A project engineer gets a question from the drywall foreman about a soffit detail that doesn’t match the reflected ceiling plan. The engineer checks the drawings and the specs, writes the RFI, attaches a marked-up sheet and sends it to the architect. Days later the answer comes back and goes out to the field. AI tools for RFIs work on both halves of that sequence, so a contractor who wants to test one needs a record of how long each half takes today.
This post sets up that record. It uses the definitions and benchmarks in a 2013 research paper from the Navigant Construction Forum, which the Construction Management Association of America hosts, and the settings in Procore’s RFI tool.
The definitions
Navigant defines an RFI as a written request from the contractor asking the owner to interpret or clarify a requirement of the contract documents. Its sample contract clause asks the contractor to state the issue, why and when a response is needed, and the contractor’s own reading of the requirement.
The same clause starts the response clock on the date the owner stamps the RFI received from the contractor and stops it on the date the response is stamped out to the contractor. The sample allows 10 working days. A footnote warns owners to say “working days” when they mean it, because most contracts count calendar days.
Procore’s RFI tool asks an administrator to set how many calendar days after creation an RFI is due, and it sends overdue email notices to assignees. Procore also tracks which party has the ball in court on each open RFI.
What the published benchmarks show
Navigant’s figures come from Aconex, which mined its records for 1,362 projects begun between 2001 and 2012. Each project had at least 100 RFIs, and together they logged 1,083,807 RFIs, an average of 796 per project. About 79% of the projects were in Australia and New Zealand, and 29 were in the Americas, so the averages describe that mix.
Across the sample, the average first reply took 6.4 days and the median reply took 9.7 days. A median is the middle value once the RFIs are sorted by time, so one RFI that waits two months for a structural engineer moves it far less than it moves the average. Projects of one year or less had a median reply of 7 days. Projects of two years or more ran close to 10.
On cost, Navigant’s estimate came from interviews with three US design and construction management firms. They put the typical RFI at about 8 hours to receive, log, review and answer, and Navigant priced that at an average of $1,080 per RFI.
The paper’s case study shows why the RFI log needs categories. A claim on a wastewater treatment plant laboratory cited about 4,000 RFIs. About 800 turned out to be repeats of questions already answered, and about 300 were answered the day they arrived by pointing to a specification section, drawing or detail.
Where an AI tool would show up
Procore’s Draft RFI with AI feature, in beta, shows the two places a tool can act. The user types the question and any cost or schedule impact, and the feature suggests a subject, a question, a cost impact and a schedule impact. A second step searches the project documents for information that could answer the question, which Procore says helps the user see whether the question has already been answered.
Suggested wording saves the project engineer drafting time. The document search can stop some RFIs from reaching the architect. The design team’s answer time sits outside both steps, so a pilot of a drafting tool should be measured on the contractor’s side of the clock. Tools that review drawings before the RFI stage, such as Buildcheck and UpCodes, would show up in the count of RFIs per million dollars of work.
How to measure it on your projects
Track three intervals for every RFI, in calendar days unless your contract counts working days:
- Days to draft: from the date the question reached the project engineer to the date the RFI was submitted.
- Days to answer: from submission to the date the response came back, the interval Navigant’s clause measures.
- Total days: from the question to the answer reaching the field.
Add a category to each RFI. Navigant’s list for an RFI coordinator includes “answered by reference to specification or drawing” and “previously asked and responded to.” Those two categories count the questions a document search might have answered before submission.
A worked example
The figures below are an example with round numbers. A general contractor exports 10 closed RFIs from one job, adds the date each question first came in from the field, and assigns a category. The contract allows 10 calendar days for a response.
| RFI | Category | Days to draft | Days to answer | Total days |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 001 | Design clarification | 2 | 6 | 8 |
| 002 | Answered by reference to documents | 1 | 1 | 2 |
| 003 | Incomplete plans or specs | 3 | 12 | 15 |
| 004 | Design coordination | 2 | 9 | 11 |
| 005 | Answered by reference to documents | 2 | 2 | 4 |
| 006 | Differing site condition | 1 | 14 | 15 |
| 007 | Design clarification | 4 | 7 | 11 |
| 008 | Previously asked and answered | 1 | 1 | 2 |
| 009 | Constructability | 2 | 10 | 12 |
| 010 | Design clarification | 3 | 8 | 11 |
| Measure | Example baseline |
|---|---|
| Median days to draft | 2.0 |
| Median days to answer | 7.5 |
| Mean days to answer | 7.0 |
| Median total days | 11.0 |
| RFIs answered past the 10-day contract time (%) | 20 |
| RFIs answered from existing documents (%) | 30 |
Days to answer has a median of 7.5 and a mean of 7.0. Two RFIs, the incomplete-spec question at 12 days and the site condition at 14, ran past the 10-day contract time. Three of the 10, or 30%, were answered from the existing documents, and those three account for 4 of the 21 drafting days and 4 of the 70 answer days.
If a drafting tool cut the median days to draft from 2 to 1, the typical RFI would reach the architect about a day sooner. If its document search caught the three RFIs answered from the documents before they went out, the architect would receive 7 RFIs. Navigant’s estimate of $1,080 per RFI is a 2013 figure from three firms, so price your own review hours before carrying it into a pilot budget.
Answer days depend on the design team, so a change in the architect’s staffing can move them during a pilot. RFI volume follows the job too: Navigant reports that projects of five years or more averaged slightly more than 1,400 RFIs, against 270 for projects of a year or less. Compare months at a similar stage of the work, or use a second job of similar size as a control.
RFIs that are late on activities with little float carry the schedule risk. The total float log shows which activities those are, and Navigant’s best practices ask contractors to submit RFIs at least 10 days before the response is needed.
Start with one active job. Export the closed RFIs from the last three months, add the date each question first came in from the field, assign a category, and compute the median of each interval before anyone turns on the new tool.