A ‘non-compliant’ submission includes product data sheets, shop drawings or samples that do not meet the criteria. These can have a wrong manufacturer, insufficient performance rating, or missing required documentation.
Reviewers usually respond to a non-compliant submission in one of three ways. They may reject the submission and request a resubmission, or approve it with exceptions that the contractor must address. On rare occasions, reviewers may approve a legitimate substitution request if the performance requirement of the specification is met, even though the language of the specification’s basis of design is not met exactly.
It is far less costly to identify a non-compliance issue in a submission than to identify one after the material has been ordered or installed. A non-compliant door hardware submission review results in a resubmission, likely a two-week wait. If the hardware is installed and non-compliant is found, it results in complete removal and hardware replacement, as well as a delay to the work installed after it.
In this case, the individual instances are less important than the overall patterns. A subcontractor that consistently provides non-compliant submissions, resulting in multiple resubmissions of multiple items, likely has a poor understanding of the specification requirements or poor quality control and should therefore be reviewed by a project manager.
A commonly encountered type of call that should be identified directly is the ability to distinguish a truly non-compliant submittal from one that is not compliant but is a functionally equivalent substitute for what the spec requires. Rejecting minor deviations without regard to performance will create unnecessary additional submittals and schedule issues. A reviewer who is overly permissive in overlooking deviations may approve a submission that does not meet the project’s requirements. This can only be helped by experience and good judgment.
Tracking non-compliance patterns across an entire project, not just per submittal, gives project leadership useful early warning about a specific subcontractor’s overall quality control on the office side, before that same lack of rigour potentially shows up in actual field installation quality as well. A sub submitting carelessly at the paperwork stage isn’t necessarily careless everywhere, but it’s a signal worth watching more closely going forward. Answering each rejection from a subcontractor often has a positive effect on their subsequent submissions, as it helps correct mistakes.
