If your team is considering electronic plan review, the real question isn’t whether it works. It’s whether your department can adopt it without new software, new hires, or losing control of your process.
In our on-demand webinar, Electronic Plan Review: Keep Your Projects Moving, Don Wilkins, CBO and National Plan Review Regional Manager at SAFEbuilt, answers the questions municipal teams ask most before making the switch.
Here is a Q&A breakdown of what he covers.
Q: Where should municipal teams start with electronic plan review?
A: Start by defining what a complete submittal looks like, before changing anything else.
Don recommends a written checklist for required construction documents, including:
- Plan sheets
- Geotechnical reports
- Project manuals
- Energy reports
- Structural calculations
Clear intake requirements cut down on incomplete submissions and rework before review even begins.
Q: Do we need new software for electronic plan review?
A: No. Most departments can run this inside the platform they already use.
Projects get assigned through the existing system, reviewers complete the work, and results are uploaded back into the same workflow. The change happens in how the team works, not in what they work with.
Q: What actually changes when plan review goes digital?
A: How plans get routed, reviewed, and documented.
Accepting digital files alone doesn’t change much. The real gain comes from defining how a plan moves once it arrives, who reviews it, how comments get recorded, and what happens next.
Q: Can we do this without hiring more staff?
A: Yes, by keeping your team as-is and adding capacity only when demand requires it.
Smaller departments often handle day-to-day work in-house and bring in outside support for complex commercial reviews, rather than hiring a full-time examiner for temporary workload spikes.
The department still runs the process; it simply adds extra hands when needed.
Q: How does this help a department that's already backlogged?
A. It leverages the same flexible capacity model, and it's often the fastest way back to a predictable timeline.
Retirements and hard-to-fill roles create backlogs even when demand hasn't changed. Layering review capacity on top of an existing team helps a department catch up and hold a predictable timeline.
Q: If outside reviewers come in, who's actually in charge?
A: The municipality, every time.
Where private provider models are allowed, an applicant can choose an approved third-party reviewer. Here's how that works:
- The applicant pays the reviewer, not the municipality
- The reviewer uploads completed work into the same municipal system
- The jurisdiction still performs quality control
- The municipality holds final approval
Getting paid by the applicant doesn't change who enforces code. Reviewers report to building officials, and the jurisdiction keeps the last word.
Q: What happens when permit volume spikes overnight?
A: The paper bottleneck disappears right when speed matters most.
A single storm can generate thousands of permits in a matter of days. On paper, every one of those sets has to be printed, routed, and physically carried before anyone can start reviewing it.
Digital submittal skips that step, so a department can respond at the speed the moment requires.
Keep projects moving without changing everything
Electronic plan review doesn't require a new system or a rebuilt team. It works best when departments start with clear intake requirements, define how plans move through review, and add support that fits how the team already works.
Watch Electronic Plan Review: Keep Your Projects Moving to see these approaches in practice, without slowing down the work you're already doing.
