Documentation, Deadlines, and Details

The Binder Every AV Project Deserves

When you buy a house, you’re supposed to walk away with a binder — floor plans, a maintenance schedule, warranties, the works. Large-scale AV projects deserve the same treatment, and for the same reason: it saves real time and real money down the road. “It’s the client’s project, it’s their equipment, this belongs to them anyway,” Marques says. That means every closeout should include the final as-built drawings, manufacturer warranties, user guides, and — critically — all of the actual files: DSP files, programming files, everything bundled and turned over.

The point isn’t paperwork for its own sake. It’s making sure that whoever supports the system next — KONTEK or someone else — has a real baseline to work from instead of starting blind.

What Happens When Documentation Goes Missing

KONTEK has taken over rooms with nothing to go on: no drawings, no access to code, no record of what’s actually behind the wall. In those cases, the team has to pre-commission the space from scratch — pushing every button, tracing every cable, piecing together what’s connected to what. On a complex space, that discovery process alone can eat almost a full day, which is exactly why it’s billed as its own paid service.

The costs show up in stranger ways too. “There are instances where instead of going twenty feet from the table to the wall, it’s going a hundred feet down a hallway, looping, coming back, and then going to the display,” Marques explains. “You wouldn’t know that unless you have the drawings, the electrical drawings.” Without documentation, that kind of discovery is the only way to find out — and it’s rarely cheap.

Deadlines Are Dollars

“Deadlines are dollars,” Marques says — and he means it literally. Liquidated damages clauses are common in large AV contracts, and KONTEK has seen fees run $1,500 to $2,500 a day when a project misses its finish date. That’s why the specifications and drawings drawn up early in a project need to accurately reflect what’s actually being built, so nothing forces an unplanned delay later.

Part of hitting deadlines is understanding why AV goes in last. It needs a genuinely clean environment — no more cutting, painting, or patching, HVAC fully balanced. Skip that step and the risk is real: AV devices are purpose-built, fan-cooled PCs, and installing them while construction dust is still settling means that dust gets pulled straight into the hardware. “Your warranty is voided,” Marques notes — a manufacturer will take one look at caked-on debris and know the space wasn’t ready.

Why Swapping Manufacturers Isn’t as Simple as It Looks

One story makes the risk concrete: a client swapped their displays from one manufacturer to another without looping in their integrator first. The new displays stopped responding to the control system entirely. “They didn’t think about the fact that they went from, say, NEC to LG,” Marques explains. “Now your code needs to be updated, because the same control language for NEC — those commands don’t work on LG.” A seemingly simple hardware swap had broken the whole room’s control functionality.

The advice is simple: call before you change anything. “We’ll just talk through it,” Marques says — flagging what will be impacted before a client commits, rather than troubleshooting a broken system after the fact.

Setting a Realistic Timeline

A lot of the pain in AV timelines comes from schedules built without an AV voice in the room. General contractors put together a construction schedule and reach out to trades as they can, but as Marques puts it, “We’ll see something and we’ll say, ‘Hey, this schedule’s not realistic.’” Forty-two rooms installed, tested, commissioned, and turned over to the client in five days sounds efficient — until you actually try to do it.

The fix isn’t complicated: bring the technology partner into scheduling conversations early, have an honest conversation about dependencies and overlaps, and make sure any hard dates — a grand opening, a live event — are reflected in the plan from the start. “Bringing folks together early, talk through things, discuss it early on in the process cycle,” Marques says, “and you should be good to go.”