Today, the Request For Information ( RFI ) process has become more of a Design / Build process rather than a simple request for information, as it was intended.    By law, the A/E team is required to provide complete and accurate Construction Documents.     I'll give you a moment to stop laughing.

In actual practice, most Steel Fabricators find that today's Construction Documents are full of errors and omissions to such an extent that the Structural Steel cannot be fabricated "per plans".    Sound familiar?       So what to do?  

If you complain about the incomplete Construction Documents, the General Contractor may accuse you of being incompetent.    The General Contractor typically has little sympathy for the Fabricator because he, unlike the Steel Fabricator, has a great deal of freedom in his methods of construction. The General Contractor does not need to provide shop drawings for his concrete work or wood framing and can often find a variety of solutions in the field to problems created by poor contract documents.    Because shop drawing must be provided for Structural Steel, all errors in construction documents must be resolved by the shop drawings and then those drawings approved by the engineer prior to construction.   This is a much higher level of review than what the General Contractor is subjected to.

So what can you do about errors and omissions in contract documents.   If you just guess at what the correct design might be and generate shop drawings based on that guess, then those shop drawings may be rejected because they don't conform the the intended design.   This will require that you revise your extensively detailed shop drawings and guess again.  This can get expensive.

Most Steel Fabricators choose to under go the tedious RFI process, wherein the Fabricator generates documentation of the "request" which usually starts out by describing the error or omission in the Construction Documents, then, when possible, offers his preferred solution in the form of drawings and explanations.   By doing this, the Fabricator is indeed designing the project, for which he is never compensated.   It is important to note that, the Fabricator is not authorized, licensed or insured for such design work.    So the wording of RFI's must always be in the form of a request.    Something similar to the TV show "Jeopardy".    In our case "could you put that in the form of a request please".

The A/E team rarely responds quickly to RFI's which robs the Fabricator of the time needed to actually fabricate the steel.   As the weeks click by, the pressure to install the steel grows, but your hands are tied because the design is still not complete.   To say that this causes a hardship for the Fabricator would be a perfect example of "British understatement".

Here is what I do at Stout Detailing to provide a solution to this ever increasing problem.
Errors and Omission in the Construction Documents are identified early in the project, often during bidding.   Complete and thorough RFI's are generated, issued to the Fabricator and a summary is created and maintained.    

If a Fabricator has a suggested solution to the problem, I may generate drawings, 3D images, fly through animations and/or web models to fully explain the suggested solution so that the A/E team, indeed anybody, can understand exactly what the Fabricator is proposing.    

This very thorough approach is important because when the RFI is finally reviewed and accepted, the Fabricator now has a complete answer to the original error or omission and can proceed immediately with shop drawings, approvals, fabrication, erection and billing.

The Web Model is a valuable tool that allows anyone with a computer and email to not only see the entire project in 3D, but actually navigate around the model to look at any connection or detail desired.   By attaching a Web Model to a RFI, the decision making process for the A/E team is greatly enhanced.   I am always available to answer questions for the A/E team during this process, whether is about how to use the Web Model or the RFI itself.

Click Here for Web Model Instructions.

Click Here for a Steel Stair Web Model Sample.