What Gets Lost Between Design and the General Contractor

Last night I was at CEDIA, the trade conference for the custom integration industry. The conversation that stayed with me was with Joseph Kolchinsky, Founder and CEO of OneVision Resources. Joseph has spent more than twenty years building a service platform for custom integrators in the smart home industry.

In this post I share what he taught me about the communication deficit between design and the general contractor, why entire industries get built around problems that no one closes, and where the research has to start.

 

The Question I Asked Him

I asked Joseph one direct question. As an AI student and an operations accountant, what value can I bring to this industry?

He answered with two words.

Processes and workflows.

 

The First Problem I Raised

I raised the silent modification problem first. The line items that change between the estimate and accounts payable. The work that gets rebilled under a different number than the one approved.

Joseph did not see the point of it. His response was direct.

 Its normal for material and labor to change. 

He was not dismissive. He was honest. He has watched that pattern play out across thousands of integrator projects and he has accepted it as a structural feature of the industry. I read the room and moved to a different question.

I asked him about the communication deficit between design and the general contractor.

He agreed it exists.

CEDIA brings together the custom integration industry that absorbs what design and construction leave undone.

What the Deficit Actually Is

An architect produces a design. A general contractor builds it. Between those two events, information has to travel. Drawings. Specifications. RFIs. Addenda. Change orders. The intent behind each decision. The reasoning behind each constraint.

Some of that information moves intact. Some of it gets dropped. Some of it gets withheld. Some of it gets changed.

By the time the building reaches the people who actually have to construct it, the design intent is partial and the reasoning behind the constraints is mostly gone.

Who Absorbs the Gap

The general contractor absorbs the gap. They build through it. They invent the workarounds. They eat the cost of every upstream fidelity loss in their schedule, their margin, and their reputation.

The custom integrator sits one step further downstream. They install the low-voltage systems, the audio-video infrastructure, the smart home technology. They show up to a building that was built from a design that already lost information twice. The wiring path they need was not planned. The conduit they need was not run. The infrastructure they need was not specified.

They invent another workaround.

This is the part Joseph has spent twenty years inside of.

What OneVision Actually Does

OneVision is a service platform that supports custom integrators after the work is sold and the project is underway. The platform exists because the deficit exists.

Integrators need ongoing technical support precisely because the upstream chain hands them incomplete information. The service layer absorbs what the design and construction process did not transmit.

Joseph has built a real business at that seam. The seam should not exist. The industry has accepted that it does, and Joseph has built a company that makes it more livable for the people working downstream of it.

This is what I call the workaround economy. An entire service layer that exists because of a structural problem upstream, profits from it, and over time becomes a constituency with its own reasons to keep the problem open.

The honest read on Joseph's business is not a criticism. It is a description. A successful operator looks at a structural inefficiency and builds something that absorbs the cost of it. OneVision absorbs the cost. It does not close the gap. Neither do the BIM coordinators, the design-build firms, the construction managers at risk, the claims consultants. Every node in the workaround economy is doing the same thing in a different shape.

What He Told Me About Closing the Gap

After we talked about the deficit, I told him I wanted to change it.

He pushed back. The push was not against the idea. The push was against the approach.

Walking into an entrenched industry and demanding changes is not the entry point. Architects will do what architects have always done. General contractors will work around what they have always worked around. Outsiders who arrive with fixes get filtered out by the same workarounds that keep the system running.

He was right.

Change in a legacy industry does not start with a fix. It starts with making the existing system legible. The workarounds that look broken from the outside are often doing real work. The patterns that look like dysfunction are often informal contracts that hold the project together when the formal contracts cannot.

An outsider has to understand what each workaround is doing before they can propose anything that would survive contact with the industry.

The custom integration industry sits one step downstream of every design-to-GC handoff.

Where the Research Has to Start

The communication deficit between design and the general contractor is not a documentation problem. It is not a technology problem.

It is a structural problem about how information loses fidelity when it crosses an organizational boundary that was not designed to preserve it.

The research that matters would measure the deficit. Not in surveys. In the actual artifacts.

The Five Artifacts Where Fidelity Drifts

• The design intent at the architect's desk. The reasoning, constraints, and decisions that shape the initial drawings.
• The construction documents. What gets formalized for permitting and bidding.
• The RFI log. Every question the GC had to ask because the documents did not answer it.
• The change order. Every modification made during construction, with whatever rationale was captured.
• The as-built drawings. What was actually built, handed to the integrator who installs everything else.

The drift between those five artifacts is the deficit. No one has measured that drift cleanly.

The industry has built workarounds for the consequences and a service economy on top of the workarounds. Joseph's company is one node in that service economy. There are hundreds of others.

The research question is whether the drift can be measured at all, and whether the act of measuring it changes the behavior at any point in the chain.

That is the question I would want to spend a few years answering.

The Bottom Line

Joseph told me two things in the same conversation.

The first was that estimate-to-AP modifications are how it has always been. The second was that processes and workflows are the value an AI student and accountant can bring to the industry.

Both statements are correct. They are also in tension. You cannot improve the processes and workflows without addressing the modifications they currently absorb.

That tension is the work.

The communication deficit between design and the general contractor is one place where it lives. The estimate-to-AP gap is another. Every legacy industry has its own version. Architects and general contractors are not the villains. Custom integrators are not the heroes. The workaround economy is the system. The system is doing what it was built to do.

The question is whether anyone wants to design something different.

I am not proposing one today. I am pointing at the seam.

Accounting Saw

For a deeper dive on this topic. Read my work on this and where I see things need to change by joining my BMAC Community. 

 

Link: buymeacoffee.com/girlgoneverde/what-gets-lost-between-design-general-contractor

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Nasly Duarte is the founder of Mindful Dollar and a student in the Bachelor of Science in Applied Artificial Intelligence program at Miami Dade College. She writes about operations accounting, autonomous business systems, and the financial architecture that holds them together. 

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