Submittal compliance refers to the degree to which a submitted product data sheet, shop drawing, or sample actually satisfies the requirements laid out in its governing specification section the specific determination a reviewer is making every time they review a submittal package against the spec it’s meant to comply with.
Thoroughly checking compliance means reviewing each relevant requirement in the applicable spec section for every submittal, not simply ensuring the manufacturer name lines up with the basis of design name. A product submitted by an approved manufacturer can still fall short of meeting the performance criteria, a required certification, or an applicable dimension and can be hidden in the depth of the spec section, which a name-matching review of the manufacturer name would completely overlook during a cursory review.
Cross-referencing a submittal against both the spec section and the related drawing detail is where thorough compliance review actually happens, since a submittal can technically match the written spec language while still conflicting with something the drawing shows for that specific application a dimensional clearance, for instance, that the generic spec language doesn’t address but the project-specific drawing detail clearly constrains.
iFieldSmart’s Submittal Compliance Review targets exactly this cross-referencing task, checking submitted product data against the applicable spec sections systematically, which matters most on projects with a high volume of submittals where manual side-by-side review of every single item against its full governing spec section isn’t realistic within normal review turnaround expectations.
A reasonable way to gauge whether a compliance review process is thorough enough: check whether reviewers are consistently opening the referenced drawing detail alongside the spec section or reviewing submittals against the written spec alone. Compliance checks that only reference the spec text and do not confirm the project-specific drawing application would miss a specific type of conflict that general spec language often cannot capture without additional external guidance.
Manufacturer data sheets provide both marketing information and technical specifications. Determining compliance in this scenario is more difficult because a dedicated compliance reviewer must have a strong understanding of and focus on the unaltered performance values and metrics, rather than being swayed by marketing claims that may not correlate with an evaluated performance value for the applicable code condition. If there is a lack of trust in a manufacturer’s claimed performance value, requesting an independent test report is the most effective way to resolve this uncertainty, since the data provided is considered the report; any marketing summary tends to omit the testing methods and related conditions.
