Trade Coordination Meeting
The recurring session where trades settle who goes where before anyone installs.
Quick Answer
A trade coordination meeting is a recurring session where the general contractor and subcontractors resolve conflicts between their scopes before installation. Trades review clashes, routing, clearances, and sequence, assign each open issue an owner and date, and track it to closure. It's how coordination decisions get made and recorded rather than improvised in the field.
The Full Picture
Trade coordination meetings exist because no single drawing or model shows how every trade's work fits together. The mechanical contractor routes duct, the plumber routes pipe, the electrician runs conduit, and the fire protection contractor lays out sprinklers, each from their own documents. Where those scopes meet, someone has to decide who moves.
Mechanically, the GC's project engineer or VDC manager runs the meeting on a fixed cadence, often weekly through the coordination phase. Participants review the latest clash report or overlaid coordination drawings for a defined area, discuss each conflict, and agree on a resolution: reroute, resize, change elevation, or raise an RFI to the design team. Each decision gets an owner and due date and is logged for the next session.
In practice, a meeting might focus on level 3 above-ceiling space. The team walks the federated model zone by zone, agrees the sprinkler main drops two inches to clear a duct, flags that a beam penetration needs structural approval, and sets a sign-off date for the zone so fabrication can begin.
In preconstruction, coordination meetings start earlier on design-assist and CM-at-Risk jobs, where key trades are engaged before documents are finished. The GC uses them to catch scope gaps between trades, confirm constructability, and feed issues back to designers while changes are still cheap. The typical failure mode is meetings without decisions: issues discussed but never assigned, so the same conflicts reappear week after week.
Real Examples
Common Misconceptions
People assume: Trade coordination meetings are just status updates.
Actually: Their value is in decisions. A productive meeting ends with each conflict resolved or assigned to a named owner with a date. Meetings that only review open items without assigning them tend to recycle the same problems.
People assume: Only BIM-heavy projects need coordination meetings.
Actually: Any project with multiple trades sharing space needs them. On smaller jobs, the meeting may work from overlaid 2D coordination drawings instead of a federated model, but the purpose of agreeing on who goes where is the same.
Does MeltPlan Solve This?
Partially — adjacentPartially — MeltPlan handles document-level coordination review, which feeds directly into trade coordination meetings. It reviews your 2D drawings and specs and flags inconsistencies and conflicts between disciplines so the team walks in with a list of issues rather than discovering them live. It does not run meetings, manage 3D clash sessions, or track meeting action items.
Find cross-discipline conflicts before the meeting →Frequently Asked Questions
What happens in a trade coordination meeting?
The GC and subcontractors review conflicts between their scopes for a defined area, usually from a clash report or overlaid drawings. They agree on resolutions, assign open issues to owners with dates, and raise RFIs where the design itself needs to change.
Who attends a trade coordination meeting?
Typically the GC's project engineer, project manager, or VDC manager, plus detailers or foremen from MEP, fire protection, structural, and other affected trades. Design team members join when decisions require their input.
How often are coordination meetings held?
Weekly is common during active coordination, often area by area. Frequency tightens as fabrication deadlines approach and relaxes once zones are signed off.
How does a trade coordination meeting relate to BIM coordination?
BIM coordination produces the federated model and clash reports; the coordination meeting is where people decide what to do about them. On projects without full models, the meeting works from 2D coordination drawings instead.
Why do coordination meetings matter in preconstruction?
On design-assist and CM-at-Risk jobs, early trade coordination catches scope gaps and constructability problems while the design can still change. That's cheaper than resolving the same conflicts after buyout through RFIs and change orders.