How Austin Commercial Uncovered Over $500K in Scope Changes Before Construction Began
On large commercial projects, risk rarely comes from obvious places. It hides in small drawing shifts, subtle note edits, and specification changes buried across thousands of pages. When those changes go unnoticed, they surface later as RFIs, rework, schedule delays, and unplanned costs.
That is exactly the challenge Austin Commercial set out to address.
Ranked #31 on the ENR 2025 Top 400 Contractors, Austin Commercial is known for tackling some of the most complex projects in the country. For this evaluation, their teams applied mbue Smart Overlays™ across multiple approved projects, including a 30-story Class A office tower, a 17-story university building, and a 1,000-bed residence hall, totaling over 2 million square feet combined, and thousands of drawing sheets and specification pages that changed significantly between design development and issue for construction.
When Manual Overlays Stop Scaling
Each project contained over 1,000 drawing sheets and more than 4,000 pages of specifications. Manual reviews with traditional overlay workflows quickly became slow, tedious and impractical. Small misses at this stage can translate into large downstream consequences.
A New Way to Spot Changes: mbue Smart Overlays™
With mbue Smart Overlays™, Austin Commercial automated the comparison of entire drawing and specification sets. Instead of hunting through PDFs, teams could instantly detect additions, deletions, and edits, including text changes down to the character level.
mbue Smart Overlays™ automatically aligns shifted drawings, content that moved between sheets, and flags changes that would have been nearly impossible to catch manually. At the same time, mbue Smart Specs™ analyzed thousands of specification pages, organizing changes by risk so teams knew exactly where to focus.
One estimator put it simply:
“Reviewing changes directly in the platform made everything clearer. The interactive interface was more intuitive than working from downloaded overlays.”
Turning Insight into Action
With mbue Smart Overlays™, Austin Commercial could:
See exactly what changed between drawing and specification versions
Batch-process thousands of pages to streamline the review process
Focus attention on the changes
Generate RFIs directly from identified discrepancies
Combine Smart Overlays™ results with RIB Software’s CostX® takeoffs to adjust scope and pricing in real time
“We combined mbue’s reports with RIB Software’s CostX® takeoffs to update quantities and scope. It made it much easier to identify where adjustments were needed.”
— Allison Koester, Preconstruction Technology Lead
The Impact
Across the evaluated projects, Austin Commercial identified over $500,000 in scope changes early, achieved a 35% reduction in review time, and gained complete visibility into changes across thousands of pages of drawings and specifications.
For teams responsible for pricing, coordination, and risk mitigation, that clarity made a meaningful difference. By catching changes earlier, Austin Commercial identified $500K+ in scope changes before construction began, reduced review time by 35%, and gained full visibility across thousands of pages of drawings and specifications, helping teams make faster decisions with less risk and greater confidence.
Seeing What Others Miss
mbue Smart Overlays™ delivers AI-powered alignment, sheet matching, text detection, and spec reporting, beyond what manual workflows can do.
For Austin Commercial, the result was clarity at scale, and confidence in every revision.
Download the Austin Commercial Case Study
Get a concise, customer-approved summary of how Austin Commercial evaluated mbue Smart Overlays™, the results they achieved, and firsthand feedback from estimators and project engineers across large, complex projects.
This case study reflects findings from approved projects and includes direct feedback from Austin Commercial team members.