How Coordinated MEP Documentation Reduces RFIs

A poorly coordinated MEP document set doesn't just look careless. It generates RFIs that have nothing to do with the actual design, only with how that design is presented. And every unnecessary RFI has a real cost: review time, schedule, and eventually, trust between the design team and the field.

What an Unnecessary RFI Actually Costs

A widely cited Navigant Construction Forum study from 2013 found that a typical construction project generates close to 9.9 RFIs per million dollars of construction value, with an average cost of about $1,080 per RFI. Nearly 22% of the RFIs in that study never received a response. Scale that across a mid-size project and you're looking at real money and real schedule delay, much of it tied to clarifications that have nothing to do with the design itself, only with how it was presented.

When fonts, symbols, and annotations shift from one sheet to the next within the same set, the reviewer stops focusing on the system and starts interpreting the formatting instead. That creates three concrete problems:

• RFI volume goes up, not because the design is wrong, but because the contractor would rather confirm than assume.

• Cross-discipline coordination slows down, because architecture, structural, and civil teams each have to decode the visual language instead of reading it directly.

• Perceived quality drops, even when the actual engineering is sound.

Why This Happens

It's rarely a technical capability issue. It's a process issue: outdated templates, sheets copied from old projects without being cleaned up, or no internal standard consistently applied across everyone drafting the set.

How Ardebili Engineering Handles This

Our CAD and Revit templates are standardized across mechanical, electrical, and plumbing. Every set goes through a visual review before it moves into coordination, in addition to the technical system review. If a client already works with their own layer standards or Revit families, we build to that standard instead of imposing our own.

Checklist: What a Well-Coordinated MEP Set Looks Like

If you're reviewing MEP drawings from any provider, not just ours, here's what tells you the set is ready for real coordination instead of generating formatting-related RFIs:

• Consistent symbols and conventions across every sheet in the set

• Uniform title blocks across disciplines.

• Legible, consistently sized annotations.

• Aligned grid bubbles between architectural, structural, and MEP sheets.

• A clear legend present on every relevant sheet.

• No visible conflicts between what's shown in MEP and what's shown in structural or architectural.

Frequently Asked Questions

What causes most RFIs on a construction project?

Coordination conflicts between disciplines (MEP versus structural, for example), missing or incomplete information on the drawings, and dimension discrepancies between sheets.

Can BIM coordination solve this on its own?

A BIM model catches physical conflicts between systems, but it doesn't resolve documentation inconsistencies like formatting, annotation, or symbol use. Both are needed: model coordination and a documentation review.

When is the best time to catch these issues?

Before the set goes out to construction. Resolving a conflict at the construction document stage costs a fraction of what it costs once it's discovered in the field.

Why This Matters, Role by Role

• Architects review faster when formatting is predictable.

• Structural and civil teams coordinate models with less friction.

• General contractors get cleaner documents in the field.

• Project managers can hand off to clients with more confidence.

Coordinated Documentation Isn't Cosmetic

It's part of quality control on an MEP project. That's how Ardebili Engineering handles it on every project we take on. Learn more about our MEP coordination services →