Attua / Industries / Engineering firms
A consulting practice sells hours and loses them to writing. This page is organised the way a design office is organised, by discipline first and then by the chair the work lands on, because what helps a hydraulic designer is not what helps a bid manager.
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A design firm has one commodity and it is chargeable time. The problem is rarely that engineers are slow at engineering. It is that an engineer with 6 years of experience spends a meaningful part of each week on writing that has nothing to do with judgement: turning calculation output into a design report, answering the fourteenth request for information on a project, logging a shop drawing review, retyping site notes into an inspection report, writing timesheet narrations on Friday for work done on Tuesday.
That writing is also where fee gets written off quietly. Nobody puts a variation in for the extra 3 hours of report formatting, so it lands in the project margin instead. Multiply it across a practice of 25 and you have a real number that never appears in a board paper because no single instance of it is large enough to argue about.
The useful question is not whether a model can write an engineering report. It is which parts of that report are reconstruction of information that already exists somewhere in the project, and which parts are engineering judgement. The first category can be drafted. The second cannot, and pretending otherwise is how a practice ends up with a professional indemnity problem.
Discipline by discipline
Design documentation moves between 12d Model, Civil 3D and a stack of council requirements that differ by local government area. The repeatable writing sits in the operational works submission: the stormwater report narrative, the compliance response against the planning scheme code, the covering letter that lists every drawing and revision. A pack assembled against the council checklist, with the gaps named, saves a design manager a day per submission.
Analysis stays in SPACE GASS, Microstran or Strand7 where it belongs. What can be drafted is the design report that wraps the analysis, the load path narrative, the list of standards relied on such as AS 3600 and AS 4100, and the shop drawing review register that otherwise lives in somebody's email. Reviewing 60 fabrication drawings is faster when the comments from the previous revision are already lined up beside them.
Services design generates enormous volumes of specification text and a steady flow of contractor questions. Specification sections can be compared against the version you issued on the last 3 similar projects, so changes are deliberate rather than inherited. Contractor requests for information can be sorted by whether the answer is already in the issued documents, which a large share of them are.
Borehole logs, laboratory results and field notes become a report with a predictable shape. The factual sections can be drafted straight from the data, with every value referenced to the test record, leaving the geotechnical engineer to write the interpretation and the recommendations, which is the part the client is actually paying for.
Approval conditions, monitoring schedules and reporting obligations arrive as long documents and then have to be tracked for years. Pulling the obligations out of an approval into a register with dates and owners is tedious, error prone by hand, and well suited to a drafting workflow that a person then verifies line by line.
Inspecting 200 assets produces field notes, photographs and a scoring sheet, then somebody writes 200 short reports. The structure is identical each time and the content is specific, which is the exact shape of work worth automating first. The inspector still owns the condition rating.
Role by role
Years one to three
Spends a lot of time assembling: finding the drawing revision, chasing the survey, pulling numbers into a table. A drafting workflow removes the assembly and leaves the checking, which is where the learning actually happens. The deliberate design choice is that a graduate verifies against the source rather than forwarding what a model produced.
Running the job
Lives in email, requests for information and coordination. The highest value workflow here is triage: sorting an inbox by project and by whether something needs a decision today, with a draft reply attached where the answer sits in an issued document. Minutes from a coordination meeting become actions with owners rather than a file nobody opens.
Technical responsibility
Reviews other people's work and signs things. What helps is a review pack that arrives complete: the drawings, the calculations, the previous comments and a list of what changed since the last revision. What does not help is a confident summary that hides the thing worth noticing.
Winning the next job
Tenders through VendorPanel, Tenderlink, AusTender or a council portal arrive with a response schedule and a deadline. A compliance matrix built from the tender documents, plus a first draft of the methodology and the team pages pulled from your own capability bank, changes a bid from a weekend into an afternoon of editing.
Keeping the lights on
Owns the project accounting, the invoicing run and the uncomfortable conversations about work in progress. Variation letters drafted from the record of what was requested and when, plus a weekly read of projects where scope has moved and nothing has been raised, are the two workflows that pay for themselves first.
The line
In Queensland, professional engineering services must be provided by a registered professional engineer, or under the direct supervision of one, under the Professional Engineers Act 2002 and the oversight of the Board of Professional Engineers of Queensland. Victoria and New South Wales run their own registration schemes. None of them contemplate software as the responsible person, and nothing in this work changes that.
So the boundary is drawn before anything is built. These stay with a named engineer:
Everything on that list is a judgement that attaches to a person and their registration. Everything else in a project, which is most of the paperwork, is assembly and writing.
Fees and bids
Two commercial workflows matter more than anything technical. The first is the fee proposal. A scope arrives as a phone call and a site address, and a principal writes a proposal at 9pm because it is due Friday. If your scope language is already written down from 200 previous proposals, a draft can be assembled against the enquiry in minutes, with the exclusions and assumptions that protect you already in place. The principal prices it and decides whether to bid.
The second is variations. Engineering practices are poor at claiming them, not because anyone decides not to, but because raising one requires reconstructing a 6 week email chain to show what was asked for and when. A workflow that watches for scope movement and drafts the variation letter with the correspondence references attached makes the claim a 10 minute task instead of an hour nobody has.
If you want the wider picture before the build, start with AI strategy, then AI implementation.
Systems
How it runs
Always a Diagnostic first. A few days with your people, in the office, looking at real projects rather than a process map somebody drew in 2023. By the end of it you have a short list of candidate workflows, a view on which discipline to start in, and an honest answer about whether this is worth doing at all.
Illustrative example, not a client story
Picture a civil and asset practice that has won a condition assessment across 140 drainage structures for a regional council. Two inspectors spend 3 weeks in the field. Each structure produces a scoring sheet, a page of notes and 12 photographs. The reporting is then quoted at 4 weeks because somebody has to write 140 short assessments and one summary report.
In this example the field data and photographs feed a drafting workflow that produces each structure's write up in the agreed format, with the score, the observations and the photograph references in place and any missing field exactly as it was left. The inspectors review their own structures, correcting the wording and the few entries the draft read wrongly. The lead engineer writes the interpretation, the prioritisation and the recommendations, which was always the part worth paying for. Illustrative example, not a client story.
Data
Engineering practices hold other people's commercial information: feasibility assumptions, land acquisition plans, tender prices, defect histories. A fair amount of it is under a confidentiality deed, and some of it would be genuinely damaging to a client if it moved. That shapes how these workflows are set up rather than being a note at the end.
In practice: business grade accounts with training on your data switched off, each workflow scoped to one project folder or one document register rather than the whole network, a record of which workflow produced which draft so a project file can show how a document came to exist, and project level exclusions where a client deed or a government contract rules it out. Where a project involves personal information, such as landholder details in an acquisition or complainant records in an environmental matter, it is handled under the Privacy Act and the Australian Privacy Principles with the same care your existing procedures already require.
The practice also needs a written internal position that staff can follow without asking: which tool may see what, what never leaves the network, and who decides when it is unclear. Writing that with your discipline leads is often worth more than the first workflow.
Every job is scoped up front after a Diagnostic. Sam is based in Fortitude Valley, Brisbane, and travel is charged at cost from Brisbane. See the cost guide.
Questions
No, and we do not build anything that tries. Analysis belongs in SPACE GASS, Strand7, 12d Model or whatever your discipline uses, where the assumptions are visible and the output can be checked. A language model is useful for the writing that surrounds a calculation, not the calculation.
A registered professional engineer, exactly as now. Certification is a personal act by a named individual who has satisfied themselves about the design. Software can assemble the evidence that engineer reads first, and it can check that nothing in the pack is missing, but it cannot hold the registration.
Usually not. Most of the useful work sits on text: reports, specifications, correspondence, site notes, RFIs and tender documents. Where a workflow does need model data it is given a read only export of the specific attributes it needs, not access to the model itself.
It helps in two directions. A first draft assembled from your scope bank and your past proposals takes a principal less time to finish, and a compliance matrix built from the tender documents tells you early when a submission is going to cost more than the job is worth.
Business grade accounts with training on your data switched off, each workflow scoped to one project area rather than the whole file server, and a record of which workflow touched which document. Where a client deed restricts how their information is handled, that project is excluded and stays excluded.
That is a real risk and worth designing against. The version that works has the graduate check a draft against the source and mark up what is wrong, which is closer to how a discipline lead teaches anyway. The version that does not work is a graduate forwarding a draft they have not read.
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