COBie data delivery

COBie — Construction Operations Building information exchange — is the structured handover of asset data: what was installed, where it is, what system it belongs to, who made it, and what the operator needs in order to maintain it. BS 1192-4 is the UK code of practice for it.

It is a data deliverable rather than a drawing deliverable, and it fails for data reasons. The common failure is not a missing model but an incomplete or inconsistent one: spaces not named to the client's own convention, systems not classified, types duplicated because two people named the same air handling unit differently, or fields populated with a placeholder that survives to handover.

Where COBie is named in the employer information requirements — which on public sector work, higher education, healthcare and large commercial estates it usually is — and on any project where the client intends to load asset data into a CAFM or maintenance system after handover.

Worth raising even where it is not required: an asset register produced during design costs far less than one produced by surveying the building afterwards.

The information requirements are read first, and the required fields are mapped to the model before anything is populated. COBie collected at the end from a model that was not built to produce it is a manual data exercise, and that is where the cost and the errors are.

Naming, classification and space data are agreed with the client and the lead consultant early — Uniclass 2015 unless the client's own system takes precedence — because renaming spaces and systems retrospectively invalidates every reference to them.

Deliveries are validated before issue rather than after rejection. The design-stage responsibility ends where the contractor's begins: SDE provides the design and type data, and the installed serial numbers, warranty dates and commissioning records come from the contractor.