As a facilities manager, you may have heard of COBie, but perhaps you are unsure exactly what it is or how it could benefit your organization. In this post, we’ll provide a primer with the basics of COBie.
- What is COBie? COBie stands for the Construction-Operations Building information exchange. Contrary to what some believe, COBie is not a building model. Instead it is a specification for importing data. An example of this would be importing space and asset data from a Revit model into ARCHIBUS.
- What is the benefit of COBie from a facilities management perspective? Historically when construction teams handed off new buildings to facilities managers, they provided extensive paper documentation. Significant effort was required to identify the data that was useful and to manually enter it into the facilities management systems. COBie can streamline this process by providing a standardized framework to move data from one system to another removing the need for manual input.
- How can facilities management teams use COBie? The COBie specification defines the format in which data should be delivered. Each organization, should develop a BIM execution plan which will define what COBie data is relevant to their organization. Many facilities management systems have the ability to import data that conforms to the COBie specification. Data can be gathered in spreadsheet format or it can be exported directly from another information system – as long as the data conforms to the COBie standard, the means by which it is generated doesn’t matter.
Has your facilities management team adopted COBie? If so, has it been an effective way to bridge the gap between construction and ongoing facility operations? IMAGINiT’s Facilities Management team has seen COBie in action at many client sites and would be interested in learning more about your successes and challenges.
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