You pay for the stamp and wait on somebody else's data
The box can't go in the ground until a registered PE seals the design, and the engineer is waiting on borings the GC hasn't sent. Your crew and your iron are already on site.
Most subs wait on submittals for material they will install later, and the wait happens before anybody trucks equipment out. Here the seal is a condition of entry: no crew goes in the hole and nothing gets set until it exists, so the delay hits a mobilized crew and a staged yard of steel. The data that opens the gate is held by the same party pushing you to start, which means you fund the cost of a decision you can't make.
The size of it
You pay the engineering fee, and you pay standby on a mobilized crew and a yard of shoring for days at a time. That's soft cost with no pay item and no change order behind it.
Any excavation 20 ft or deeper, or any surcharge outside the manufacturer's tabulated data, requires a site-specific design sealed by a registered professional engineer. You order that design and you pay for it. The engineer can't finish it without soil identification, geotech borings, surcharge loads, and buried-utility data, and every one of those inputs belongs to the GC or the owner. Typical engineering runs 1 to 3 days of PE time, longer on deep or complicated cuts, and that clock only starts when the last piece of data comes in. The crew is mobilized and the shoring is staged the whole time.
Three moves, in order
Step 04: Estimating system
The estimate maps one to one onto the job cost codes, so variance means something the day it appears.
What else costs shoring and shielding contractors money
The same mechanism in other trades
What shoring and shielding owners ask
Who pays for the engineered shoring design on a deep excavation?
The box can't go in the ground until a registered PE seals the design, and the engineer is waiting on borings the GC hasn't sent. Your crew and your iron are already on site.
What does it cost?
You pay the engineering fee, and you pay standby on a mobilized crew and a yard of shoring for days at a time. That's soft cost with no pay item and no change order behind it.
What do I do first?
Put the engineered design on the estimate as its own cost code, with a PE fee line and a separate standby line, so the waiting has somewhere to go.
What are shoring and shielding contractors supposed to be making?
No survey separates shoring and shielding, so there is no figure of its own. The nearest comparable trade in the reference is Excavation, which runs 21% gross margin, 14% overhead and 7% net profit before taxes at $1M–$5M, with a CFOS target of 10.5% net. Those are derived figures, not shoring and shielding's own. Read them as the neighbourhood, and read your own job costing as the answer.
Which part of the system fixes it?
The step is number 04, estimating system. The estimate maps one to one onto the job cost codes, so variance means something the day it appears. It comes from chapter 4 of CONTROL: The Construction Financial Operating System.
Everything on this page is something you can install yourself, andCONTROL is the order to do it in. If you would rather buy the finished result, SPM The Construction CFO does this work for shoring and shielding contractors as a service. It is a separate firm, Sulphur Prairie Management, LLC, run by the same author.
Wrote CONTROL, the 8 step system behind these figures. More about the author.