Construction and engineering
The site pack is due Friday and half of it is in the old template.
Contractors and engineering consultancies carry an unusually large amount of controlled Word: method statements, risk assessments, inspection and test plans, site procedures, tender packs. Most of it is reused from the last job. A framework win, a joint venture or a mobilisation is the moment all of it has to be current at the same time.
What usually goes wrong
These are the failure patterns we see described most often. None of them is a statistic; they are the reasons people give for why the backlog is still there.
Documents are reused, not rewritten
The last job's method statement becomes this job's, carrying whatever template it happened to be written in.
Tables and drawings do not survive a careless rebuild
Site documents are dense with tables, embedded images and landscape sections. These are where a naive conversion falls apart.
Mobilisation compresses the timeline
The document work lands in the same fortnight as everything else, with the client already asking for the pack.
A joint venture needs a third look
Neither partner's template is right, so someone has to move documents into a template that did not exist last month.
How a controlled migration runs
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Step 1
A representative sample
Not your average document: a spread that includes the awkward ones. Scope and price come from what the sample shows, not from an estimate of what the library probably contains.
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Step 2
Template configuration
Your approved Word template is read directly: its styles, numbering, cover page and approval tables. No separate template language to learn and nothing to rebuild by hand.
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Step 3
Batch conversion with automatic checks
Documents are converted in batches. Each one is compared against its source word-for-word and scored for confidence as it completes.
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Step 4
Exceptions, then human acceptance
Anything low-confidence or unusual is flagged with a reason. You accept the output, document by document if you want to, and a report records what happened to every file.
Documents this usually covers
- Method statements and RAMS
- Inspection and test plans
- Site procedures
- Quality and HSE plans
- Tender and PQQ responses
- Registers and permits
Who usually owns it
- Bid or proposals director
- Mobilisation lead
- Document control lead
- SHEQ manager
The questions people ask first
How do we know the text did not change? +
Every converted document is compared against its source word-for-word. A conversion that would lose or alter a word is rejected rather than delivered, and the comparison result is recorded in that document's report.
What about the difficult documents? +
Some genuinely are difficult: fixed-layout forms, embedded objects, unusual section breaks. Those come back flagged for review with the reason stated. We would rather hand you a short exception list than a library you cannot trust.
What happens to our files? +
They are stored for a maximum of 30 days and then deleted automatically, and you can delete them sooner. The security page sets out exactly what is stored, where, and who can reach it.
Our template is not finished yet. +
That is normal, and it is worth sorting first. Retempla reads your Word template directly, so the cleaner and more decided it is, the better every converted document looks.
How long does it take, and what does it cost? +
That depends on how many documents there are and how varied they are, which is what the assessment is for. Self-serve pricing is on the pricing page; a scoped library migration is quoted after a representative sample.
Talk about a site document backlog
Twenty minutes, no obligation, and an honest answer about whether this is a fit for your library.
Book a migration assessment