NMS (national master specification) use

[kacarrol]

I have a couple of questions regarding NMS. How widely is this used outside of the government? Do you see a lot of private sector companies using NMS?

Also, the way I understand it, NMS is for making contract documents that go to outside companies for design work. Does anyone build their own internal design specifications based on NMS documents?

I'm just curious as I'm working for a government organization and they have "piping specs" that are huge 15 page wordy documents (built to look like NMS specs). But when I worked at an oil and gas consulting firm a piping spec was a succinct 1 or 2 page tabular document.

I'm trying to figure out what is the norm here, my experience in oil and gas was not with regular building systems and now I'm working on regular old hvac systems. Is NMS edit regularly used for buildings or is it just a government thing?

Thanks,
K

 

[GMcD]

My location is western Canada so my answer is based on my local area of knowledge. Most larger Architectural firms use the NMS format since they regularly employ contract spec writers, and that seems to be the norm in the last 10 years. Our office has used the "true" NMS spec only for our Federal Government work. We do have a "sham" look-alike NMS spec in our in-house Master Spec file that was really the old 15000 series spec with revised section numbers to match the most direct NMS sections - but our "sham" NMS does not contain the same breakdown or sub-sections that the "true" NMS has. The "sham" NMS spec at least matches the cross references in the "true" NMS spec that the Architects use so we don't get too hung up on fine-tuned editing.

In a true professional world, we should really buy the NMS and edit to to suit our particular specific company standards and preferences.