorry. And you're delayed by a month because they're missing.
Dee Davis (19:45)
All of the above are correct. I definitely have had people tell me things were there when they weren't. I've had people tell me they weren't there when they were. And really it's just a whether or not that person really has a grasp on what's happening. So if you have an electrician that's storing light fixtures at their shop, maybe they have a container or they have an area in their shop where they're storing your fixtures, get in your car and go look for yourself is my advice.
Number one, they're going to be billing. If they ordered it and they're storing it, they have to pay their supplier. So they're going to be billing you for it. Get your can down there and look at it with your own eyes. Don't just pay that bill. And you better make sure that you're looking at the details. I ordered 52 fixture number, blah, blah, blahs. Where are those 52? Somebody needs to be checking this stuff in. I've had it happen on my own crew.
where they said, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's here. Did you check it in? Yeah, I checked it in. I put it down in the basement. We'll install it in a couple months. When we go to install it, well, they didn't check it in. They looked at it and they went, it's a pump, it's here, great. It was the right model number, wrong inlet outlet size. So we go to hook it up, won't fit. When I was an installing contractor, that was my...
watershed moment when that instance happened with that pump, I was the one that checked everything in from then on. That became my responsibility because the delay, I had a pump that had been sitting in our site, for two months. We didn't notify the vendor. There was a problem for two months. Now I had to go back and plead with that vendor to take the pump back and rush me a new pump.
that had the right inlet sizes. We had egg all over our face. It was completely our fault. We knew we had plenty of opportunity and we didn't take it. We just went, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's here. It's fine. That's not fine. You must check it because you don't always get what you order. Receiving processes are a really big deal when you're talking about procurement. Somebody needs to have the job.
of actually receiving it and it's not just going yeah, its here. I'm unloading it and I'm sticking it over there. I'm checking it and I'm checking it against my order. I make sure I ordered it right and make sure it was pulled right at the vendor. Maybe they sent you 16 of the right thing and two of the wrong thing. You're only going to know if you check. You don't want to find out when you got to go install it.
Brad Wyant (22:28)
And I 100 % agree, but that all takes time and money. That takes...
Dee Davis (22:32)
That's your job. That's you're being paid for.
Brad Wyant (22:35)
Yeah, yeah, but there are only so many hours in the day and it'd be nice if there were a way to do it that were faster, that were expedited. Procore luckily has come along and given us the tool to instead of take a picture with our phone and then plug the phone in the computer and then upload the photos into a file, you can just take a picture right from Procore and submit it into a document tracking thing there and have the proof that you
received what you ordered. So there have been some efficiencies in the tracking system a little bit.
Dee Davis (23:10)
That's
not going to tell you whether your inlet and outlet sizes are correct. If it's in a piece of equipment, you could take a picture of the tag number and you could say, okay, well, it's tagged correctly, but is it the right size? Is it the right motor data? These things, AI can't help you with people. You are never going to replace humans in this way because you have to physically go look at it, put your eyes on it, look at the data.
Is this what I'm supposed to be getting? Yes or no?
Brad Wyant (23:43)
When it comes to doing things on site, one of things I used to have to do to do exactly what you're saying is, okay, such and such tile has arrived. I need to print out the submittal that I received for that tile, staple it, carry it out to the field, and compare this piece of paper to what I'm seeing. Now, instead of having to do that, I can pull up the submittal on my phone, scan through to find the relevant pages, pass all the cover sheets, all the stamps and all the...
six digit numbers that sometimes are relevant, most times are not, and get to the keywords. Okay, it's this part number in the submittal, it's this part number on the box. There we go, moving on. So.
There are certainly opportunities to make these processes efficient on a job site. And I think my recommendation would be to put in the work early on to create more efficient processes to save you time later on. Because if you get overwhelmed by these activities later on in the job, when they're hot and heavy, when you're bringing a bunch of material on site, then you're going to miss something. And it's going to be critical. And it's going to be a situation like Dee describes where you're going to be
egg on face bent over backwards trying to solve a problem that you wouldn't have if you had made better processes at the beginning of the job. And nobody likes to do the process stuff. Setting up is hard because there are other demands on the job side's time, but it can be a big benefit, I think, to set yourself up for success on the sub-bill side there.
Dee Davis (25:14)
Yeah, I created a receiving sheet out of that incident. I did exactly what you're talking about. Instead of carrying that whole submittal, and this was paper days, it was a long time ago. Instead of printing out that submittal and carrying it out into the field, I made a receiving sheet that had all the critical data on it, pre-filled out for every piece of thing that I was receiving. And from the submittal, I would fill it out and you could probably find a way to...
putting an intern on this and having them fill it out for you, or are you doing it yourself, or are you finding a way to use electronics to tie these things together and maybe pre-populate it somehow? You do what you can. And then I take that sheet out into the field and I confirm, here's everything it should be. And then you're just check, check, check, check, check. It's very quick. That was my solution to the problem.
and I've utilized that solution for many years now and it's very efficient and very effective compared to printing it out and flipping through this huge submittal and trying to find the right data out in the field in the moment. A little bit of work on the front end makes that receiving process very quick.
Brad Wyant (26:24)
Good solutions. Let's talk about unique items that we have to procure for jobs. The big, heavy, make or break items like generators, air handlers, chillers, not getting these kinds of things on time that are unique one-offs to your job, that are very expensive, that are heavily engineered, can kill a project schedule. And they're often owner furnished, which we'll talk about in a minute. But when it comes to ordering these kinds of things, what have you seen,
One of the things I've seen is that there's an expert within the company who is like the generator guy who everyone goes to when they're procuring a generator because that person has procured a dozen of them in the last two years and say, hey, could you just check this over for me real quick to make sure this is right? I'm not sure if I have all the relevant information. I haven't done a generator submittal in four or five years. Having an expert like that within a big company can help. Have you seen similar practices in your experience?
Dee Davis (27:21)
Yeah, absolutely. There are people that are very, very proficient at all things electrical or very proficient at all things mechanical or very proficient at specific pieces of equipment. And within your organization, hopefully you know who those people are. They usually have a lot of experience or a heavy background in something particular. Those people are great to draw from.
And it's good to know those people, even if they're not in your organization. I've absolutely drawn on people outside my organization who I know are really good at this one thing. And I'll call them up and I'll say, I'm reviewing this thing and I've got some questions. It's not saying this or is saying that, is this important? Do I need to worry about this? They'll be able to provide me some advice, which is very helpful. Having friends in the industry who know more than you highly recommend it.
Brad Wyant (28:14)
That is one of the best pieces of advice that anyone can hear on this podcast is to have friends who know more than you, period, but especially in areas where you don't have as much knowledge. That's a great piece.
Dee Davis (28:25)
Yeah. Well, if you're counted among my friends and you are Brad, you know more than me about a lot of stuff. And I have many friends in the industry that know a lot more than I do about many, many things. I don't hang out with people who aren't smarter than me ever. That is 100%. If we hang out, it's because you're smarter than me. And it doesn't, it doesn't make me dumb. It just makes me not as smart in those things. And that's okay. This industry is.
Amazing. love it. I get so excited about all this stuff. There's never a dull moment and you never have the same day twice. There's so much to do and so much to learn, but here's the thing. You will never learn at all. And it's okay to not know everything. Don't ever feel like you have to know everything or be the resident expert on absolutely everything. Because if you, if you're trying to pretend like you are, you aren't.
and everybody knows it, so just stop. Figure out your stuff and learn it, but don't think you need to know it all.
Brad Wyant (29:29)
If you're in the position of being asked to do things you don't understand how to do, take it as a learning opportunity, but don't pretend you know. And if you have an MEP coordinator, an MEP manager at your company that bills to overhead, go be their friend, get to know them, network with them, and then call them and ask them to help you out with stuff on your job. And if your project manager gives you crap for that person billing two hours to your jobs, hey, why did you talk to that person? You're costing me money.
I'm saving you money. I'm learning and I'm saving you money. So quit your whining is the advice I would give anybody who's young on this podcast and in the GC world and trying to figure it out.
Dee Davis (30:09)
Yeah, in our episode on commissioning, John mentioned MEP managers, they can be fabulously valuable to you, even if they don't work for your company, even if you just get to know some in the industry. There's an MEP manager that I worked with who is an electrical whiz. The guy knows everything and you bring up generators. That's what made me think of him.
He's, he's a generator whiz and I did a generator job with him. He worked on the GC side. I was the owner's rep. This guy knew generators inside, outside, upside down, gave me some great advice. were doing owner furnished, which I don't love when owners want to buy those things themselves because it's rife for problems when owners buy technical engineered equipment like that.
Fortunately, I know enough about generators to be dangerous. He knew a lot about generators. He procured a lot of generators in his past life. So between the two of us, we did a great job. But what if we hadn't have been there?
Brad Wyant (31:15)
So now is the time, let's talk about owner furnished and why owners try to choose to do that and why that may not always be the right choice. One of the things that comes to mind when talking about owner furnished is the cost savings. What you're doing is you're saving yourself as much money as possible by buying it yourself as opposed to buying it through somebody who's gonna put their markup on it. And for a big enough dollar item like a generator or an air handler,
could be could be 10 % of that that you're saving. And for somebody managing construction professionally on the owner side, that becomes a nugget that you want to go after. Yeah, I can go save that money. I have an experience that I want to share. I was working on a job where we were asked to procure a very unique piece of equipment. It was a piece of machinery. was a beam hoist that was going to run along the bottom flange of an I-beam and pick stuff up.
and run over to another part of the room and then drop it down. And I'm a mechanical engineer. I love cool mechanical things. I was like, ⁓ we totally missed this in buyout. Nobody has it covered, but they added to the spec and it wasn't very clear. So we're going to have a basis to go after the cost on this. That's fine. I want to be the one to install it. I think we can make a little money doing it. We've got some very smart people on this job site who are also excited about doing it because it's fun challenge. Let's try it. And my project manager was like,
In hindsight, we should have looked deeper into what that was going to involve because it was a very complicated process. The weight of this machine and what it going to take to get up there, the risk that we were taking on as a general contractor installing it ourselves as opposed to hiring a millwright, which is what we ended up doing, who has done this kind of thing before.
We ended up making out okay on that, thankfully. the electricians wired it backwards There was some damage involved, unfortunately.
it shredded something. We had to hire the guys back and make it right. If we had done that damage ourselves, then it would have been on us. If you have the bandwidth to become an expert on something and you've got the support of your managers and you are going to sit down and make the time to think of the unknown unknowns for yourself, power to you, but know there are risks. It's much better to hire an expert who knows what they're doing.
in something as obscure as that, that is just totally outside of your expertise to avoid those risks, to focus on the things that you're being paid to be great at. Dee, what are your thoughts on owner furnished and trying to take on risk yourself on the owner side?
Dee Davis (33:51)
Well, the famous last words are how hard could it possibly be, right?
Brad Wyant (33:55)
How often have we said that to ourselves?
Dee Davis (33:57)
Yeah, it seems like it would be simple. I can do this. Later, you're face palming thinking, oh my goodness, I should have done something different. I should have left it to the professionals. And that's really what we're talking about here, to be perfectly honest, is are we leaving it to the professionals or are we thinking we're going to self-perform this and we're going to save ourselves some money? There are certain things that when the owner buys it, it's fine.
As long as you have the right person on the owner side in charge of it. So for example. Furniture. Owners have very specific furniture vendors that they like to use because they have colors and looks and styles that maybe are carried across from site to site that they want it this very specific way. That's great if you have somebody on your team that knows something about furniture. If you asked me to be in charge of that.
that would be not the best choice because I don't know anything about modular furniture. I've messed with it a little bit, but it's not my area of expertise. So who on your team knows something about this that's gonna be working with that vendor to get the questions answered, to ask the right questions, to make sure that everything is working fine. Can I project manage it? Can I look at a schedule and say this is when I need furniture?
Yeah, but I can't really help you with the details because I just don't understand it. That's what ends up happening with technical equipment is that your procurement people are buying reams of paper, widgets, toilet paper, and now you're asking them to go buy a generator or a boiler or something like that. And I think the thought is, well, it's not a big deal because the engineer of record is specifying everything.
So we'll just hand that specification out and we'll just go get bids and it'll be fine. Well, there's a number of challenges with that. Number one is if you don't have somebody that knows what they're looking at on your side, on the owner's side, who can look at that and say, I still have questions or there's conflicts in the specification or there's missing things in the specification or a vendor may look at that and say, well,
I can be 80 % of this, but I'm going to bid on it anyway. Who on your side of the fence is going to look at that and know? That what they're looking at either meets or doesn't meet. The specification and the design requirements.
Brad Wyant (36:40)
And an engineer, especially an engineer of record, is going to be somebody who's responsible for checking to make sure that the piece of equipment meets their load needs in their scheme of how they've designed the system to work. A generator that's going to be, does it make the right power? Does it have the right duty cycle? Does it have the right tank capacity size for what I've been asked to provide? Air hand let it's going to be, does it flow enough air? Does it have this rate of cooling? Does it have this ramp time? But they're not going to ask questions like, well,
How is this going to be installed? Does it need to come in in pieces or does it need to come in as an assembled unit? How is it going to be picked? Does it need to come in on a crane with attachments for that or does it need to be trucked in a different way? An electrician who has installed a dozen generators is going to ask those questions. A foreman on the electrician side is going to go through and say, okay, well, I really want it pop out here because I've got that vault right there and I can pull the power to here.
And if I have to make that turn with this big a copper, it's just gonna be, it's gonna take me way longer. I want it to be here. I want it to go like this. You're gonna get these efficiencies that as an engineer designing behind a desk would not be considered otherwise. They're gonna benefit your job. They're going to have positive repercussions.
Dee Davis (38:00)
Yeah, those are excellent points. flashed on an air handler. I don't think I bought it. It was owner furnished and we were installing it. It was a sectioned air handler and think it came in three pieces. The pick points were on the inside of the footprint.
So I could set each piece and get them kind of close together, but I couldn't, we call it drifting them together. I couldn't drift it together when the pick points are on the outside. You can kind of drift the pieces together. Well, I had to set them a couple feet apart and then we had to put it on rollers and manually put it. It's a nightmare. And it's the kind of thing that you would only look for if you were an installing contractor.
It ended up taking us way longer to install it because of not asking those questions and telling the vendor, hey, why are these pick points here? They need to be on the outside of the footprint. Well, the vendor doesn't care. They're moving it off of their loading dock in pieces. They don't have to assemble it. So what do they care where the pick points are? This kind of stuff happens all the time. The other thing that I've seen happen a lot with owner furnished equipment, I'm going to use a boiler as an example.
Owner bought the boiler and we had asked for the submittal. Hey, can I get the approved submittal for the boiler? Oh yeah, here it is. Well, as the installing contractor, you are fabricating all kinds of things that connect to this boiler. You're connecting pipes, you're all kinds of things have to happen. All these dimensions matter because we've coordinated everything. We're prefabricating everything in theory.
We're dropping this boiler into place. We're connecting everything and we're good to go. Well, it comes out and the nozzles are completely in the wrong place and they're different sizes. They're in different places. Now everything we fabricated and laid out and installed already doesn't work.
So have to pause, hold on, what's going on? The dimensions of the unit are different. The connection points are different. The sizes are different. The connection types are different. I have to redo my entire plan. And now I'm working in this mechanical room and I'm fixing all this stuff. And now you have to pay for that owner. All that money you saved by not paying my markup.
you just spent with reworking the field.
Brad Wyant (40:31)
not to mention the time that that rework in the field cost you. And as we all know, it's the time that costs you money. If you're delaying the job, you've got a bunch of people waiting on one thing. got a dollar waiting on a dime, as they say, and you can't afford that.
Dee Davis (40:49)
Well, right. And at this juncture, you may have to pay me overtime to fix everything. So now it's costing you even more. So it is rife with potential for miscommunication. And we go back to the owner and we complain. say, gave me an approved submittal. Why did it come out different? well, some things changed after that. Well, I don't know who authorized the change, but it was never communicated back to the construction team.
And that communication back to the construction team is where the fail often is. Also often you'll have performance problems and other problems because somebody made a decision somewhere along the line and now the thing no longer meets the design intent. But it's the communication. Those folks that are doing your sourcing or procurement or whatever you're calling it in your company,
They do their stuff in a silo. They're given an order, they process it. They don't know anything about these things. So when something is handed to them, they just go buy it. They don't know that there's a problem. It's not their area of expertise. Their area of expertise is to procure, not to question.
Brad Wyant (42:02)
To get great terms, I'm sure, on things that don't require this much analysis, as an owner, the question you want to ask yourself is, do you want the people who buy your paper towels and toilet paper to buy a $100,000 piece of engineered equipment that could make or break your project?
Dee Davis (42:19)
I have owner furnished equipment that's $500,000, a million.
Brad Wyant (42:25)
Yeah, I'm playing with kids money as opposed to that. There you go.
Dee Davis (42:29)
Yeah, the risk is substantial. It can be substantial to your project, especially if you're talking about many things, many things that you're buying. You're buying one generator, okay, there's some limited risk there. But if you're buying four or five or 10 or 20 things, the risk just keeps getting bigger. And is it really worth it? The GC's markup, if it's something that the GC is buying, is
three, four, five, 7%, whatever it is on your project, it's not really that much. Subcontractor markup is more like 15. So yes, maybe you're going to pay 18, 20 % more, but it's sort of like insurance. First of all, it's their problem if something goes wrong. There's that one head to lop off kind of mentality about it. If you're talking about small things, it might be fine. But if you're talking about big things, my advice is
leave it to the professionals. We installed 3,000 square feet of concrete at this house on the outside when we bought the place. It was all dirt outside. We made this beautiful patio area. Can I pour concrete? Sure I can. Did I pour 3,000 square feet of concrete? No, I didn't. I left it to the professionals.
Brad Wyant (43:48)
No one to hold and no one to fold them. No one to say it could be harder than I think it could be.
Dee Davis (43:53)
Yeah, I would have not done nearly as good of a job and probably not been nearly as happy with it. Did it cost a lot of money? Sure it did. But was it worth it? 100%. I wouldn't change a thing about it. So we have to think about those things as you're going in, is it look beyond the dollar sign for a minute and look at what really makes sense for the overall project. Do you want that?
kind of internal stress. mean, your internal sourcing people, they're busy already. I've never met a sourcing person that wasn't. They're already overwhelmed. They're already busy. Do you really want to be adding this kind of stuff onto their plate? And this is time sensitive stuff. And it has to be a priority for the project. Let's wrap up with a little more submittal talk.
Brad Wyant (44:44)
Yeah, so this was an interesting idea that I wanted to talk to you about, There are obviously submittals for things that have a ton of risk associated with them, like the air handlers and generators and other niche pieces of equipment that we're talking about. But when it comes to the basics, like the drywall submittal that you get from your drywall contractor that has the list of the screws they're going to use and the nails and the joint compound, it's the same.
joint compound every time. Are there submittals where we can say this is a low enough risk item that I'm going to trust AI to check whether they submitted one of the three tile grouts that I specified, whether they submitted one of the three options for three quarter inch elbows that I requested. Because I'd never see architects go out to job sites and
check through, yep, they're using the drywall I wanted, yep. Can I see that box of screws that you got in your pocket there to make sure that they're the screws that we specified for the drywall? At a certain point, if the drywall falls off the wall, you're gonna blame the installing contractor. You're not gonna, this is not, is this worth spending our time on at a certain point?
Dee Davis (45:56)
I think it depends. I think there are definitely commodity items on certain kinds of jobs that we could probably say you don't need to submit on that. You bring up screws and my brain instantly jumps to Oshpod or now it's H-CHI in California, the governing authority for hospital projects. And do they check the screws? Yes, they do.
Do they check the spacing of the screws? Yes, they do. yes. yes. So on a job like that, no, I don't think you could get away with just not submitting screws because they will check. But on other kinds of jobs, if you're building an office building, do you need to submit on basic drywall and basic screws and tape and joint compound? I don't know. I don't build office buildings, but I'm going to guess that
As an efficiency measure, if you have subcontractors you have a trusting relationship with. If you have an owner that you are having a trusting relationship with and you have a good team, I think there's got to be a trust there because there are contractors who will cut corners. There are contractors who will install inappropriate things. If they know you're not paying attention, they will try to get away with things. I've seen it happen.
Brad Wyant (47:23)
In those instances, a submittal is not so much a documentation, double check, are we doing the right thing? It's a promise. It's a promise to follow the architect's directions and people can promise things and then not follow through on those promises. The act of promising in those cases, I think, if you're submitting me the general submittal on one of the top three drywall manufacturers, I should be able to, as an architect, press a button. Is it what I asked them to submit?
Yes, no, yes, done. So that that architect can free up their time to check through the colors that they wanted in a more detailed manner, to check through the tile stuff and the shop drawings. Architects having to check shop drawings, that's a sophisticated intellectual activity. Architects checking through screws? No, that is not worth the rate that we're paying them, in my opinion. I'm sure architects would agree that if there were an easy button for that.
that they could trust that they would rather press it.
Dee Davis (48:21)
Yeah, that's a good point. as a measure of efficiency on a given job, I think it's worthy of discussion. Can we sit down at the beginning of a job and go through the entire submittal list and say, I'm comfortable with not reviewing submittals on this, this, and this? Right. A handful of things that are commodity items that are really very low risk.
I think it's worth the discussion on a project. think the fact that you call it a submittal of promise is a really good point because that is exactly what it is. You're saying, I understand and I will comply. I promise I'm going to do the right thing. Does that translate out to the field? Not always. I've seen contractors submit the right thing and install the wrong thing all the time.
Brad Wyant (49:08)
And we see this all the time with plumbers. They'll submit the entire catalog for Zirn and for another manufacturer to cover if their guy that showed up that day had something different on the truck. But that's not the point of a submittal. The point is to say, no, you're going to install the thing that we asked you to install. So like you're talking about, if you go through and have that conversation of what does and doesn't matter, that could be a productive use of time.
Dee Davis (49:35)
Yeah, you bring up piping. will say piping, does matter. And it doesn't seem like it would matter. mean, copper, copper, carbon steel, carbon steel, cast iron, whatever. What's the difference between this manufacturer and that manufacturer? Well, I'm working on some things right now that, ⁓ it did matter. It was a manufacturer that had some problems. When you mix and match, that's always a very, very.
dangerous and in my opinion, bad practice is to allow contractors to mix and match brands. If you're going to install brand A of copper piping or carbon steel piping, stick with brand A. If you start mixing and matching brand A, brand B and brand C with whatever's on the truck, whatever you happen to find laying around in a boneyard somewhere or whatever the warehouse wants to send you that day.
Sometimes there's very specific problems that will happen between different manufacturers. Depending on the type of material it is, some play together nicely, some don't play together nicely. But if you start having defects, which happens, and I've had this happen on several projects where you've had defects, if it's all one manufacturer, you have one place to go as a contractor. You can say, hey, brand A, we installed
3,000 feet of your piping on this project and we're having failures. If you have brand A, B, and C on that project, they're going to look at it and go, well, how do know it's my stuff that's leaking? Well, how do you know there's not a problem with their stuff that's causing a problem with my stuff? It's not a good practice. Stick with one manufacturer whenever possible.
Brad Wyant (51:24)
Wow, I would have never thought of that. I would have never thought that one plumbing equipment material manufacturer would object to their material being installed adjacent to somebody else's and say, their stuff made my stuff leak. I'm not a lawyer. I haven't been in court, thankfully. And I'm sure that there's a good reason. But boy, that is something I never would have thought of. And that's the reason that we have experts in our lives, like Dee, who knows way more than I do. I only know more about cars. So to wrap up.
A submittal is a promise, and every object that shows up on a job site has to pass through three sets of hands. It has to pass through the mind and hands of the owner and their needs. It has to pass through the minds and hands of the designer who is trying to meet those needs. And it has to pass through somebody on the installing side to understand that it's going to be the right thing for them to be able to achieve those outcomes before it shows up on site. And again, after it shows up on site to make sure that it was what was ordered.
If you don't take those steps, you're not gonna have the outcomes you wanted to, you're not gonna meet the performance expectations you needed to, you're gonna have scheduled delays, you're gonna have rework in the field, and ignoring the importance of submittals is something that anyone does at their own peril.
Dee Davis (52:38)
Yeah, again, please, please, please do that full submittal log in the very beginning so that you know what to expect. You know what's coming. That can be the platform for discussing, do I need to submit drywall screws or some other basic commodity? You don't have to have chosen your brands or anything at that moment. It's just a list of what you are going to submit. Maybe there's room for negotiation.
Want to say, although I can't cite a very specific instance off the top of my head, I am sure that I've had those conversations with owners as an installing contractor. Maybe we're not going to submit that specific thing. We're just going to call it good. Do I really need to submit certificate showing that my installers are experts on these particular things? No, I know your people that are fine. I'm not concerned about it. Great. One less thing to submit.
There's things that you can negotiate. And that's also, by the way, a really, really good place to start looking at your spare parts. Even that early in the project, spare parts are going to be called out in the specification. Make that list and start negotiating right now on what spare parts they really want, what extra materials they really want, and which ones they don't. Because guess what? If you don't have to provide it, you never have to order it.
Brad Wyant (54:04)
Money and time, things we want to save. That's a podcast topic for another day. It's building engineers, the wealth of expertise they have, how to use it, how to set yourself up for success with them, how to get them the right spares that they want.
Dee Davis (54:17)
Well, thanks everybody for joining us. We'll see you next time.
Watch us on YouTube at YellowstoneProfessionalEd.co. Don't forget to like, share, and add to your podcasts. You can email us with questions, comments, and suggestions at [email protected].
