Features

What Does attolist Track?

Attolist was designed for Architects to collaborate online with Consultants, Contractors and Engineers. The web-based software tracks submittals, submittal schedules, RFIs, Sheet-Specification Index, CCDs, ASIs, PRs, Change Orders and Addenda.

Built for Digital Review Through PDF

With tight deadlines and increased amounts of data, the construction industry is shifting towards an all-digital solution for transferring information. Firms are seeing data being sent by email and they are quickly figuring out that email won’t cut it. Attolist provides the design team and construction team a project website, so all parties share a central database. PDF versions of the submittal and RFI are logged into the website and the review process begins immediately instead of waiting for mail or couriers.

Submittal Log and Submittal Schedule

Spreadsheets and manual logs are a thing of the past.Attolist designed the submittal log for architecture firms to collaborate online through PDF with their design consultants, contractors and owners. Most firms use off-the-shelf spreadsheet and desktop publishing software that allows for error and redundancy. At the beginning of each project, architects reinvent their submittal log, which costs firms time and money. With attolist, the team can get started in five minutes.

A submittal schedule that finally makes sense. Firms can now take advantage of their submittal schedule with attolist and use it to confirm that submittals have been received. With built in automation, the submittal schedule items automatically close themselves as the items are completed. The number one complaint from contractors regarding design team submittal schedules is the information is scattered throughout the specifications. Now there is a way to pull that buried information from the specifications and make it readily available.

Take construction administration to the next level. All your submittal information from multiple projects can now be viewed in a single location from any web-browser regardless of where you are. Firms typically use billable employees to log submittals into a simple spreadsheet buried on an internal server. Attolist allows firms to designate one support person to log submittals in and out for all your projects. No more explaining where the spreadsheet is located on the server – just type in attolist.com and they have access to all projects in your office in a single view. This allows your billable staff to focus on reviewing submittals and focusing on what they were hired for.

Automation is key during construction administration. The most redundant task for an architect during construction is creating transmittals to design consultants and the general contractor. With off-the-shelf office software, you have to log the submittal into a spreadsheet and re-type the information multiple times into separate transmittals. This is a tedious task and allows for error in every step. Attolist eliminates the redundant process of transmittals. For hardcopy submittals, all you do is log in the submittal and select who should receive a transmittal and attolist automatically generates a transmittal in PDF format. The PDF file can always be printed later from the website, or you can save the PDF to your internal server.

Consider this formula taken from an actual large building project with 1400 submittals received from the general contractor and 3500 transmittals processed for design consultants:

On average it takes 1-1/2 minutes to open a transmittal template, type in the recipient’s name/address and save the file on an internal server with generic off-the-shelf office software. At 1-1/2 minutes per transmittal, that translates to 5000 minutes, or 87 hours saved on this large project…or an entire two entire weeks worth of time!

The only thing attolist can’t do is type your submittals and RFIs into the system for you. But after using attolist you’ll be convinced…

Tracking should never have been this complicated. Sending a submittal to 5 different design consultants should not require you to manually type in 5 transmittals. Fortunately these days are behind us.

RFI Log Online Software [Request for Information]

We all know nothing slows down the building process more than a contractor waiting for your RFI answer or submittal approval. You want this process to be as seamless as possible. That’s why Architects who use attolist have the best chance of not becoming the information bottleneck. Attolist is doing your part to avoid the chaos of the critical path.

The RFI log is 100% web-based which allows all users from the subcontractors to the design consultants to see the same information in a single glance. The process begins with the contractor typing in a question and uploading attachments. Once the RFI is saved into the system, the architect is immediately notified via email. Best of all — architects can login and forward the RFI to multiple design consultants simultaneously. This allows the architect to focus on reviewing the data rather than managing the data.

Other construction administration software requires you to monitor an RFI and forward it to your consultants one at a time. With their software you end up spending more time monitoring the location of an RFI rather than answering it.

See the diagram below for how attolist speeds up the RFI process.

An RFI can contain information that is not ready to become public. Attolist has implemented a confidentiality filter that allows information to remain hidden from certain users until it is ready to become part of the contract documents. Once the RFI is marked returned by the contractor, any user can see the results.

Contract Modifications Log

For years the FTP site and email have been the tool of choice for issuing CCDs, ASIs, Change Orders, Proposal Requests, Bid Packages and Addenda to the contractor and owner. The inherent problem is that these methods are difficult to maintain and organize. Attolist provides an easy-to-use online repository for all your construction data with automated time-stamps and numbering.

Tired of having to resend CCD’s or ASIs because the contractor or owner can’t find their copy in their email inbox? Through attolist’s contract modifications log, you issue the sketches to the project web site and your contractors and owners are notified by email that the information can be downloaded from the project web site.