An ALTA/NSPS land title survey is the one deliverable in a transaction that depends on someone else's paperwork before a crew can finish. The field work on a typical commercial parcel takes two to four days. The schedule risk lives almost entirely in the documents.
The single most common cause of a late survey is a title commitment that lists exceptions by recording reference but does not include the documents themselves. A surveyor cannot plot an easement from a book and page number alone. Requesting the underlying documents at the same time as the commitment removes about a week from the critical path, every time.
The second cause is Table A item selection made without reading Table A. Items 11 and 18 in particular, underground utilities and wetland delineation, carry field and coordination effort that is wildly disproportionate to the box being ticked. They are sometimes essential. They are frequently ordered by reflex.
Our recommendation is unglamorous: send the survey order and the title order on the same day, insist on full exception documents, and have a fifteen-minute conversation about Table A before it is fixed in the contract.