Vendor documentation

Purchased equipment arrives with paper attached, and the paper is on the critical path more often than the equipment. The vendor's certified drawings carry the facts detail design is waiting for — footprints, nozzle positions, loads, connection sizes — and until they arrive and clear review, the foundations, piping and cabling around that equipment are engineered on assumptions. Each purchase order therefore specifies the vendor document requirements and their schedule, and the review cycle runs through the project's document control like any other deliverable set.

The friction is structural: vendors produce documentation as a cost after winning the order, projects consume it as an input to everything downstream, and the two incentives meet in the expediting function. Late or repeatedly-rejected vendor data stalls engineering in ways the procurement schedule never shows.

At the other end of the project, vendor documentation becomes a completeness problem: the certificates, manuals and final drawings owed to the handover package, collectable cheaply while the vendor still wants the final payment and expensively forever after.