Activity Inspection Requests

Reinforcement gets covered by concrete. Pipework gets covered by screed. Ducts disappear behind ceilings. There is a window — sometimes a few hours long — in which a piece of work can still be looked at, and once it closes, opening it again costs money. So the site engineer who has finished such a piece of work sends a request: come and inspect this now, before we cover it.

Activity Inspection Request is that request. In most contracts it is called an Inspection Request, an IR, or sometimes an RFI. It records what is ready, where it is, which drawing and specification it was built to, which engineers from each of the three parties are involved, and the verdicts that come back.

Where to find it

Menu	Contracting > Quality > Activity Inspection Request
Kind	Document
Document term	Required — nothing inspection-specific to configure on it
Licence	contracting-qc

What Is Being Inspected

The header answers the what and where, above the standard document book, code, term and dates.

Field	What goes in it
To	the party the request is addressed to — in practice the consultant
Area	the zone of the site
Building	which building or block
Specification No	the specification section the work was built to
Drawing No	the drawing, with its revision
Activity	what is ready for inspection — the single most important box on the document
Attach	a typed reference to a supporting document, not a file upload. Put the document's own number here — "Bar bending schedule BBS-104" — and attach the actual file using the document's ordinary attachment facility
Description	anything else the inspector should know before he walks out

Set your consultant up as a customer as well

To is a reference to a customer record. In practice the addressee of an inspection request is the consultant, so if you want to pick the consultant here — rather than typing his name into the description — you need a customer record for him alongside the consultant master file that the rest of the module uses. It is worth doing once at the start of a project; it is tedious to retrofit onto three hundred requests.

Write Activity as if the reader will not see the drawing: not "slab" but "Reinforcement fixing — slab level +12.00, grid C–F". The inspector reads this line on his phone in a lift.

Who Signs — Three Panels of Three

Below the header the screen splits into three panels, one per party. This is the fullest sign-off model anywhere in the quality group, and it exists because an inspection request is genuinely a three-way conversation.

The first panel is the site team. A Survey Engineer — the person who set out and verified the levels — followed by the site team's Civil Engineer, Mechanical Engineer and Electrical Engineer.

The second panel is quality control. A verdict — Reviewed By Qc — followed by the same three discipline slots, so the QC engineer of the relevant trade signs against his own discipline.

The third panel is the consultant. Again a verdict, and again the three discipline slots.

Each panel offers all three disciplines because the same document is used for every trade. A slab inspection fills the civil slot in all three panels and leaves the other six blank. A chilled-water pipe run fills the mechanical ones. Nobody fills all nine.

The two verdicts

The QC verdict and the consultant verdict each offer the same three answers:

Verdict	What it means on site
Acceptable	proceed
Acceptable with comments	proceed, and fix the listed points as you go
Not acceptable	do not proceed; rework and re-raise the request

The list shows these as short internal option names rather than translated captions, so read them by their order: acceptable first, acceptable-with-comments second, not-acceptable third.

Because the choices carry no remark box of their own, the reason for anything other than a clean Acceptable has to go in the document's description. Make that a rule for your QC team — a not acceptable with no written reason is an argument waiting to happen.

What Approval Does — and Does Not — Unblock

Nothing downstream depends on this document. That is worth stating plainly, because the shape of the screen suggests otherwise: it looks like a workflow, with a request, two reviews and two verdicts.

• A verdict of Not acceptable does not stop anyone pouring. The pour is stopped by the site engineer who reads the verdict.
• A verdict of Acceptable does not release the quantity for certification. Project Execution and Subcontractor Execution do not look for an inspection request, and neither does either extract.
• Committing the document creates no journal entry, no other document and no change to the project, contract or ITP it relates to.

If your procedure requires that no quantity is certified without an accepted inspection, enforce it with people and with a generic approval cycle on the inspection request itself, and audit it by reading the requests. Do not expect the extract to refuse.

Worked Example: Before the Pour on Tower A

Tower A, the residential tower for Al-Fanar Development, is at level +12.00. The reinforcement for the slab is fixed, the formwork is closed, and the pour is booked for six o'clock the next morning. Before the concrete arrives, the steel has to be seen.

Step 1 — the site engineer raises the request on 03/03/2026, as AIR-2026-0142:

To Dar Al-Handasah — the project consultant, set up as a customer record so he can be picked here Area Zone B · Building Tower ASpecification No SPEC-03-201 · Drawing No ST-A-104 Rev.CActivity Reinforcement fixing — slab level +12.00, grid C–FAttach Bar bending schedule BBS-104Description Pour booked 04/03 06:00. Cover blocks 25 mm, spacers at 1.0 m c/c.

In the first panel he names the survey engineer, A. Mansour, and himself as the civil engineer, M. Fathy. The mechanical and electrical slots stay empty — there is nothing mechanical about a slab of steel.

Note that the specification number matches row 1 of ITP-CW-01, the inspection and test plan the consultant approved in February. Nothing in the system checks that. It matches because the engineer made it match, and that is exactly why the plan's Report Reference No column is worth filling.

Step 2 — QC inspects. The company's QC engineer, H. Salem, walks the slab the same afternoon. Cover is right, laps are right, but two spacers are missing at the C4 corner. He records his verdict as acceptable with comments in the second panel, signs the civil slot, and adds to the description: "QC 03/03 16:20 — add two spacers grid C4 before pour."

Step 3 — the consultant inspects. R. Aziz from Dar Al-Handasah attends at 18:00, sees the spacers in place, and records acceptable in the third panel with his own name in the civil slot.

Step 4 — the document is committed, and nothing else in the system moves. The pour goes ahead at six because two engineers said it could. The next morning somebody raises a Pre-Concrete Inspection for the formwork readiness check, and a Post-Concrete Inspection once the sides come off — separate records, each standing on its own.

Later, when the month's execution is measured and 200 m³ of concrete goes onto the extract, AIR-2026-0142 is the piece of paper that says the steel under that concrete was seen by three people before it disappeared. That is the whole job of the document, and it does it well.