The Silent Schedule Killer
When people talk about construction delays, they talk about change orders, RFIs, weather, and permitting. Submittals rarely make the list. They should.
A submittal that sits in someone's inbox for an extra week doesn't feel urgent in the moment. It's just a review that hasn't come back yet. But when that submittal is tied to a material with a 16-week lead time, that one quiet week just pushed an installation by a month. Now the trade behind it can't start. Now the schedule is compressing. Now you're having a conversation with the owner about a timeline you were supposed to hit.
The cost of slow submittals isn't just the PM's time — though that's real. It's the downstream schedule and budget impact that builds silently until it's too big to fix without pain.
Where the Time Actually Goes
The manual submittal workflow has more friction points than most people realize until they map it out:
Preparing the package. The PM or PE gathers shop drawings, cut sheets, and product data from the sub. Half the time the sub sends incomplete information. So you chase them, get the rest, and assemble the package. That's before any review has even started.
Internal GC review. Before it goes to the design team, the GC's own team reviews the submittal to catch problems early — wrong product, missing specs, coordination issues with other trades. On a complex submittal, this step alone can take 4 to 8 hours of cross-referencing manufacturer data against project specifications.
Logging and routing. Enter it into Procore or the tracking spreadsheet. Figure out who needs to review it. Send it to the right people. This should take five minutes but rarely does, because "who's supposed to look at this?" is a question that gets asked more often than anyone wants to admit.
The waiting game. Design teams are often reviewing submittals across 10+ projects simultaneously. Your submittal is competing for attention. So you follow up. Then follow up again. The PM becomes a human reminder system — checking in with architects, engineers, and subs who owe responses.
Processing the return. It comes back approved, approved as noted, or revise and resubmit. If it's rejected, the entire cycle restarts with the sub.
Each step has friction. Now multiply by the dozens or hundreds of submittals on a typical commercial project. Industry data puts the PM time on submittal logistics at 3 to 8 hours per week during normal phases, spiking well above that during peak submittal periods early in a project.
The Costs Nobody Puts on a Spreadsheet
The PM hours are quantifiable. What's harder to measure — but often more expensive — is what happens when submittals move slowly.
Delayed procurement. Materials can't be ordered until submittals are approved. If the approval takes three weeks instead of one, that's three weeks added to the procurement timeline. On long-lead items like electrical transformers, custom flooring, or precast concrete, you can't make that time up.
Rework from missed details. A single specification mismatch buried deep in a manufacturer's cut sheet can be catastrophic if it gets through review. One industry example: a rooftop HVAC unit submittal specifying the wrong refrigerant type — a detail on one line of a 70-page document. If installed, that's a warranty violation, a unit replacement, a 16-to-20-week reorder, and $75,000 to $150,000 in cost. All because one spec wasn't caught during a review that someone was rushing through because they had nineteen other submittals waiting.
Strained sub relationships. Subs can't start work until their submittals are approved. When approvals stall, they're sitting idle or being shuffled to other projects. The good subs — the ones you want on your next project — notice when a GC's submittal process is slow. It quietly affects who wants to work with you.
The cascade. One late submittal pushes one trade's installation window. That trade's delay pushes the trade behind them. By the time you're looking at the schedule impact, it's not one late submittal — it's a chain of compressed timelines and overlapping work that didn't have to happen.
What Automation Can Handle
The same honest framework from what can and can't be automated in Procore applies here.
What automates well: The logistics around submittals — routing them to the right reviewer automatically when they arrive, triggering review sessions in tools like Bluebeam so teams can start collaborating immediately, tracking status across every open submittal, and sending follow-ups on reviews that are overdue. These are high-volume, repetitive coordination tasks that eat PM hours without requiring PM judgment.
What doesn't automate well: The actual technical review. Reading a 70-page cut sheet and catching that the refrigerant spec doesn't match — that's still an engineer's job. AI tools are getting better at flagging obvious mismatches, but deep spec review requires domain expertise and contextual understanding of the project. The industry will get there eventually. It's not there today, and I'd rather tell you that honestly than sell you something that isn't ready.
The right setup automates the routing and tracking so your PMs and PEs can spend their submittal hours on the review work that actually requires their expertise — not on chasing emails and updating spreadsheets.
The Bottom Line
Submittals don't get the attention change orders do, but they're arguably more dangerous to a project's timeline because the delays compound invisibly. By the time you feel the impact, it's already downstream — in procurement delays, schedule compression, and strained relationships with subs and owners.
If your PMs are spending hours every week on submittal logistics instead of the actual review work that keeps projects moving, that's the gap automation is built to close. Not the judgment. Not the expertise. The busywork around it.
I'm easy to find if you want to talk through how your submittal workflow could work differently: goldsmithgrowth.com
Connor Goulding is the founder of Goldsmith Growth, where he builds AI automations that help companies eliminate operational busywork. He has a decade of experience in marketing and operations consulting, and an unhealthy obsession with making manual work disappear.