Drawing
Revised layout issued
Contract drift detection for infrastructure projects
Contractual events, live.
Kuper reads the live project record — site diaries, internal correspondence, RFIs, instructions, revised drawings, programme — against your contract baseline. It connects related records into one developing contractual event and surfaces it while the notice window is still open.
Live project record
Monitoring
Contract baseline
Notice of Claim
CL. 20.2
Runs from when the Contractor should have become aware
28 days
Internal email
Site flags the route has changed
Response
Proceed pending instruction
Potential variation
High confidence
Three records together indicate the scope has moved from the contract baseline.
Clauses 13.1 + 20.2 · 16 days left on the notice window
01Contract baselineWhat was agreed
02Live project recordWhat is actually happening
03Contract intelligenceWhat needs attention now, and why
01 The recognition gap
Every event is visible. Not every event is recognised.
A contractual event rarely arrives labelled as one. It starts as an operational detail — a revised drawing, access that slipped, an RFI still open, an instruction confirmed after the work had already started.
Engineering sees a coordination problem. Site sees a constraint to work around. Both are right, neither is thinking about a clause, and the contracts team is usually not copied in. The significance only appears in the sequence.
It takes three to six related records, accumulating over several weeks, before anyone steps back and recognises the project has drifted from the baseline. By then the work is under way. Sometimes it is finished.
Entitlement is more often weakened than lost. The cost lands as a discounted settlement and weeks of retrospective reconstruction — not as a headline write-off anyone reports.
The same event, seen at two different times
Time →
Week 01Design revisionEngineering logs a coordination issue
Week 03Work proceedsSite resolves an operational constraint
Week 04Kuper connects the recordsPotential change surfaced against the baseline
Week 10Commercial recognitionChronology rebuilt after the fact
Notice window open · entitlement protectable
Window closed · entitlement harder to prove
02 Order of appearance
Your systems record the event. They don't connect it.
A contractual event appears in writing long before it appears in the systems built to record it. By the time it reaches the document management system it has already been cleaned up, contractually framed and filed.
A tool that watches only the CDE is, by construction, a lagging indicator. Kuper reads the record where the event actually starts, and connects the fragments into one event before anyone has to.
Where a contractual event appears, in order
Status
01
Origin
Kuper starts here
Daily site reports & diaries
“Excavator standing idle waiting on Grid C drawings.” Written by people not thinking contractually.
02
Origin
Verbal instruction on site
Given deliberately without a paper trail. Its first written trace lands in the daily report, not in a letter.
03
Origin
Internal site-to-office email
Operational frustration. “Still waiting on RFI 104.” “Design clash on level 2.” Contracts rarely copied.
04
In motion
RFIs & technical queries
The emerging design or coordination issue, now written down but still framed as a technical question.
05
In motion
Engineer's instructions & revised drawings
The change becomes formal. The clock, in most cases, started weeks ago.
06
In motion
Minutes of meeting
Decisions already taken elsewhere, recorded after the fact.
07
Lagging
Formal correspondence
Cleaned up, contractually framed, and served. The event is now history.
08
Lagging
Variation instruction or change order
The outcome, not the signal.
Aconex, Unifier, the correspondence register and the claims log all sit at 07–08
Kuper reads from 01
03 The intelligence layer
Ambient by design. Accountable by default.
Kuper sits beneath the ordinary flow of a project. It does not replace the CDE, the contract register, or the person making the call. It gives them one continuous view across systems and across time.
Project traffic
SITEDiaries, reports, allocation sheets
MAILInternal and external correspondence
CDERFIs, instructions, drawings
PLANProgramme updates
UPER
Contract intelligence
Cumulative, not keyword. Sequence, not similarity.
Explained signal
High significance
Potential notice event
5 linked records · 16 days remaining
- Trigger identified
- Clause linked
- Reasoning shown
- Sources attached
Read the contract
A reviewable rulebook of notice requirements, time bars, variation mechanisms and programme obligations — built from your executed contract and its amendments, each rule linked back to its source clause.
Read the live record
Site diaries, internal correspondence, RFIs, instructions, drawings, minutes and programme updates are read as the project develops — starting where events originate, not where they are filed.
Reason across time
Related fragments are grouped into one developing event. What changed, when it became knowable, and which contractual mechanism it may engage — measured against the baseline, not matched on keywords.
Put judgment in the loop
A small number of banded flags — high, medium, monitor — each carrying the trigger, the clause, the reasoning and every source record behind it, so your team can act on it or dismiss it in under a minute.
04 Evidence in context
Not a search result. A defensible chain.
Finding the relevant email is the easy part. The value is preserving the path from the contract rule, through the records that existed at the time, to the decision your team actually took — in a form that still holds up eighteen months later, in front of someone with an incentive to pull it apart.
Every flag answers three questions: what changed, why it matters, and where the evidence came from.
Event / 024Review required
Late design approval may affect the mechanical completion sequence.
RuleCl. 8.4 — Extension of TimeDelay caused by an Employer risk event
Records4 linked documentsSubmittal · engineer response · programme update · minutes
ReasoningApproval landed 16 days after the planned need datePotential critical-path effect — requires planner review before notice
Confirm eventDismissOpen all sources →
You could paste the files into a chat window. People do.
- 01
A chat window answers when asked. The whole failure mode here is that nobody knew to ask yet. Kuper runs against the record continuously, so the flag arrives before the question occurs to anyone.
- 02
A chat window reasons from a general reading of FIDIC. Kuper reasons from your executed contract, its amendments and the particular conditions — the clause numbers and time bars your project actually runs on.
- 03
A chat window gives you an answer. Kuper gives you the chain — rule, records, reasoning, sources — because an answer you cannot evidence is worth very little at the moment the position is challenged.
05 Principles
Built for the live project.
Tracking systems die on live projects for four reasons: they get too complicated for daily site use, they depend on one person who then leaves, they aren't linked to the clauses, or they get treated as an admin register rather than a commercial risk tool. Kuper is built against those four failure modes.
Few signals, fully explained
Every flag carries its source records and its contractual reasoning, banded by significance. No black-box score, and no second inbox of noise to ignore. Over-flagging is the failure mode most likely to kill this product, and we treat it that way.
Continuous, not retrospective
The baseline persists across the whole life of the project, so a record in week twelve is understood alongside one from week two. Nothing has to be re-uploaded, re-explained, or reconstructed by someone who joined last quarter.
Your records stay yours
Deployed to your own tenancy, region-aware, separated by project. Nothing is exported to us to be processed, and your project data is never used to train foundation models. If that is a blocker, we would rather solve it before a pilot than during one.
Your tenancyRegion-aware hostingProject separationHuman review by designNo training on your records
06 Who it's for
Built for the people who carry the time bar.
On the project
Every live contract, watched continuously
One main contract, twenty to fifty active subcontracts, and hundreds of records a week. No individual can monitor all of it. Kuper does, and raises only what carries contractual weight.
Contracts managersQuantity surveyorsProject controlsPlanning
Across the portfolio
The same discipline on every job at once
Consistent notice discipline across projects, recurring contractual issues visible early, and nothing arriving at final account with the record already three months cold.
Commercial directorsContracts directorsHeads of commercialRegional leads
07 Partnerships
We're building this with people running live infrastructure projects.
Kuper is partnering with commercial and contracts teams on live infrastructure projects — building against real contracts, real correspondence and real programmes.
If contract drift is showing up on your projects, we should talk.