How Much Time Do Construction Teams Lose Looking for Information?
Helonic is an AI construction drawing analysis platform for project teams losing hours to revised drawings, renumbered sheets, and broken callouts. Construction teams lose about 5.5 hours a week per person looking for project information, according to FMI's survey of nearly 600 construction leaders. Add conflict resolution and fixing mistakes and it passes 14 hours, about a third of the week. This page breaks down where those hours go, what they add up to over a year, and which drawing-set problems in Helonic's review data send people searching.
Where do the 14 lost hours go each week?
| Activity | Hours per week | What it includes |
|---|---|---|
| Looking for project data | About 5.5 | Revised drawings, material cut sheets, and other project information |
| Conflict resolution | Almost 5 | Managing disagreements between project stakeholders |
| Dealing with rework | Nearly 4 | Assessing mistakes, their cost, and why they happened |
| All non-productive work | More than 14 | About 35% of total working time |
Source: FMI and PlanGrid, Construction Disconnected (2018), as reported by Construction Dive.
The three rows feed each other. An hour spent finding the wrong revision can turn into an hour of conflict resolution and then an hour of rework. That chain is why the search time matters more than its own row suggests.
What does 5.5 hours a week add up to over a year?
Straight arithmetic on FMI's figure, assuming 48 working weeks:
| Team size | Hours searching per year | 40-hour weeks |
|---|---|---|
| 1 person | 264 | 6.6 |
| 10-person project team | 2,640 | 66 |
| 50-person operations group | 13,200 | 330 |
A ten-person team loses more than a full-time person's year to searching alone. The drawing review time calculator runs the same math on review hours for your own team.
Why is the current drawing so hard to find?
Drawings change through addenda, bulletins, ASIs, and RFI answers, and each change can break a link somewhere else in the set. Helonic's preconstruction risk findings show the pattern on issued documents:
- Missing or broken cross-references were about 21% of flagged issues. A callout that points nowhere sends someone digging through the set.
- Packages with three or more addenda had about 35% higher issue density than packages with zero or one.
- Scanned or partially scanned sets had about 22% more document control and reference issues per page, and nobody can search a scanned tag.
- About 6 in 10 packages with specs had at least one spec-to-drawing conflict, which means checking two documents to answer one question.
The everyday version: a wall section calls out a detail that was renumbered in an addendum, so the super spends twenty minutes finding it and still isn't sure it's current.
How much rework comes from bad project information?
FMI attributed 48% of U.S. rework to two causes: poor communication at 26% (about $17 billion) and poor project information at 22% (about $14.3 billion), for $31.3 billion in 2018. Our breakdown of construction rework costs goes further into that figure, and the NIST interoperability study covers the file-exchange side of the same problem.
How can a project team get those hours back?
- Keep one current set and a sheet index that matches it. Sheet index validation catches missing, duplicate, and mislabeled sheets.
- Compare each revision against the last so changes are visible instead of discovered. Revision comparison highlights what moved.
- Check that every callout resolves to a real detail after each addendum. See how to compare drawing revisions.
- Tie RFI answers to the sheets they change so the next person doesn't have to find the email. Our drawing version control guide covers the process.
How does Helonic reduce time spent searching drawings?
Helonic reads every sheet of the issued PDF set and flags broken callouts, sheet index gaps, revision changes, and spec-to-drawing conflicts, each with a sheet location. The team fixes the reference once, and nobody else has to go looking for it.
Practitioner insight
“My project engineers spend the first hour of the day figuring out which version of a sheet is real. There's the addendum, the ASI, the RFI answer somebody pasted into an email, and a detail that got renumbered. By the time they know what they're looking at, the morning's half gone.”
Source: Conversations with project managers and operations leaders at commercial general contractors, synthesized from Helonic's buyer-side interviews, Q2 to Q3 2026.
Time Lost to Project Information FAQ
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Milind Sagaram
Co-founder & CEO, HelonicMilind is the co-founder and CEO of Helonic, where he leads product and go-to-market for AI-powered construction drawing analysis. He works closely with general contractors, project managers, estimators, and owners to understand how drawing quality drives project outcomes - and where AI can reduce RFIs, change orders, and rework. Milind has interviewed hundreds of construction professionals across project delivery roles, from preconstruction estimators at ENR top-400 contractors to facilities directors at institutional owners, and uses those conversations to shape both product direction and the way Helonic talks about the work.
- Construction project delivery and preconstruction
- RFI and change order economics
- Owner and GC workflows for drawing QA/QC
- Estimating risk and bid-stage scope assessment
How this page was researched: Hours-per-week, labor cost, and rework attribution figures from FMI's 2018 Construction Disconnected report for PlanGrid, a survey of nearly 600 construction leaders, as published by Autodesk and reported by Construction Dive. Annual hour totals are arithmetic on FMI's weekly figure. Cross-reference, addenda, and file-quality findings from Helonic's review corpus (1,000,000+ pages, 2,000,000+ issues) through Q3 2026, reported as approximate shares.
Last reviewed by Milind Sagaram · September 29, 2026