The Door Schedule Disaster: Why Coordination Errors Happen Here (and How to Fix Them)
The three-way check that catches most teams off guard
You've seen it happen. The drywall is up, the frames are set, and suddenly someone realizes the door scheduled for Room 104 is a 90-minute fire-rated assembly—but the wall it sits in has no rating at all. Now you're looking at a change order, a schedule slip, and an uncomfortable conversation with the owner.
Door schedules are where coordination errors go to hide. Not because anyone is negligent, but because the information lives in three different places—and keeping them synchronized requires a level of attention that's almost impossible to maintain across a 200-door project.
The Triangle of Doom
Every door in your project exists in three places simultaneously:
A tag (usually a number in a hexagon or circle) that identifies which door goes where. Shows swing direction, location in the wall, and relationship to adjacent spaces.
A table listing every door with its dimensions, material, fire rating, hardware set, frame type, and glazing requirements. The "source of truth" for procurement.
Division 08 specifications that define hardware sets, closer requirements, and fire-rating requirements that must align with the schedule.
The problem? These three documents are created by different people, at different times, often in different software. The architect draws the plan. The spec writer (sometimes a consultant) writes Division 08. The door schedule might be generated from Revit, manually typed in Excel, or copied from a previous project.
When one changes, the others don't automatically update. And that's where the errors start.
The Errors That Slip Through
Here are the coordination failures we see most often:
A 90-minute door scheduled in a 1-hour wall (or worse, a non-rated wall). The schedule says fire-rated, the plan shows it in a standard partition. Which is right? Neither person checked.
Door exists in the schedule but not on the plan (or vice versa). This happens when rooms are added late or when someone forgets to update the schedule after a revision.
The schedule calls for Hardware Set "C" but the spec only defines Sets A through B. Or the schedule specifies a lever, but the spec requires panic hardware for that egress door.
A 3'-0" door scheduled for an opening that scales to 2'-8" on the plan. Often happens when openings are resized but the schedule isn't updated.
Two different doors with the same tag number on different floors. The framing contractor orders based on the schedule—but which location gets which door?
The Real Cost of a Miss
Let's walk through what happens when a fire-rated door is installed in the wrong location:
Not including schedule impact if this door is on the critical path to occupancy.
Now multiply that by the number of doors on your project. A 150-unit apartment building might have 400+ doors. If even 2% have coordination issues, that's 8 doors at $5,000 each: $40,000 in avoidable rework.
Why Traditional QA/QC Misses These
The typical approach is to have a project engineer or coordinator manually cross-check the schedule against the plans. They'll print out the floor plans, highlight each door tag, then flip to the schedule and verify the information matches.
This works. But it has problems:
- It's tedious. Checking 200 doors against a schedule takes hours. Human attention wanes.
- It happens once. After the initial check, who re-verifies when Revision 3 comes out?
- It misses context. The reviewer checks that Door 104 exists in both places—but do they also verify the wall rating? The hardware set? The fire-rating label requirements?
- Schedules are dense. A door schedule might have 15 columns. Eyes glaze over.
The Automated Approach
This is exactly the kind of coordination check that benefits from automation. The task is well-defined: compare tabular data (the schedule) against visual data (the plan) and flag discrepancies.
Here's how Articulate handles door schedule coordination:
AI reads the door schedule table from your PDF—including all columns: door number, size, type, rating, hardware set, frame, glazing, and notes.
Computer vision identifies every door tag on your floor plans, along with the wall type it's located in and the rooms it connects.
The system compares what's in the schedule against what's on the plans. Missing tags, duplicate numbers, and orphaned schedule entries are flagged.
Fire-rated doors are checked against wall ratings shown on the life safety plans. Hardware sets are validated against the spaces they serve (egress doors need panic hardware, etc.).
The output is a list of issues with exact locations—not just "Door 104 has a problem" but "Door 104 on Sheet A-201 is scheduled as 90-min fire-rated but is shown in a non-rated partition on the plan."
When to Run This Check
Door schedule coordination isn't a one-time activity. Run automated checks at these milestones:
- 50% CD: Catch fundamental mismatches before the schedule is "locked"
- Issued for Permit: Verify fire-rating coordination before AHJ review
- Issued for Construction: Final check before procurement begins
- Each Revision: Automated re-check takes minutes, not hours
Stop Checking Schedules by Hand
Tired of manually cross-referencing door schedules against floor plans? Articulate's AI can scan your PDFs and find missing tags, fire-rating mismatches, and coordination conflicts in seconds—not hours.
Catch the errors before they become change orders.
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