Secure management of construction project submittals is vital.
Submittals include everything from architectural drawings, mock-ups, diagrams, and details on materials and equipment required for the construction project to be completed. Once a project is won, these details are shared with the architect, engineers, and others inside and outside the company.
Safe and secure distribution of submittal documents — including all parties’ acknowledgment and approval of the daily reports contained — is a core feature of Fluix. Most Fluix construction customers setup their Fluix accounts so that a single project is represented by a primary folder, with subfolders containing all pertinent documents that are shared with appropriate stakeholders.
Document Formats in Fluix
For documents where employees need to add annotations, fillable fields, comments, and send documents for approvals, the acceptable file format in Fluix is the PDF.
The reason PDFs are still so relevant and pervasive is that they are easy for anyone to create from virtually any software; they’re easily generated in a structured, visual layout to experienced employees who are used to working with hard-copy paperwork (or who need to print a copy); and they’re more easily secured for tracking purposes.
However, Fluix also allows admins to distribute other file formats for view-only access within Fluix on iOS devices as well. Most commonly, we see Microsoft Word, Excel, and image files such as JPG, PNG, and so forth.
Most construction companies will generate their documents as PDFs for distribution in Fluix.
Flexibility in Managing Groups & Roles
What makes Fluix flexible to many construction customers is the ability to restrict access to files and folders based on a user’s participation in a construction project (for example as the project’s superintendent or foreman) and their job classification at your company.
This role-based access gives managers and executives confidence that project employees (and subcontractors) will stay focused only on the projects they’re involved with — whether that’s a single project or multiple projects they need oversight on.
Fluix allows account admins to provide not only role-based access to files and construction workflows, but can grant specific access to Fluix to other stakeholders, such as data analysts, document and quality control personnel, and external third-parties such as architects, designers, subcontractors, or anyone else.
Submittal Workflows
At Fluix, we support easy custom configuration of submittal workflows and change requests. You’re not forced to follow a format for document workflows. One set of documents may follow one review-and-approval process, while another follows a different approval process.
They may follow a workflow similar to the construction submittal process flowchart below:
At each step in the process, participants can add annotations and comments on specific pages, review others’ annotations and comments, and add standard (or custom) stamps to indicate approval for all parties to see.
Notifications ensure parties are aware that someone has added their own contribution to the documents and reassigned the document to them to take action on. And full document and comment history is available for all parties included to see.
Managing Deadlines to Keep Project Plans On-Schedule
As Fluix account admins distribute submittals for review, annotations, and comments, they can select a deadline to ensure project planning is efficient.
Submittal documents can be grouped and distributed to a specific group of stakeholders at one time, or different documents can be grouped and configured to follow a custom approval process, one person at a time, with deadlines for how long each person has to review and approve the submittal documents.
Fast Configuration for Projects
Each customer is different in the construction process. Different expectations, different timeframes, and different preferences for communication. Understanding construction labor productivity can significantly impact these varying factors.
This is why your construction submittal process must be as lightweight, intuitive, and flexible as possible to put the emphasis on review, approval, and decision-making. Fluix makes this much easier than most construction management software because we put the emphasis on exactly those tasks, streamlining interfaces for ease-of-use but providing maximum customization in terms of configurability.
If you’re looking to truly transform and digitize your construction submittal processes, you must avoid the need to require stakeholders to re-print, re-scan, or even attach documents to emails. Fluix keeps everything self-contained and automated, so that work actually flows.
