A cladding bid built off the panel schedule's square footage is a bid that's already wrong, and not by a small margin. Panel area is the easy part — it's a takeoff off the elevations, and any two estimators land within a few percent of each other. The part that actually separates a competitive bid from a losing one is the linear-foot work: the closures, corners, transitions and trims that stitch the panel system together, plus the interface points where cladding stops being cladding's problem and becomes someone else's.
This is a working list of where those boundaries sit, built from what actually shows up across real Canadian ICI tenders — not a product catalogue, a list of the specific questions worth answering before the number leaves the office.
What's reliably yours
- Insulated metal wall panels, complete — the full IMP system per the panel schedule and elevations: panels, clips, sub-girts, trims, closures, and inside and outside corners. "Complete" is the operative word, because the panels themselves are the smallest pricing risk in the list.
- Composite and ACM panel systems — rainscreen assemblies and their sub-framing across every drawn extent, including feature bands, canopy fascia and column covers wherever the elevations show them. These extents hide in places a quick elevation read skips — a fascia return, a column wrap two sheets away from the main panel schedule.
- Metal siding and liner panels — profiled steel siding and interior liner panels with their matching trims, priced as one system rather than panel-and-trim as two separate line items.
- System flashings and trims — every flashing, closure and transition that belongs to the panel system itself. This is worth calling out on its own because it's the item most bids under-price: trims run 25-40% of total panel cost and are almost never shown as an area on the drawings, only as a length of line on an elevation you have to measure yourself.
- Delegated panel engineering — stamped shop drawings and attachment engineering wherever the specification requires them. This is real design time and real schedule, not a formality tucked behind the submittal process.
Where the fight actually happens
Soffits and canopies
Panel or plank soffits show up on building elevations, on reflected ceiling plans for canopies and overhangs, and sometimes only on a detail sheet nobody cross-references against the main panel schedule. The area itself is rarely the issue — it's the access. A soffit thirty feet up on a canopy changes the equipment and productivity assumptions behind the labour rate even when the panel spec is identical to the wall system below it. Extract soffit and canopy extents as their own line, with their own access note, rather than folding them into the wall-panel quantity and hoping the labour rate absorbs the difference.
Sub-framing beyond the panel system
Girts and structural sub-framing are the steel trade's by default, but plenty of tenders push secondary girt work — the framing that exists specifically to carry the cladding system rather than the building's primary structure — onto the cladding scope instead. There's no consistent convention here; it genuinely varies tender to tender, and sometimes clause to clause within the same tender. Read the assignment language exactly as written rather than assuming either answer, because pricing girt steel you don't actually owe is as costly as missing girt steel you do.
The other half: what isn't yours, even when it looks close
- Primary structure and heavy girts — the steel trade's frame, full stop. Record the boundary exactly as the documents draw it rather than assuming the line sits in the same place it did on the last job.
- Windows, curtain wall and entrances — the glazing trade's scope. The exclusion itself is straightforward; what isn't straightforward is that every interface flashing between the two systems still needs an owner, and "the glazing trade's window" doesn't automatically mean "the glazing trade's flashing where it meets your panel."
- Roofing panels and membranes — the roofing trade's, including metal roofing, unless the documents expressly assign it to cladding. Standing-seam roof panels and metal wall panels can look similar enough on an elevation to blur together; they're priced and installed by different trades unless the tender says otherwise.
Four things that hide outside the panel schedule
- Air and water performance requirements. Air-barrier continuity duties, required testing, and hygrothermal or effective-R language usually live on the wall type or wall section details rather than in the cladding spec section itself — and continuity duties in particular mean your scope doesn't stop at the panel face.
- Finish warranties and colour. Coating system, colour count, and custom-colour lead time are commercial terms as much as technical ones, and oil-canning acceptance language — how much visible waviness in a flat panel is considered a defect versus normal — is a dispute waiting to happen if it isn't nailed down before the panels are ordered.
- Field-cut and touch-up restrictions. Limits on field-cutting factory-finished panels, and the touch-up method allowed at cut edges, drive a real fabrication decision: shop-cut-to-length versus field-cut-and-touch-up changes both cost and schedule, and the restriction is usually one sentence buried in the finish requirements.
- Panel lead times. IMP and ACM panels are shop-fabricated to order, and lead time against the project schedule is a real risk, not a footnote — check stated milestones against the panel order date this bid implies.
Who you're actually sharing the wall with
| Trade | What to reconcile before you price |
|---|---|
| Steel | Girt alignment and tolerances, plus support steel for feature elements like canopies and column covers. |
| Glazing | Interface flashings and air-barrier continuity at every window and curtain-wall edge — confirmed per opening, not assumed once for the whole elevation. |
| Roofing | Parapet caps and roof-to-wall transitions, where a shared detail can be drawn once but priced by two different trades. |
| Waterproofing | Air and vapour barrier tie-ins behind the panels — confirm who laps onto whose membrane, and who's responsible for the seal at the tie-in itself. |
The pass that catches most of this
Read the panel schedule for area, then read every elevation a second time for linear feet of trim, closure and corner condition — that second pass is where the 25-40% lives. Then chase the interface: every point where your system meets glazing, roofing or waterproofing needs a named owner for the flashing, not just an assumption that it belongs to whoever's system it's flashing into. The panel schedule gets you the easy number; the boundary items above are what turn it into the number that survives the job.