Building Supply Companies Editing and Proofreading Services

The specified product has a fourteen-week lead time and the slab is going down in three. You have an alternative that is, in every way that matters, the same thing — and possibly better. Whether it goes in depends on a submittal that has to persuade a designer who has never heard of your product and whose professional indemnity insurance is attached to their answer.

We edit what builders' merchants, distributors and manufacturers produce — product substitution submittals and equivalence justifications, technical datasheets and performance declarations, specification and product literature for designers, installation instructions and workmanship requirements, quotations and their exclusions, delivery, storage and handling guidance, warranty documentation and its conditions, compliance and certification documentation, product-specific method statements, and technical support responses to contractors and specifiers. Our editors work on the document that gets an alternative approved.

The substitution submittal is where a supplier either wins the specification or gets a polite refusal, and its failure is asserting equivalence rather than demonstrating it. A datasheet attached to a covering email asks the designer to do the comparison, and a designer under time pressure who cannot see an answer will say no, because no is free. We work through these so the comparison is presented attribute by attribute against the specified product, in a table, with the specified requirement in the first column, since the designer's job then becomes checking rather than researching; so every attribute in the specification is addressed including the ones where the alternative is not equal, with the difference quantified and its consequence stated, because a submittal claiming equality on everything is not read as credible; so the evidence for each claim is cited to a test report, a certificate or a declaration with its number and date rather than to the brochure; so anything that changes for adjacent trades is named — a different fixing centre, a thicker build-up, a different primer — as this is what actually costs the designer time; so the reason for the request is stated honestly, whether lead time, cost or availability; and so the submittal says what the designer is being asked to approve and what remains the supplier's responsibility. Submittals written this way get approved in a week.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including product data, pricing and project information. We are editors rather than designers, specifiers or technical advisers, and we offer no view on equivalence, performance or compliance. What we can do is make the comparison something a busy designer can check.