I have one long-time customer that only wants his equipment labeled and if I find any over-dutied equipment or signs of something in disrepair during data collection. If and when I find an issue in one of his buildings, he addresses it immediately. He doesn't care about reports at all and doesn't want to spend the time and money for me to create reports that he won't ever read or use. If he has to change something in the distribution system he just calls me to make the change to the model and provide a new label or labels if needed.

I bring this up because I gave another customer the same option yesterday to save time and money. They questioned how someone could possibly do without a report. After some discussion and without getting too deep into it, it was clear they did not have a good understanding of the data typically included in a report and what is not included and what may or may not need to happen if they were to make say, a breaker setting change or a fuse size or characteristic change. I find that this is pretty typical.

A small minority of customers of mine have EE's on staff, or other highly electrically technical people that completely understand what is in a report and look at it closely, but I find that most others do not and don't really care. They do not look at arc flash reports, trip curves, fault contribution tables etc. and wouldn't know what they were looking at if they did. They just want their equipment labeled and staff trained on safety and how to read and use the labels, and, much like my other customer, to know if there are any problems identified they need to address.

What is your experience and how do you feel about not issuing a study report for customers that just want the labels and to know if you find problems? Do you see any risk involved for the engineer by NOT issuing a report if the customer doesn't want to pay for something they will never look at anyway? In some ways I think by not issuing a report, it actually lowers your risk and the customer's as you are not giving the customer a tool they do not know how to use properly and could misinterpret and misapply. It forces them to reach out to a qualified person if they want to make changes to their system instead of trying to interpret a trip curve. Most people have a warning about making changes on the label like is highlighted in the example below. Do you agree or disagree?

Like most enforced things, the people who need it most are the people who understand it least, and vice versa. It's the same with IR studies; I have customers who want to fix discovered issues as soon as they know about them, and I have customers who will get the same corrections year after year and never do anything about them. But when the piece of equipment eventually does fail, or the inspector or fire marshall cites them for negligence, that paper trail will be crucial to establishing a pattern.

It seems to me that generating a report is not the lion's share of the time and cost of the job, so I'm not sure how much savings it would be to go without one. I mean, it is a somewhat time consuming process, but I'd be interested to hear what percentage of a job you spend creating the report versus data gathering (if you do that yourself), data entry, building the model, analyzing it, passing your findings to the customer and producing labels.

For me, the report is maybe 7-10% of the whole process. Having that as a CYA is very important, both for me, as well as the customer (whether they realize it or not)....I don't know what savings you're offering the customer, but I wonder if your first customer would see the value in having a documented history of their fastidious approach to electrical safety in the off-chance that something went wrong.

Thanks for your input. I can see your points and agree with the first sentence for sure.

RE: Cost, I get an annual standing open PO from the customer that doesn't want reports. I work T&M for them so the "savings" is just whatever hours I would have spent on reports that I don't have to. Besides labeling his buildings he calls me for things like, "where should I feed this new whatever from and what size should the feeder be?" or "one of the ground fault lights on this switchboard went out and the other two got bright, what should I do? Can you come help us troubleshoot?"

The second customer that was surprised that I would suggest not requiring a report is similar, T&M on an open PO, but I don't have an annual standing PO with them.

Working T&M is typically cheaper for them than if I quote the job and I don't generally make as much money as I would have fixed fee, but my risk being over budget on hours is non-existent. It's good to have a mix of T&M and fixed fee revenue, I think.

There’s definitely a difference between customers who want documentation for compliance and customers who genuinely use reports as an engineering tool. In facilities with experienced electrical staff, the report can be valuable because they understand coordination curves, fault current data and the impact of future system modifications. In many other environments, the practical outcome is exactly what you described: labels get used daily, while the full report ends up archived and never opened again.

One thing that still matters, though, is maintaining some level of documented engineering basis, even if it’s simplified. In Ireland and the UK market, companies involved in electrical risk management and compliance work, including IRS Ireland, often stress that traceability becomes important years later when systems are modified, incidents occur, or insurers request evidence of due diligence. That does not necessarily mean every client needs a massive report package with pages of curves and tables, but having a concise summary of assumptions, settings, identified issues and revision history can protect both the client and the engineer.

The bigger risk probably isn’t the customer failing to read the report. It’s someone later making changes to the system without understanding what the original study was based on. A short controlled document with clear limitations and update requirements can sometimes achieve the same protection without generating a 200-page report nobody will use. In that sense, a scaled approach depending on the customer’s technical capability makes more sense than treating every facility exactly the same.

Brent,

I haven't run into this in my past lives, but if I did, I would want something for traceability. If the customer wants to cut costs, you could give just a summary report with findings and no boiler plate, TCC's, etc.

Mike