Ask any document controller how long a submittal review "should" take and they'll quote you the contract number. Ask how long it actually takes, and you'll get a longer, more uncomfortable one.
That gap is almost never about review quality. It's about ownership.
Where submittals actually lose time
A typical submittal passes through at least four hands: the contractor who submits, the consultant who reviews, sometimes a sub-consultant with visibility only if someone remembered to loop them in, and the document controller tracking all of it in a spreadsheet or email thread. At each handoff there's a moment where the submittal is technically "with" someone — but nobody's confirmed they know that. Multiply across every open submittal on a project, and most of the delay isn't technical review, it's waiting for someone to notice.
Three questions that expose it
- For any open submittal, can you name who it's currently waiting on without checking three places?
- How long has it been with them?
- If more than 48 hours, did anyone get notified, or did it just sit?
Most document-control setups can't answer #2 or #3 without manual digging. That digging is the 3x.
What actually fixes it
Not faster reviewers — clearer ownership. Once every submittal has one visible current owner and an automatic clock, review time starts closing in on the contractual number instead of drifting from it.
That's exactly what BuildVault's Document Routing Centre is built for: Ball-In-Court is tracked automatically on every submittal through workflow management, so nobody has to ask "who has this" — including you, three months later, reconstructing a timeline for an EOT claim.