Clear Creek Mechanical
How a commercial HVAC contractor eliminated hours of manual submittal work — and the costly mistakes that happened when that work didn't get done
Clear Creek Mechanical is a Colorado commercial HVAC contractor. Every project starts the same way: a stack of equipment submittals — dozens of pages of manufacturer documentation that has to become a working equipment list before procurement and the field can plan around it.
That work fell to Patricia, Clear Creek's administrator, on top of everything else on her plate, and a single submittal could eat hours. It was so onerous that the list sometimes never got built at all — most memorably, a pallet holding roughly $70,000 of equipment turned up in Clear Creek's own warehouse, ordered for a project that had wrapped six months earlier.
We didn't start with a tool. We started with Patricia and her project managers, working through real Clear Creek submittals alongside the people who do the work. What came back is software that reads each submittal the way a careful administrator would, with Clear Creek's own hard-won rules built explicitly into how every line gets interpreted.
A generic AI tool would spit out a list Clear Creek couldn't trust without re-checking it by hand. So the system reads each submittal in four passes — extract, cross-validate, score the confidence of each line, and surface a short list of QA flags before anything moves downstream. A 35-ton rooftop unit listed without a CO₂ sensor gets flagged for review, so attention goes exactly where it's needed.
A submittal package that used to consume hours of Patricia's time, several times a week, now takes about five minutes to build and verify.
The more important change: every Clear Creek project now starts with a definitive equipment list — so procurement plans against a real document, the field knows what's coming, and items don't get ordered twice or once and forgotten on a stranded pallet.
Beyond the direct time savings, the value compounds downstream: fewer surprises in the field, cleaner procurement cycles, and operations that run on reliable data from day one instead of catching up to the paperwork after the fact.
Blue Fractal helped guide us through the AI process and implement a tool with our project management team. Beyond the direct cost savings, consistently having reliable data means our operations can run more smoothly, so there's savings from avoiding downstream issues. It's a great ROI for us, and we're preparing our next project with Blue Fractal.Josh Rosenberg — CEO, Clear Creek Mechanical