Approved with comments: releasing the shop while the re-issue closes out

Approved is simple: proceed. Rejected is simple: fix and resubmit. Approved with comments means both at once.

The customer has authorized fabrication against the returned revision, and the shop should start, because the schedule is the schedule. The comments still have to be answered: the drawing gets corrected, re-issued, and the approval cycle runs to a clean close. Two obligations, two timelines, one document.

Some customers send the comments as their own sheet, either bound into the returned PDF or as a separate spreadsheet for each file. That sheet has to reach whoever picks up the drawing, alongside the returned document rather than in a separate email, and it comes back with the corrected file once the answers are written. Both go out again with the resubmittal.

Without something holding both threads, this gets handled as a decision. Either the shop waits for the clean revision, which spends schedule on tidiness, or the shop proceeds and the re-issue becomes a loose end. Take the second and neither track is really tracked: the authorization to proceed is an email or a conversation, and the pending re-issue is an intention. When the customer asks where their answered comments are, or the shop asks which revision is released, the answer is a search. On a job with many documents in that state, a re-issue or two goes missing, and it surfaces while the book is being assembled, against a vessel that has already shipped.

The fix is to treat the document as being in two workflows and track both. One track is the returned revision, statused approved with comments and released to the shop, with a record of when that release went. The other is the correction and re-issue, moving through your own engineering like any other revision cycle until the customer closes it. When the clean approval lands, the two merge back into one document history.

The route that correction takes through your shop is yours, which matters here because it is the same conversation. The customer’s specification dictates what they see: the codes, the statuses, the formats, the dates. Who reviews the correction internally, and in what order, is your process, and any approach that assumes otherwise will fight the way your shop actually works.

DocBoss runs the split as it is: one document, two tracked workflows, merging on completion. The shop proceeds against the approved return while the corrected re-issue closes the formal cycle. Both tracks sit in the queues and both show in the record, and the comment sheet stays with the document it came back with, so whoever picks up the drawing has the comments in front of them.

Approved with comments lets the job move before the paperwork closes. What it asks is that both tracks stay on the record.