from osmoda research · construction
Site-specific safety plan, permit packet, locked POs — in 1h 12m.
Two days of project-admin work, gone by lunch. 29 CFR 1926 subparts mapped to scope, AHJ permits drafted from address + IBC adoption, lumber/concrete POs locked at current pricing — all dropped into the right Procore folders.
TL;DR
- • OSHA 29 CFR 1926 requires a written site-specific safety plan whenever crews handle hot work, fall hazards, confined space, or hazardous substances
- • McKinsey's Reinventing Construction puts global construction labor productivity growth at 1%/year vs 3.6% for manufacturing — paperwork is a top-3 cause
- • 98% of megaprojects overrun cost by >30%; 77% are >40% late, with permitting and approvals a named driver
- • lantern reads the project address, scope, and the local IBC adoption, then drafts the SSSP, permit packet, lien-waivers, and lumber POs in 72 minutes for $2.10
- • Stays inside Procore and Autodesk Construction Cloud — writes back into the existing folders, not a separate tool
1. The pain — paperwork as a productivity tax
Construction project admin is a documentation tax. OSHA's 29 CFR Part 1926 spans the full safety code — fall protection, scaffolding, hot work, confined space, lead, silica — and a site-specific safety plan has to map every applicable subpart to this site, this scope, this crew. Procore's own SSSP guide lists the trigger conditions: hazardous substances, hot work, confined space, fall hazards above 6 feet, bloodborne pathogens. Each one drags in additional written programs. A two-day project-admin sprint per new mobilization is the industry-standard tax, and McKinsey's data is brutal — construction productivity has crawled at 1% per year for two decades.
Then there's the permit stack. NYC DOB, LA Building & Safety, Chicago DOB, plus any AHJ that has adopted the 2024 IBC — each wants a slightly different application packet, plot plan callouts, and signed-off responsible party. Federally funded jobs add Davis-Bacon: prevailing wage determinations attached to the contract, weekly certified payrolls, classification break-downs by job code. Miss a cert and the whole draw stalls.
The 2026 backdrop sharpens this. IRA-driven manufacturing buildouts, semiconductor fabs and battery plants are all simultaneously hitting the same regional building departments, and lumber prices are still volatile from the post-pandemic cycle. Procore and Autodesk Construction Cloud are excellent systems of record but explicitly position themselves as document hubs — they don't draft your SSSP, they store it after your project engineer wrote it. The bottleneck is upstream of the platform.
Procore
Best-in-class for storing and routing SSSPs, OSHA 300/300A/301 logs, and submittals; doesn't draft the underlying plan documents.
Autodesk Construction Cloud
Strong on model-linked docs and submittals; drafting still falls to the project engineer or an outside safety consultant.
Safety consultant
$1,500–4,000 per SSSP, 1–3 day turnaround, doesn't update when scope changes mid-project.
Buildertrend / CoConstruct
Residential / mid-market PM platforms; permit application support is checklist-grade, not generative.
2. The workflow — address + scope to filed packet
- 1 · lantern +
doc.parse— ingests project address, scope sheet, drawing index; identifies AHJ from address and the locally adopted IBC / OSHA state-plan flavor. - 2 · lantern +
regdb.lookup— cross-references 29 CFR 1926 subparts against the scope (e.g. fall hazard ≥6ft → Subpart M; concrete pour → Subpart Q) and assembles the SSSP draft. - 3 · naga +
policy.check— verifies Davis-Bacon applicability, prevailing-wage determination ID, and union scope on federally funded jobs before signing payroll templates. - 4 · frog +
vendor.lock+keyd.sign— pulls current lumber and concrete pricing, generates locked POs to approved suppliers, signs without seeing the vendor portal credentials. - 5 · soot +
procore.write— drops the SSSP, permit packet, lien-waiver template and POs into the right Procore folders, alerts the PM via the project channel.
3. Why it works
Replaces the consultant, not the platform
Procore stays the source of truth. lantern is upstream — it produces the documents Procore wants you to upload. The PM workflow doesn't change; the consultant invoice does.
Audit-grade by construction
Every regulation citation in the SSSP is hash-chained to the eCFR snapshot lantern read. When OSHA shows up, the audit trail is one click — not a frantic search through email threads for who edited the plan last.
Self-host fits the GC's risk posture
Project pricing and subcontractor data are not data most GCs want sitting in someone else's SaaS. Apache-2.0 on a NixOS box in the trailer or back office means the data stays where the GC's lawyer wants it.
FAQ
Does it actually generate something an inspector will accept?
lantern produces a draft mapped to specific 29 CFR 1926 subparts; your competent person still signs off. The time savings is in the drafting, not the legal accountability. The hash-chained ledger captures every regulation citation and the eCFR snapshot it was read against.
Can it handle state-plan states that go beyond federal OSHA (CA, WA, OR, MI)?
Yes. The regdb tool maps the project state to the relevant state-plan delta, then folds the stricter rule into the SSSP. Cal/OSHA, WA L&I, Oregon OSHA, and MIOSHA each have their own mapped policy file.
Will it work with our existing Procore project structure?
Yes. soot writes to the folders you already use — Project Documents > Safety, Project Documents > Permits — via the Procore API. Procore stays the source of truth; lantern is upstream of it, producing the documents you currently upload by hand.
Hand lantern an address and a scope sheet at 9am. Walk in to a complete SSSP at 10:12.
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