FieldPE
Three published figures, the arithmetic they imply, and the part of it no software can take off your desk.
All three come from the Navigant Construction Forum's study of 1,000,000 RFIs across 1,300 projects. It remains the largest published dataset on the subject. Everything below is arithmetic on those figures — there are no numbers of ours in this section.
Count the RFIs your office answers in a year and read across. The third column is the one in eight that, by the same study, never needed asking — the answer was already in the set.
| RFIs a year | Cost to answer | Of which avoidable |
|---|---|---|
| 100 | $108,000 | $12,960 |
| 250 | $270,000 | $33,480 |
| 500 | $540,000 | $66,960 |
| 1,000 | $1,080,000 | $135,000 |
| 2,000 | $2,160,000 | $270,000 |
It is the fully loaded cost of one question making a round trip: the field noticing it, a project engineer writing it up, somebody finding the sheet and the spec section, the architect or engineer answering, and the answer being distributed and filed. It is not a fee anyone invoices. It is hours, across several companies, attached to one question.
The 9.7 days do not add up. RFIs run concurrently, so a hundred of them is not 970 days of delay — it is a hundred questions each sitting about 9.7 days, some of which were on the critical path and most of which were not. Anyone multiplying that figure by a volume is selling you something.
And most of the $1,080 is somebody else's clock. The architect's review time is the largest share of it, and no tool on your side shortens that.
Two of them.
The writing-up. Finding the drawing, finding the spec section, filling every Procore field, attaching the sheet. On the projects FieldPE runs on we measure under two minutes from the email arriving to a drafted RFI sitting in Procore — that one is our own measurement, not Navigant's, and it is the only figure on this page that is.
Some of the one in eight. When the answer is already in the drawings, a tool that reads the drawings can say so before the question is sent. Not all of them — plenty of avoidable RFIs are avoidable for reasons no document contains — but the ones the set already answers are the ones most worth catching.
What it does not touch is the architect's review clock, and any honest estimate of what you would save has to leave that where it is.
Subcontractors email them. They arrive as prose, in a thread, with a photo attached and a drawing number somewhere in the middle. The cost is not in answering that email — it is in turning it into a record that Procore, the architect and the closeout auditor all accept.