Knowledge / Workflows
RFI drafting and precedent search
Finding whether a question has been answered before, on this or earlier projects, and drafting the RFI or its response from the governing drawings and clauses.
Most RFIs are drafted from the sheet in front of the engineer. The detail is unclear, the question goes in, and a week later the response points to an RFI from four months ago or a drawing re-issued in the meantime that had already answered it. The responder, meanwhile, searches the register by keyword, opens the drawings and the clause, and writes a response that will be as hard to find next time. An RFI AI that drafts a question without references produces a worse RFI. Structured knowledge lets an engineer see what has already been asked about the element and draft with the drawing, revision and clause attached, while the engineer decides whether to raise it and the reviewer decides the answer.
What the workflow involves today
Notice the ambiguity on the sheet, or the clash between the drawing and the clause, and decide it needs a question.
Search the RFI register by a keyword or two, and skim the last few sets of minutes for anything similar.
Check the drawing register for a later revision of the sheet that might already resolve it.
Draft the question, attach a mark-up, and cite the drawing and the clause if there is time.
On the receiving side, find the governing drawing and specification clause, check previous responses on the same element, and write the response.
Log the response in the register under a title nobody will search for the same way twice.
Where generic AI tools fail
A keyword search of the register finds RFIs that used the same words. The RFI that asked about the same detail under a different name for the element, or the response buried in a minute rather than the register, does not appear. A general-purpose tool given the register does a better search of the same kind, and it still cannot read the new question against the drawing and the clause to tell whether it has already been answered, because it does not know that RFI 088, drawing 2310 rev C02 and clause 320 of the rainscreen cladding work section are about the same junction.
Asked to draft an RFI, the tool writes a fluent question without references, and a fluent question without references is worse than a rough one with them: the responder has to reconstruct which sheet and which clause it concerns before they can answer, and the response inherits the vagueness. Asked to draft a response, it produces an answer that reads as authoritative and cites nothing, which the reviewer must check line by line against documents they now have to find. The register grows, and the next engineer starts the search from nothing.
What changes with structured knowledge
When the RFI register, the drawings, the specification clauses, the minutes and the instructions are connected, a question about a junction is a question about an element the record already knows, with everything previously asked and answered about it within reach.
Before raising the question, the engineer receives the previous RFIs and responses about the same element, from this project and, where the firm allows it, from earlier ones, each with the drawing, revision and clause it relied on, and a note where a later drawing issue or minute has since resolved the point. Where a new RFI is still needed, the engineer receives a draft that cites the governing drawing and revision, the specification clause and the previous RFI it follows on from. The responder receives the governing documents alongside the question, with the earlier responses that bear on it.
The engineer decides whether to raise the RFI, and raises a better one. The reviewer decides the answer with the clause and the drawing in front of them, and the response goes into the register with the references that will let the next person find it. Time goes on the questions that need a decision, and each response can be traced to what it relied on.
We onboard a focused slice of your project data, configure the ingestion paths, extract a structured context graph, and build a workflow against the resulting structured knowledge layer.
Related to
This workflow reads the RFIs, the construction drawings and the construction specifications, and it leans on the minutes and instructions where a question was settled outside the register. It sits beside project knowledge search, which answers open questions across the whole record, and submittal review, where a query about a product often begins.
Does it search earlier projects as well as the current one?
Does it work with our RFI system?
How do we see it on our own RFIs?