Engineering & Project Management Document Control

Tracking More Than 30,000 Workflow Actions to Find Approval Bottlenecks Across Hundreds of Engineering Projects

A multi-disciplinary engineering and project-management firm running hundreds of concurrent projects used Docwize to issue transmittals through governed workflows, track notification delivery per recipient, and report how many days each team held a document — before delays became disputes.

Two professionals reviewing engineering transmittal records and project documentation

30,000+ workflow actions tracked

Action requests, decisions and timing recorded by the workflow engine — no manual status compilation.

Delivery status per recipient

Notification emails tracked as delivered, opened, clicked or failed and joined to the action they relate to.

Days held per team, per project, per period

Section timing computed from action request and action taken timestamps, with the current holding section for open items.

Hundreds of concurrent projects

One set of workflow templates and dashboards applied across the firm's project portfolio.

The challenge

Every drawing, specification and submission moved through chains of review across engineering teams, client representatives and subcontractors spread over multiple sites. Transmittals were sent by email, so once a document left the system there was no record of whether the reviewer had received it, opened it or acted on the correct revision. Project status was compiled manually in spreadsheets and was already out of date by the time it reached the project manager. When deadlines slipped, there was no reliable way to show which team was holding the process, or for how long.

The approach

Transmittals became workflow items rather than emails. Each workflow template was divided into named sections corresponding to the teams involved, every action request carried a due date, and the notification emails themselves were tracked. The reporting then fell out of data the workflow engine was already recording.

•Register each transmittal as a structured record — document, revision, project, discipline, package, from and to parties — with an automatically generated reference number
•Issue transmittals through workflow templates whose nodes are grouped into sections per team (client process, engineering, procurement, project management, vendors), each action request carrying a due date with a default applied if none is set
•Track each notification email's delivery events — delivered, opened, clicked, failed — and join them to the action request so reviewers who never received a notification are distinguished from those who received it and did not act
•Compute section timing per workflow: the first action request in a section marks its start, the last action taken marks its end, giving days held per team and the current holding section for anything still open
•Publish dashboards of open and overdue actions per receiver and average days held per team, by project and period, and retain the full history of who received which revision and when

What the analysis revealed

Delays concentrated in specific sections

Section timing showed that hold time was not spread evenly across the chain. Particular review sections consistently exceeded the target, which turned a vague sense of slowness into a specific conversation with a specific team.

"No reply" often meant "never opened"

Delivery tracking separated notifications that failed or were never opened from reviewers who had seen the document and not acted — two different problems with two different remedies.

The spreadsheet duplicated what the workflow knew

Every status the project managers were compiling by hand already existed as a workflow state. Reporting directly from the engine removed the lag and the transcription errors.

Outcome

More than 30,000 workflow actions have been tracked without a status spreadsheet. Every transmittal is linked to a review step, a responsible party and a due date; every notification's delivery status is visible in a live report; and section-timing reports show how many days each team held each document, by project and period. The firm can now identify a bottleneck while it is happening — and, if a delay is later disputed, produce the record of who received which revision on which date.

Chasing transmittal status by email and spreadsheet?

Docwize issues transmittals through governed workflows and reports who is holding what, for how long. Get in touch to discuss your document control process.

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