Engineering Submittal Review Automation: A Practical Guide

Engineering submittal review automation is becoming less of a competitive edge and more of a baseline expectation. The volume of submittals arriving at engineering firms during the construction phase hasn't changed, but tolerance for slow turnaround, missed compliance issues, and rejected documents has dropped. 

Construction teams are running tighter schedules. Project managers are pushing materials faster. And the expectation that engineers return thorough, defensible reviews hasn't moved an inch. Something has to give. For a growing number of firms, that something is the manual process.

The Burden Engineering Firms Actually Carry

Reviewing submittals looks different depending on where you sit on a project. GCs and subs are focused on getting documents submitted. Engineering firms are focused on getting them right, and that's a different job entirely.

By the time a submittal reaches a PE's desk, it has already traveled through a sub's internal process and a GC's initial pass. It arrives carrying schedule pressure and an implicit assumption that the engineering review will be fast. What it often carries instead is non-compliant items, missing data, and characteristics that don't match the specification section they're supposed to satisfy.

The manual effort required to catch those issues adds up. Reviewing a single complex submittal means reading product data sheets line by line, cross-referencing multiple spec sections, checking construction documents against project specifications, and making a call on every characteristic. An air handling unit alone can contain 60 or more technical characteristics. Work through dozens of those during a project startup phase, and the hours disappear fast.

The Real Cost of Getting It Wrong

Every missed non-compliant item has a downstream consequence. A submittal that gets approved with a wrong refrigerant type, incorrect light transmittance value, or missing warranty language doesn't stay a paperwork problem. It becomes a field problem. And field problems on construction projects are expensive, both in money and in the relationships that keep work coming.

A recent survey found that only 27% of architecture, engineering, and construction professionals are currently using AI, even as early adopters report meaningful results. The gap between awareness and adoption is real. For engineering firms, the hesitation often comes down to one specific concern: can an AI-powered tool actually perform the kind of technical analysis that engineering review demands?

Where the Manual Submittal Review Process Breaks Down

The problem isn't just time. Manual reviews introduce risk in ways that compound across multiple projects:

• Junior engineers working through the submittal process without deep familiarity with a given spec section can miss characteristics that are wrong on their face.

• High volume during startup creates conditions where reviews get rushed and corners get cut.

• Contradictions between drawings and project specifications, which appear more often than anyone wants to admit, create ambiguity that manual reviewers either catch or don't.

• Incomplete records mean that once a submittal is approved, what was actually checked often lives in a handwritten note or a spreadsheet cell.

Reducing errors in the review process isn't just an efficiency goal. It's about having a defensible record when something surfaces in the field. For firms that put a professional seal on approved documents, that record matters.

Improving communication between the engineering firm, the GC, and the design team also depends on the quality of what gets returned with a reviewed submittal. Vague markup comments slow everything down. Specific, documented findings move construction forward.

How AI-Powered Submittal Review Works in Practice

What Automated Submittal Review Actually Does

AI-powered submittal review tools are designed specifically to handle the extraction and comparison layer of the review process. The tool reads the submittal, identifies individual products, extracts every technical characteristic from the product data, and checks each against the relevant spec section in the project documents. Every pass, fail, and unknown is documented with a reason. Source document evidence is available at a click.

What it doesn't do is replace engineering judgment. Submittals involving substitution requests, performance-based project specifications, or characteristics requiring contextual interpretation still need a PE's eyes and final sign-off. The AI-powered process handles the data comparison work. The final call on compliance and approvals stays with the engineer.

The "unknown" category is worth explaining, because it's commonly misread. An unknown doesn't mean the tool couldn't understand the submittal. It means the critical information needed to make a determination isn't present on the submittal or isn't defined in the spec. That's useful. It tells the reviewer exactly where to ask questions before the document goes back out.

Managing Submittals Across Projects

For firms that manage submittals across multiple projects simultaneously, the volume problem is real. AI-powered review doesn't just speed up a single document. It changes the capacity equation across the board. Construction teams that previously needed to triage which submittals got careful review and which got a quick pass can run every product data submittal through the same thorough process and make better decisions about where human review time goes.

Jacob Delargy, Project Engineer at Monteith Construction, described the shift after his team adopted BuildSync on a $100M+ school construction project:

"BuildSync has helped us review multiple submittals against multiple specs that I would not have thought to reference during my own review process." 

That's automation making review more thorough, not less.

Tom Port, the co-founder of BuildSync, says:

“What surprises most engineering firms is that the AI doesn’t replace engineering judgment, it actually sharpens where that judgment gets applied. The software handles the repetitive extraction and comparison work, but the engineer still makes the final call on substitutions, ambiguous specifications, or anything requiring context from the project. What firms realize pretty quickly is that the AI is taking away the administrative burden of review, not the professional responsibility.”

Managing Project Documents: The Trust-But-Verify Principle

For engineering firms, the ability to verify is non-negotiable. Approving a submittal based on an automated output, with no visibility into where each determination came from, isn't a workable process.

A well-built automated submittal review tool shows its work. For every characteristic, the reviewer can pull the original page from the submittal, with the relevant value highlighted, and the corresponding page from the construction documents showing the requirement. No hunting through project documents. The source evidence surfaces at a click.

BuildSync's visual dashboards show pass, fail, and unknown counts at a glance across all products in a submittal, so reviewers can prioritize where to focus before diving into the detail. The Excel compliance report breaks down every characteristic by product, with page references to both the submittal and the spec. 

Construction teams use this output to communicate findings back to subs with specific direction rather than general comments, which speeds up resubmittals and improves the quality of what comes back.

Tom Port, the co-founder of BuildSync, says:

“BuildSync handles the research layer of the review process. We extract the technical characteristics from the submittal, compare them against the specifications and construction documents, and surface the passes, failures, and unknowns with source evidence attached. The engineer still reviews the findings, applies professional judgment, and makes the final approval or rejection decision. We’re not replacing the engineer’s responsibility, we’re giving them a more thorough and defensible foundation to make that decision from.”

See BuildSync's AI-powered submittal review in action.

How to Manage Submittals with Automation: Practical Considerations

If your firm is evaluating tools to manage submittals and reduce manual effort in the review process, these are the questions that matter:

Does it review product data submittals? 

That's where automated review delivers the most value. Shop drawings involve spatial coordination and fabrication details that require a different layer of engineering analysis. BuildSync covers product data; shop drawings stay with the engineer.

Can you see the source documents? 

If a tool can't show where it pulled a characteristic from, it's not auditable. For engineering firms, that's a hard requirement.

Does it handle multiple spec sections per submittal? 

Some submittals reference two or three spec sections simultaneously. A tool that only checks against one will miss compliance issues.

How does it handle contradictions between drawings and specifications? 

A good system flags both, notes the relationship, and surfaces the more stringent requirement so the reviewer can write the RFI with key information already in hand.

What does integration look like? 

For firms whose GC clients are on Procore, BuildSync connects directly into that construction process. Submittals come in, automated review runs, and marked-up documents go back, without changing the workflow on either side.

Onboarding is faster than most firms expect. Monteith Construction's team was up and running after a single setup call, with the automated submittal review process handling the initial compliance pass on every product data submittal that came through. Project outcomes improved within the first 30 days.

What Changes When Engineering Firms Adopt Automated Review

The real-world shift that comes with reducing manual effort in the submittal review process isn't just time saved. It's a reallocation of where engineering judgment gets applied.

When data extraction and spec-matching run automatically, PEs aren't spending hours hunting through project documents for characteristics. They're spending that time on submittals that actually require interpretation: substitution requests, ambiguous specifications, design coordination questions that can't be resolved by document comparison. The volume work moves through faster. The judgment work gets more attention.

The 2025 Autodesk State of Design & Make report found that over 76% of construction leaders are increasing their investment in AI, with administrative efficiency cited among the primary drivers. For engineering firms, the administrative layer of the submittal process is precisely where that efficiency is available right now.

Explore the types of construction submittals that benefit most from automated review, and how the process differs across submittal types.