Estimating low voltage work, part 9: assembling a submittal package

Part 8 listed the submittal package among the job-specific items a qualification period asks for, and noted that it is the one with the longest lead time. This post covers building it.

A submittal package is largely the same document every time a company quotes the same system with the same components. That fact is both the opportunity and the trap. The opportunity is that the package can be built once and reused. The trap is that reusing it without editing produces the most common failure in the trade, which is a package containing everything the company installs rather than what this project specified.

What this post covers

• What a reviewer is looking for. Why a bundled package is recognizable on sight, and what it costs.
• Where the requirements live. Division 01 against the technical sections, and the additions that exceed data sheets.
• The structure. Cover page, navigable index, and data sheets in index order.
• What gets a data sheet and what does not. Performance ratings against padding.
• Cropping and marking. Which documents can be cropped to the item, which have to go in whole, and how to tell them apart.
• Base packages by system. Building once, maintaining, and adding job-specific items on top.
• Substitutions and review responses. The separate track, and what an approval does and does not mean.

It is obvious from the other side

A reviewer can identify a bundled package immediately. Three camera lines when the bid carried one. Data sheets for faceplates and surface mount boxes. A ninety page line catalog submitted for a single jack. Two manufacturers offered for the same item, which many specifications return without review on sight. None of that reads as thorough. It reads as a package that was exported rather than assembled.

What the reviewer is actually doing is narrow: confirming that the equipment being furnished meets the performance requirements in the specification. Everything in the package that does not help answer that question makes answering it slower, and a reviewer who has to hunt for the one rating that matters is a reviewer who finds a reason to return the package.

The cost of getting this wrong is a full review cycle, and review cycles are measured in weeks.

Division 01 says how, the technical sections say what

Submittal procedures do not live in the section for the system. They live in Division 01, General Requirements, normally in section 01 33 00, Submittal Procedures. The technical sections say what to submit for each system: Division 27 for communications, Division 28 for electronic safety and security, and Division 08, Openings, for door hardware. Division 01 sets the format, the transmittal form, the numbering, the review period, the route it travels, and what counts as complete.

That section gets read before anything is assembled, because it is where the requirements that exceed data sheets appear. The typical additions are stamped engineering drawings and wiring diagrams. Both carry a lead time and a cost, and both have to have been priced in the bid rather than discovered during qualification.

Division 01 can also go considerably further than most contractors expect. Sections commonly require a signed certification statement from the contractor, a paragraph by paragraph compliance mark against the specification with every deviation identified and explained, tabbed dividers with page numbering within each tab, and a transmittal form from a specific project management system. An unsigned transmittal is frequently returned unreviewed. A package assembled to the company's own habit rather than to the section as written is a package that comes back.

Division 01 also sets the review period and the resubmittal window. Those numbers are not administrative trivia. They are the schedule cost of submitting a package that gets rejected.

The structure

Three parts, in this order.

• A cover page. Project name and address, project number, the specification sections being submitted against, the submittal number and date, the party it is being submitted to, and the company's own information with a named contact. Where Division 01 provides a transmittal form, that form is the cover page and it is used as issued.
• A navigable index. Titles a reviewer can identify without opening anything, meaning the component, the manufacturer, and the model number. Bookmarked in the PDF, in the same order as the pages, with a bookmark or divider for every component. An index entry reading "Camera" is not navigable. One reading "Fixed dome camera, 4 MP, model number" is.
• The data sheets, in index order.

The index is where most of the perceived quality of a package comes from, because it is the first thing opened and the thing the reviewer works from for the rest of the review.

What gets a data sheet

The reviewer is checking performance against the specification, so the sheets that belong are the ones carrying a rating the specification can be checked against:

• Cable, by type and category.
• Jacks and outlets.
• Racks, cabinets, and cable management.
• Cameras and lenses.
• Recorders, servers, and workstations.
• Controllers, interface modules, and relays.
• Power supplies and batteries.
• Door hardware, including locks, strikes, and power transfer devices.

What does not belong is everything whose selection does not affect whether the system performs. Faceplates and surface mount boxes are the clearest examples. Nobody is checking a faceplate against a performance requirement, and including it buries the sheets that are being checked.

The test is a single question: does this sheet carry a rating the specification names. If it does not, it is padding.

What can be cropped, and what cannot

Whether a document can be cropped has nothing to do with how long it is. It depends on how the manufacturer built it, and there are two kinds.

The first kind is a compilation. HES, Von Duprin, ASSA Abloy and the rest of the hardware manufacturers publish documents running a hundred and eighty pages or more that cover an entire product line, with each item laid out as its own self-contained spec sheet on its own page or pages. Nothing is shared between items. Submitting the whole catalog for one strike is not thoroughness, and cropping is correct here. Take the pages for that item, and take all of them. An item whose data runs three pages goes in as three pages, not as the one with the picture on it.

The second kind is a single data sheet covering several products together, where the ratings, listings, environmental tables, and certifications are shared across the products and appear once. They are frequently on the last page. Cropping that document down to the page the model appears on removes the UL rating along with the clutter, and what arrives on the reviewer's desk is a model number with nothing behind it. That is a rejection, and it is the single most common way a data sheet gets submitted wrong.

So the test is one question: can these pages be lifted out of the document and still carry everything the reviewer is checking, including the rating and the listing? If they can, crop to the item and include every page belonging to it. If the proof sits on a page shared with other products, the document goes in whole and the product that applies gets marked.

Marking is what focuses a document that cannot be cropped. Highlight or flag the model being furnished, and strike through the options, configurations, and models that do not apply. Many Division 01 sections require close to exactly this: cross out all extraneous text, options, and models so that only the item being furnished remains. The page stays whole and the ambiguity goes away.

The principle under both cases is the same. The package is narrowed to the equipment actually listed, and it is never narrowed by deleting the page that carries the proof.

Build base packages by system

This is where the time is saved, and submittal packages consume a substantial amount of time.

A company that installs the same components on every job of a given type builds the package once, by system: structured cabling, access control, video surveillance, fiber. Each base package holds the standard data sheets, already whole, already marked for the models the company actually furnishes, already indexed under titles a reviewer can read.

A specific job then adds to it: the components unique to this project, the stamped drawings, the wiring diagrams, and the cover page. That is an afternoon of work instead of a week, done inside a qualification window that does not have a week in it.

This is the same reuse that the parts catalog and the scope library provide, and it carries the same maintenance obligation. Data sheets get revised, models get discontinued, and part numbers change. Each base package needs a date and a periodic review, because a submittal built on a three year old sheet for a model the manufacturer no longer makes is a resubmittal.

One cross-check comes free with this. The base package and the estimate should contain the same components. When the estimate priced a camera the base package does not hold, one of the two is wrong, and finding that out while assembling a submittal is better than finding it out at delivery.

Substitutions are a different process

If the specification names a product and the bid carried something else, that is a substitution request, not a submittal.

It travels on its own track, with its own form, and its deadline is set by the specification and is usually early. Specifications typically require a comparison against the specified item, the reason the specified product cannot be furnished, schedule and cost impact, and a contractor waiver of claims for added time or money if the substitution does not perform. Many sections permit substitutions only for cause, such as a discontinued or unavailable product, and disallow substitutions for convenience outright.

Slipping an alternate product into a normal product data submittal and hoping it clears review is how a package gets returned without action. When a bid was based on an alternate, the substitution request goes in on the specification's schedule, separately, and the submittal reflects whatever the outcome of that request was.

What comes back

Stamp wording varies by specification, but the responses fall into three groups.

• Approved. Wordings include no exceptions taken, and approved with corrections noted, which means proceed with the noted changes rather than resubmit. Material can be released.
• Not approved. Wordings include amend and resubmit, and rejected. Nothing gets ordered, and the resubmittal window has already started.
• Receipt acknowledged. Used for informational submittals, which are filed rather than approved.

Two things about an approval are worth understanding before relying on one. Review is almost always stated to be for conformance with the design concept and with the information given in the contract documents only, and to not relieve the contractor of responsibility for compliance, dimensions, or quantities. And an approved submittal is not a change order. A reviewer approving a sheet that shows something outside the bid scope has not added it to the contract, and has not removed it either. Scope moves through the change order process, not through a submittal stamp.

The schedule consequence is the part worth carrying away. Material cannot be released until the submittal clears, so a rejected package costs a full review cycle on top of the time spent fixing it. On a two to three week review that is most of a month, on a project that has already spent its qualification window.

Bringing it together

Division 01 gets read first, because it dictates format, numbering, the transmittal, the review period, and whatever is required beyond data sheets, which is usually stamped drawings or wiring diagrams.

The package itself is a cover page with the project and company details, a navigable index with titles carrying component, manufacturer, and model, and then the data sheets for the components whose performance is being checked. Faceplates and surface mount boxes are not among them. A hardware catalog built as one self-contained spec sheet per item gets cropped to the item, with every page belonging to that item included. A data sheet covering several products with shared ratings goes in whole, with the applicable product marked and the inapplicable options struck, because the page carrying the UL rating is exactly the page a crop tends to remove.

Base packages by system are built once and maintained, with job-specific items added on top, because that is the only way this work fits in the window it is given. And an alternate product is a substitution request on its own deadline, never a surprise inside a product data submittal.

Next in this series: award, procurement, and the handoff.

Planning and device counts are numbers. Those live on the calculators. The estimating workbook that follows the method in this series is part of the Bid Kit. See the kits. The rest of this series is on the estimating page.

Related on this site

• Estimating low voltage work, part 8: following up and the qualification period
• Estimating low voltage work, part 7: inclusions and exclusions
• Calculators