This article was generated by prompting our AI support agent.

The prompt provided towards the bottom can be used to generate your own, updated version of this use case as the support articles the AI is trained on change over time.

This article contains information about the following topics:

Sarah Thompson works as a BIM Coordinator for Meridian Construction, overseeing a 12-story residential housing project in downtown Portland.

With eight years of experience coordinating complex construction projects, Sarah manages the flow of information between multiple design teams and ensures all documentation meets project standards before publication.

In her role, Sarah collaborates with Architectural Teams who submit furniture layouts and space planning documents, Structural Engineers who provide cladding detail drawings and connection specifications, and MEP Consultants who deliver door schedules and area calculations.

Each team reviews documents from other disciplines, adding their professional input through markups and validation decisions.

Sarah's expertise lies in understanding how each team's work impacts the others and making informed decisions that keep the project moving forward while maintaining quality standards.

BIM coordinators must understand interdisciplinary relationships, manage competing priorities, and translate technical feedback into actionable decisions that serve the overall project timeline.

Sarah's approval decisions directly impact the construction schedule.

Delayed approvals can cascade through multiple trades, potentially making planned activities impossible to execute on time.

As the final decision maker, Sarah ensures that all reviewer feedback has been properly considered and that documents meet the project's technical requirements before they become official published revisions.

Sarah must balance the sometimes conflicting opinions of different reviewer teams, using her experience to determine when concerns are valid versus when they reflect incomplete understanding of project requirements.

Final approvers control project timelines, ensure quality standards are met, and coordinate between competing team perspectives while managing the cascading effects of their choices.

Sarah serves as the Publisher in the approval workflow, holding the authority to make final decisions on document publication after all reviewer teams have submitted their validation indications.

Multiple Reviewer Teams participate in each approval request, with each team assigned specific responsibilities for validating documents within their expertise. These teams can approve or reject documents based on their evaluation.

Each reviewer team provides validation indications that Sarah can view in the documents tab, giving her insight into how each discipline has evaluated the submitted materials.

Submitting Teams create shared revisions and initiate approval requests.

Members who are part of submitter teams configured in a project workflow can select between workflows that their teams are configured for.

Members can be part of both submitter and reviewer teams, allowing them to both create approval requests and participate in reviews, or they may only be part of one type of team.

Publishers make final decisions while reviewer teams validate within their expertise areas.

Submitters initiate the approval process, and individual members may participate in multiple roles depending on their team assignments across the workflow.

During week 15 of the housing project, the architectural team submitted cladding detail drawings for the building's exterior envelope.

The structural engineering team approved the drawings, noting that connection points met load requirements.

However, the MEP team rejected the submission, citing conflicts with planned HVAC penetrations on the south facade.

Sarah reviewed both teams' feedback through the documents tab, where she could see the structural team's approval and the MEP team's rejection.

The MEP team had added markups highlighting specific areas where ductwork would interfere with the proposed cladding attachment points.

Using her coordination experience, Sarah recognized that the MEP concerns were valid and that proceeding with publication would create costly field conflicts.

She rejected the approval request, requiring the architectural team to revise the cladding details to accommodate the HVAC requirements before resubmitting.

Real projects involve conflicting reviewer opinions where markups provide crucial context, and experienced coordinators prevent costly field issues through careful evaluation of interdisciplinary concerns.

For most documents, follow the majority opinion when teams are split.

If 3 out of 5 reviewer teams approve while 2 reject, the majority supports approval. However, as the final approval team, you retain authority to override this if technical concerns warrant rejection.

When reviewer teams are equally split (50% approve, 50% reject), you become the tiebreaker.

Consider rejecting such documents to allow submitters to provide additional information or clarification that might achieve stronger consensus in a subsequent approval request.

Establish minimum approval percentages before starting workflows.

For standard documents, require two-thirds majority approval.

For critical structural or safety-related documents, mandate 100% reviewer team approval before you can approve publication.

When validation results show weak consensus (barely meeting minimum thresholds), reject the approval request.

This signals submitters to provide better documentation or address reviewer concerns before resubmitting, ultimately improving document quality and project coordination.

Analyze validation distributions systematically, establish project-specific thresholds, and use rejection strategically to improve documentation quality when consensus is insufficient.

Navigate to the approval request page where you can see the overview of all documents requiring your final decision.

The step ribbon shows your position as the final approval team in the workflow.

Click on the Documents tab to view the validation amounts submitted by each reviewer team for every document in the approval request.

Each row shows whether teams have approved or rejected specific documents.

Before making decisions, access the Markup section to view all annotations associated with the approval request.

Click the play button on individual markups to display them directly on the documents, providing visual context for reviewer feedback.

Return to the review section and submit your approval decision for each document. All documents in an approval request step must be either approved or denied before the request can advance.

Once you've decided on every document, submit your final validation.

The approval request will close automatically, and approved documents will begin publishing immediately while rejected documents remain as shared revisions.

Review all validation indications systematically, examine markups for context, and ensure every document receives a decision before submission to maintain workflow integrity.

You are working in a housing construction project.

Your job is to be the BIM coordinator of the project.

In this project administrators have configured different ways that parties can review documents together. The documents have been handed from party to party and they have all given their opinions on what they think should happen to the documents.

As a coordinator it is your job to look at the different documents that have been submitted and either approve or deny the document that the submitter has submitted for review. By looking at the different opinions that the reviewers have given you can make an informed decision.

Over the course of your career you have coordinated construction projects from small to massive in scale. You both have the knowledge on the individual needs of the people in the teams as well as the needs for each of the stakeholders in the project in relation to each other.

While others are busy with the specifics of the matters at hand you see the bigger picture. It is often overwhelming to take in everything at once and heavily rely on different tools to present the information to you in a way that is non-biased and shows each of the parties equally.

Since this is about a housing construction project the building is probably several storey tall.

Documents that are involved include:

Furniture layout documents.

Cladding detail drawings.

Door schedules

Area calculations

Documents that that are used as grounds for submitting a tender.

Documents are submitted by different people that draft the documents.

Different teams of reviewers have reviewed the submitted documents.

The documents have been handed from team to team and comments are submitted.

Opinions on whether the documents should be approved or denied are submitted by each of the teams.

The teams have performed actions like viewing documents document, adding markups, approving, rejecting.

Based on their opinions you are tasked with giving the final approval or rejections on each of the documents.

As there are many parties involved it is important that you clearly communicate about why you either approve or deny the document.

For example if someone submitted the opinion that the document should be denied and you approve it anyway you should tell them why you did that.

Also if they thought the document looked fine and you denied it you should tell them why.

Perhaps it is not their fault because it was not their part of the document that was wrong but one of the other reviewers need to make a change.

Perhaps none of the reviewers need to make a change but rather the problem lies with the drafter that submitted the document to begin with.

If it is one of the reviewers that needs to provide more context and information a new approval request will need to be submitted and this one needs to be rejected.

If it is the submitter that needs to draft a new version of the document the shared revision will need to be rejected and a new shared revision needs to be submitted and and approval for the new revision needs to be requested.

When opinions are given by the different teams it is your job to either approve for the documents to be published or deny the approval request and keep the documents as shared revisions.

The documents do not get published until all documents in the approval request are either approved or denied so it is important that the final submitter team that you are part of submits their decision.

Because of your experience with teams you know when they are not working well together and a decision is rushed or when they do not have the full information and opinions get skewed.

Only if you are completely convinced do you approve the documents.

You have control of the schedule of the project. There are many moving elements and a delay of one of them could have implications on all the others. If you do not get these documents approved in time you risk your planning to get completely out of hand. It is not just that there will be delays but some of the things that are planned will straight up not be possible anymore if things are not delivered according to plan.