What a Submittal Is and Why It Comes Before the Work

Why this matters

On institutional work you do not get to install what you bid until somebody approves what you propose to install. That approval process is the submittal, and it sits between the contract and the first day of work. Shops coming off residential and light commercial meet it the same way every time: they win the job, order the equipment, and discover six weeks later that the approval they assumed was a formality has come back rejected, on a unit already sitting in their warehouse. The claim worth carrying out of this article is that the submittal moves risk: ordering ahead of approval transfers the consequence of a rejected product from the owner onto you, entirely, with no recourse. Reading a submittal package once you have one is a separate skill and a sibling article covers it; this is about why the sequence exists and what the sequence costs.

What it is, in one paragraph

A submittal is a package you send to the design professional or the owner's representative proposing exactly what you intend to furnish and install, so they can confirm it matches the design intent before anything is bought or built. It typically holds product data, a schedule of the items with their capacities and options, shop drawings where something is fabricated, samples where appearance matters, and calculations where performance has to be demonstrated. It comes back stamped with a disposition: approved, approved as noted, revise and resubmit, or rejected. The stamp is the gate.

What went wrong on a rooftop replacement

A mechanical contractor takes a school district project to replace four rooftop units over a summer break. The schedule is genuinely tight: the district's window is 9 weeks between the end of one school year and the start of the next, and units have a stated lead time of 14 weeks.

The contractor does the arithmetic everyone does. Fourteen weeks of lead time means ordering in early spring. The submittal review is stated in the contract as 14 calendar days for the engineer, plus transmittal time. They release the purchase order to the supplier at the same time they submit, reasoning that a 2-week review is inside a 14-week lead and the units will be built to the same specification either way.

The submittal comes back "revise and resubmit" on one line item. The engineer's comment: the scheduled unit's electrical characteristics do not match the existing service, and the roof curb dimension shown does not match the existing curb without an adapter that was not included.

Neither comment is about quality. Both are about fit, and both are the kind of thing a submittal review exists to catch. The revised submittal goes back, is approved as noted 11 days later, and the corrected order goes to the supplier. But the original order was already in production, and the restocking terms on a configured unit are not the terms on a stock item. The contractor now owns a unit configured for a service that does not exist at that building.

Where the reasoning failed. The contractor treated review duration as the risk and lead time as the constraint. The actual risk was never the calendar; it was that the review had a non-trivial chance of changing what gets built. Reviews on mechanical equipment come back with comments far more often than they come back clean, and comments about electrical characteristics and curb dimensions are among the most common. The contractor priced a 2-week delay and absorbed a configuration loss.

What a different call would have looked like. Release the long-lead item's order only for the portion that cannot change, where the supplier permits a staged release, or submit early enough that the full review cycle fits inside the lead time with a resubmit built in. The planning number is not one review, it is one review plus a resubmit: two cycles, not one. At 14 days each plus transmittal, budget roughly 5 weeks of approval calendar against the 14 week lead, which still fits, and which the contractor had time to do.

The dispositions, and what each one actually permits

The line that costs shops money is "approved as noted." It reads like approval and it is conditional. Every note is a change to what you submitted, and installing what you originally submitted rather than what the notes describe is a non-conforming installation that gets found at closeout, when correcting it is at its most expensive.

Why the sequence exists at all

Three reasons, and knowing them changes how you argue when you want to compress the schedule.

It protects the design. The engineer specified performance and the owner is buying performance. A substitution that meets the capacity but not the sound criteria, the electrical characteristics or the maintenance clearances is a real problem that only shows up in a document review.

It protects the operator. The facilities department is often a reviewer, and their comments are rarely about performance. They are about whether they can service the thing: clearance in front of the panel, filter access, whether it matches what they already stock, whether their staff is trained on that control platform. A department that cannot maintain the unit you install will be living with it for fifteen years and knows it.

It creates the record. The approved submittal is the document that later proves what you were told to install. When an operating complaint arrives two years out, the approved submittal is what separates "you installed the wrong thing" from "you installed what was approved."

What the sequence costs you in working capital

The submittal cycle sits ahead of the work, and nothing in it is billable in most agreements. The engineering, coordination and drafting hours are absorbed before the first payment application, so the whole cycle is an uncompensated working capital position on top of whatever your payment terms already impose.

Worked example. A small mechanical shop takes an institutional project with 6 submittal packages. Preparing each averages 5.0 hours of coordination and drafting, so 30.0 hours absorbed before mobilization. Two of the 6 come back revise-and-resubmit, at an average 2.5 hours each to correct, adding 5.0 hours, for 35.0 hours total.

Set that against the project's field labor of 400 hours. The submittal effort is 35 hours against 400, about 8.75 percent of field labor, spent before any of that 400 begins and before any payment application can be made.

Now the timing, which matters more than the hours. If the shop's terms are net 45 from an approved payment application, and applications are monthly, work performed in the first half of a month is paid roughly 60 days out. Add the submittal cycle ahead of that: about 5 weeks of approval calendar during which the 35 hours are already spent and no work has started. The shop is carrying its own labor for roughly 5 weeks plus the normal payment cycle before any of it returns.

Be careful how you read that comparison. The 35 hours are unbilled effort the shop absorbs; the 400 hours are gross field labor that still costs wages, travel and supervision to deliver. The 8.75 percent is a measure of how much unbilled preparation this kind of project demands, not a margin figure and not a return. What it is good for is bidding: a shop that has never measured this number bids institutional work as if the project starts at mobilization, and it starts about five weeks earlier.

What changes the answer: on a project with few engineered products, mostly stock items and no fabrication, the package count drops and so does the position. On a project with custom fabrication or a heavy controls scope, the package count and the resubmit rate both rise, and it is worth counting packages during the bid rather than after award.

What you can compress and what you cannot

You can compress your own preparation time, and that is where most delay actually lives. Packages sit unfinished in shops for weeks while everyone waits on the engineer who has not received anything yet. You can also compress by submitting the long-lead items first as their own package rather than holding everything for one complete transmittal, which most specifications permit and few contractors ask about.

You cannot compress the reviewer's stated duration by asking, and attempting to is how a shop becomes the vendor who does not understand the process. What you can do is ask, at the preconstruction meeting, which items the reviewer expects to comment on. Reviewers will usually tell you, because they would rather comment once than three times.

How to know you have handled a submittal correctly

Three checks, all before anything is ordered.

First, hold the stamped return next to your purchase order and confirm the model, capacity, options, electrical characteristics and accessories match line for line, including every note. If any line was changed by a note and your order was placed before the return, that is the moment to catch it, not at delivery.

Second, confirm the return covers everything you submitted. Partial returns are common and the missing item is usually the one with the longest lead.

Third, confirm somebody has read the notes who will still be on the project at installation. Approval notes get read once, by the person who prepared the package, and that person is frequently not the person on the roof in July. Attach the stamped package to the job file the field crew actually opens, and mark the noted items rather than expecting anyone to read the whole set.

References

• See related: How to Read a Submittal Package
• See related: How to Assemble a Closeout Package
• Trade-standard practice for construction submittal procedures and reviewer dispositions