RFI management by text

What the current RFI cycle looks like

1. Day 0, 7:30am: foreman in the field spots a conflict between drawings. Snaps a photo.
2. Day 0, 7:35am: texts the PM — “hey we’ve got a conflict on C-12, dim doesn’t match between A-201 and S-201”.
3. Day 0, 4:30pm: PM gets to the message. Opens Procore on laptop. Drafts the RFI, attaches photo, routes to architect.
4. Day 1: architect’s RFI coordinator triages. Routes to the right designer.
5. Day 2-6: designer reviews, drafts response.
6. Day 7-9: response routes back through Procore. PM forwards answer to the field.

The unfixable parts are the architect’s side — days 2-9 are designer review time and you can’t compress that. The fixable parts are day 0 (the 9 hours between the foreman noticing and the PM typing) and day 9 (the PM forwarding the answer to the field, which often becomes day 10 or 11).

What the Forward-mediated cycle looks like

1. Day 0, 7:30am: foreman texts draft RFI: dim conflict on C-12, A-201 says 14’-6” S-201 says 14’-0”, attaches photo.
2. Day 0, 7:31am: Forward composes a structured RFI with the dimension dispute, the source sheets, the photo, and the relevant spec section. Routes to PM’s approval queue.
3. Day 0, 7:45am: PM glances at the queue from her phone or desktop, edits one line, taps approve. Forward posts to Procore, RFI goes to the architect.
4. Day 2-6: designer reviews + responds. (Unchanged.)
5. Day 7, instant: when the response posts back to Procore, Forward texts the original foreman with the resolution + the source the architect cited.

Net effect: the day-0 delay collapses from 9 hours to 15 minutes. The day-9 delivery to the field is instant instead of a day or two. Total cycle time typically drops from 9-12 days to 6-8.

The structured RFI Forward composes

Forward isn’t guessing the RFI shape. It pulls the GC’s RFI template from Procore (or your Autodesk Construction Cloud account) and fills the required fields from the foreman’s text:

• Subject: derived from the question
• Question: the foreman’s text, cleaned up
• Drawing references: parsed sheet IDs (A-201, S-201) auto-linked to the current revision in Procore
• Specification section: inferred from drawing context or asked if ambiguous
• Location: parsed grid reference (C-12) or BIM room
• Cost impact / schedule impact: PM fills in during approval review
• Distribution list: pulled from Procore defaults for that project + RFI type
• Attachments: photo from the original text

The PM approval surface

PMs see the queued RFI in the Forward dashboard with all the context: the original SMS thread, the photo, the inferred fields. One-click approve posts to Procore. Edit before approve if the bot got something wrong. Reject + send back to the field with a clarifying question.

Most PMs approve 80%+ of bot-drafted RFIs as-is. The 20% they edit are usually adding cost-impact estimates or routing guidance.

What about the auto-close-out

When the architect responds and the RFI hits “answered” status in Procore, Forward fires an SMS to the original foreman with the resolution. He doesn’t have to refresh anything or check Procore. The answer comes to the same thread where the question started.

If the response is long, Forward summarizes and attaches the full PDF response. If the architect cited a specific spec or sheet, Forward links it.

Try the RFI flow now

Text +1 (682) 300-6750 with draft an rfi: dimension on c-12 conflicts a-201 vs s-201. Demo project will compose the RFI structure and queue it. You can also try what did rfi 142 say to see how Forward returns existing RFI responses.