What is a Claims Administration?
Claims administration is the process of documenting, monitoring, and resolving contested changes — situations where buyer and seller disagree about whether a change occurred or what it's worth. Unresolved changes become claims, then disputes; contracts define the resolution ladder, and PMI's stated preference is negotiation before litigation.
The practical craft is contemporaneous records: the party with the better daily logs usually wins the claim.
Worked example
A contractor claims 14 days and $310K for differing site conditions — rock where borings showed clay. The owner's engineer disputes half the quantity. Both sides' daily drilling logs go on the table; they negotiate to 9 days and $195K under the contract's claims clause, and nobody spends two years in arbitration over a hole in the ground.