As an Electrical Engineer and MEP Consultant working on DEWA and UAE authority submissions, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about a stage of our work that rarely gets talked about outside the industry — the approval process itself.
Most experienced MEP design engineers I’ve spoken with share the same frustration: the approval stage sometimes undoes everything — unexpected errors, missed updates to regulations, or details lost somewhere in a long design process — leading to endless revision cycles.
Reflecting on my own submissions over the years, I keep coming back to the same question: local codes and regulations are accessible, sure, but realistically, how much time do we spend reading through them, cross-checking every clause, just to end up complying to a single reviewer comment weeks later?
What if there was an assistive tool that could help detect, review, and suggest corrections to MEP drawings before submission — something that works alongside how an engineer already thinks and designs, not against it?
I’m not talking about replacing engineering judgment — I’m talking about reducing the hours spent manually cross-referencing codes, so more time goes into actual design thinking, not repetitive compliance-checking.
I’d genuinely love to hear from fellow engineers on this: how much of your time on a typical project goes into revisions caused by things that could’ve been caught earlier? If you had a reliable assistive tool in your corner — something like a trusted buddy at work, quietly double-checking things before submission — would that actually change how you work? Or is there something about the process I’m not seeing?