Knowledge / Workflows
Handover pack structuring
Turning the handover deliverables into a structured asset and information register, with every record linked to its source document and drawing.
In the last weeks before practical completion the contractor assembles the handover pack, a document controller checks it against the employer's information requirements as far as a folder listing allows, and it is delivered as folders. The client's FM team then spends months rebuilding an asset register from it, or does not, and runs the building from memory. COBie is often specified and often arrives needing work before it can be used. Handover documentation AI has a job here if it turns the pack into a register rather than a better index. Structured knowledge lets the FM team receive each asset the pack records with its location, its records and its warranty, each linked to the page it came from, and keeps the FM lead on the decisions about what to chase before the retention is released.
What the workflow involves today
Collect O&M manuals, record drawings, commissioning records and warranties from every subcontractor in the final weeks.
Rename and file the documents into a folder structure, usually the one the contract asked for, sometimes the one the compiler preferred.
Check the folders against the information requirements by ticking off document types rather than contents.
Produce the COBie or asset data deliverable from whatever the model and the schedules contain.
Hand over at practical completion and chase the missing items through the defects period.
On the client side, open the pack, start a spreadsheet of assets, and give up somewhere around the mechanical volumes.
Answer the FM team's questions for years by searching folders.
Where generic AI tools fail
A general-purpose tool can search a folder tree and summarise a manual. It cannot connect an air handling unit on a data sheet to its position on the roof plant drawing, its commissioning certificate in another volume and the warranty letter in a third, because nothing in those documents says they are about the same unit. It cannot check the pack against the information requirements, because that check is about whether the required information about each asset is present, and a folder index answers only whether a document type exists.
What the tool produces is a better folder index, and a folder index is not a register. An FM lead who accepts the pack on the strength of a summary that says the O&M documentation appears complete discovers the gaps during the first year, when the retention has been released and the subcontractor has no reason to answer the phone. The confidence of the summary is what makes it costly: it is read as a check that was never performed, and the FM team rebuilds the register by hand anyway.
What changes with structured knowledge
When the pack's documents, drawings and model objects are one connected record, an asset is a thing with a location, a product, a commissioning result and a warranty, rather than a name that appears in five files that do not mention each other.
The FM team receives an asset register in which every asset carries its location on the record drawing, the installed product from the schedule, the commissioning record, the warranty with its start date and conditions, and the maintenance requirement from the manufacturer's schedule, each linked to the page or drawing it came from. Alongside it comes a list of what the information requirements asked for and the pack does not contain, item by item, with the requirement each gap was measured against.
The FM lead decides what to chase before the retention is released and what to accept, and can show the contractor the exact gap rather than a general complaint about completeness. The register can go into service from handover and, for a building that needs one, feeds the golden thread: the information about the building that the accountable person has to keep current through occupation, carried over from design and construction with its sources attached.
We onboard a focused slice of your project data, configure the ingestion paths, extract a structured context graph, and build a workflow against the resulting structured knowledge layer.
Related to
This workflow reads the as-built drawings and handover pack, the O&M manuals and the IFC and BIM model where one has been delivered, and it uses the employer's requirements for what the pack was supposed to contain. It sits beside project knowledge search, which answers the FM team's daily questions from the same record, and lessons learned capture, which reads the handover for what was late and why.
Does it produce or validate COBie?
Which handover formats does it read?
How do we see it on a pack we are about to receive?