9 MEP Coordination Mistakes Delaying Projects in 2026
MEP systems account for up to 40% of total construction cost on service-heavy buildings, yet coordination failures involving these systems remain a leading cause of rework on job sites. A single missed clash between a duct and a structural beam can stall an entire floor, pull crews off schedule, and trigger an RFI that sits unanswered for weeks. This is not a rare event. It happens on projects of every size, and the root cause is almost never a construction error. It is a gap in MEP coordination that nobody caught before the trades arrived on site. Why MEP Coordination Keeps Breaking Down Firms that treat coordination as a formality rather than a discipline keep repeating the same errors. Some start checking for conflicts only after construction begins, when design flexibility is already gone. Others let each trade design in isolation, missing overlaps that only surface once every system sits together in one model. These patterns are not new. Research on BIM-based coordination...