Coulter BIM Information Management

Over the weekend I came across a LinkedIn post that genuinely stopped me in my tracks. The speaker had taken part in multiple panels at London Build, all focused on the Golden Thread, fire safety, and the realities of delivering compliant information. Across four panels, with roughly 200 people in each audience, they asked a simple but crucial question: “Has anyone here ever received a complete, legally-required Regulation 38 Fire and Emergency File on their project?” The result? Zero hands. Across almost 800 people, including professionals specifically working in fire safety. And even more worrying: those few who had received something said it was not adequate. It’s a sobering reminder that, for all the industry talk about digital twins, AI, smart buildings, and platform ecosystems, we’re still struggling to deliver the most fundamental statutory fire safety information. And it made me think of something that has come up again and again in my own work:

COBie Is the Solution Hiding in Plain Sight

For over a decade, COBie has been dismissed by many as “that BIM spreadsheet” or something only relevant to model data. But this overlooks what COBie was actually designed to do: capture the structured information needed to operate and maintain a building safely; store product information, warranties, manuals, certificates and installation data; and record exactly what was installed, where, and by whom. This is precisely the information that Regulation 38 requires. In fact, if you look at what typically goes missing in a non-compliant Reg 38 handover—fire doors not identified, dampers undocumented, no product data sheets, no certs attached to assets, no link between installed systems and the fire strategy, random PDFs dumped into a folder with no structure—these are all things that COBie was designed to solve elegantly. But because so many people mentally file COBie under “BIM” or “models”, they overlook the fact that COBie is fundamentally a document-and-asset-information standard, not a modelling standard.

COBieForms + COBieOM = A Practical, Real-World Reg 38 Workflow

Tools like COBieForms (for subcontractors and site teams) and COBieOM (for producing an O&M website) take the COBie schema and turn it into something incredibly practical. With COBieForms, each installed product gets a line entry, you attach product data sheets, O&M manuals, commissioning certificates, record installation dates and responsibilities, and link assets to rooms, systems, and components—exactly what’s needed for fire doors, fire stopping, sprinklers, alarms, AOVs, dampers, emergency lighting, and more. With COBieOM, all of that information is compiled into a simple, offline HTML website that the client or FM team can open on any device. No subscription, no vendor lock-in, no “future-proofing fees”. Just a clean, structured representation of the building’s asset and safety information. For fire safety deliverables, this is gold.

So Why Aren’t We Using It?

The irony is hard to ignore. The industry talks endlessly about the Golden Thread. People say collaboration is broken. Everyone blames someone else for handover failures. Fire safety information keeps being delivered late, incomplete, or not at all. Meanwhile, a perfectly good, open, royalty-free standard exists—and has existed for over a decade. COBie isn’t perfect, but it’s surprisingly well-suited to the exact problems highlighted in that LinkedIn post: clear asset registers, document attachment, installation info, product-level traceability, a structure that survives system upgrades, and a format FM teams can actually use. And it does all this without relying on proprietary platforms.

COBie Is Not “Model Data” — It’s Asset Data

People associate COBie with BIM models, IFC, and Revit schedules. But the Documents sheet, the Attributes sheet, the Systems sheet, and the Contacts sheet are just as important—if not more important. These are the parts of COBie that solve the Reg 38 problem. Fire door certs go into Documents; damper commissioning sheets go into Documents; O&M manuals go into Documents + Attributes; smoke control products go into Components + Systems; installer details go into Contacts; correct location mapping goes into Spaces + Zones. This is where the Golden Thread actually lives. Not in flashy dashboards. Not in proprietary portals. Not in CDE marketing brochures. It lives in structured data, linked consistently to the physical asset—exactly what COBie captures.

Final Thoughts

The LinkedIn post wasn’t surprising to me—but it was still deeply worrying. If, after everything the industry has been through since Grenfell, we still can’t consistently deliver the basics, then we need to seriously rethink our approach. And maybe the rethink starts by recognising that: COBie isn’t the problem. COBie is part of the solution. And it’s been sitting in front of us the whole time. If contractors adopted COBieForms, and clients embraced COBieOM as part of their fire safety handover workflow, we’d be in a dramatically better position than we are today. Sometimes the answer isn’t a new platform. Sometimes it’s an existing standard, used properly. COBie is the solution hiding in plain sight.