Permit sets a plans examiner does not send back

The organisation

Vance & Sons Civil is a six-person firm doing site works, grading and small structural design for residential and light commercial developers. Two licensed engineers, three technicians and an office manager. It submits permit sets to two county building departments, typically two or three sets a month, occasionally more when a developer is racing a season.

The problem

A permit set is drawings, calculations, specifications and a signed and sealed cover, presented in the order the receiving county's checklist gives. The two counties Vance works in order theirs differently, and neither order is the order the drawings are produced in.

A set submitted out of order does not get reviewed. It gets returned with a checklist item ticked, and the queue position is lost. In one of the two counties the review queue runs three to eleven working days depending on season, so a returned set costs somewhere between a week and a fortnight of programme — on a project where the developer is paying interest on land.

There was a second, quieter problem. The sealed cover sheet was inserted as a page in a set that remained editable, which meant the seal could be extracted from the file. Nobody had done it, and the firm's insurer asked about it during a renewal, which was the first anybody had thought about it.

What they tried first

The firm's method was a printed checklist taped to the wall beside the plotter, and a technician assembling the set against it. It worked when the technician doing it was the one who had done the last one. It did not survive holiday cover, and two of the returns in the previous year happened in the same fortnight in August.

A later attempt numbered the source drawing files to match the county order. This broke as soon as the two counties were worked in the same week, because a file cannot be numbered two ways, and the technicians started keeping two copies of every drawing. That produced a worse failure: a set submitted with a superseded sheet in it, which is the kind of return that costs more than two weeks.

What changed

Each county's checklist is now a preset. Sheets are dropped in and ordered by the preset rather than by their filenames, so the drawing files keep one set of names and one location and the ordering is done at assembly.

The set is bookmarked by discipline, which the plans examiners did not ask for and both have since commented on. The sealed cover is inserted as a template and the whole set is flattened on export, so the signature and seal are part of the page rather than an object sitting on it.

The firm's own addition, which it worked out rather than being told: the preset for each county also carries that county's sheet-numbering convention, so the numbering is applied at the same time as the order rather than being a second pass.

How it was put in

One afternoon, one engineer, both presets, built against the last accepted set for each county. The firm is six people; there was no pilot and no phased adoption. The presets were used on the next set that went out.

The only difficulty was that one county's checklist had changed since the last accepted submission, which the firm discovered while building the preset rather than after a return — which the engineer who built it points out was the first useful thing it did.

The result

Two counties, and no resubmission for a set defect since the presets were built. Assembly went from most of a day to about ninety minutes, but the firm does not lead with that figure: two or three sets a month means the time saving is modest and the avoided returns are not.

The seal question closed itself. The insurer's renewal question now has a one-sentence answer, and the flattened export is written into the firm's own quality procedure.