Ofivio Engineering, explained: review and issue as first-class records

Ofivio Engineering is the delivery and commercial side of a consultancy practice. It does not run structural analysis, load calculations, MEP sizing or energy modelling, and it should not — those tools are specialised, mature, and correctly separate. What it holds is everything that happens to the output afterwards.

Review is a deliverable nobody models

For a consultancy the review comment is as much an output as the drawing. It has an author, a severity, a response and a close-out. When it lives in a PDF markup or an email chain, closing it out becomes an afternoon of searching, six times per project. Making review a first-class record is the single biggest change most consultancies can make, and almost nothing on the market is built for it.

You sit between two other firms

You receive from the architect and issue to the contractor, or the reverse. That means your document control has to be defensible to people who do not use your system — which is what a transmittal record is for, and why it matters more than the folder structure. See drawing management.

What is in the box

Planning & QS, Manager, Technical Review, HR, Finance.

The three fee traps

• —The extended programme — the fee was agreed for nine months and the project is in month twenty; the scope did not change, the calendar did
• —The review that never ends — six small rounds is a month of somebody's time that was never priced
• —The coordination nobody scoped — work that belongs to neither the architect nor the contractor lands on you by default

All three are invisible without staff cost tracked against the fee, and all three are why a consultancy can be busy all year and thin at the end of it.

What it does not do

• —No analysis, calculation or simulation of any kind
• —No BIM federation or clash detection
• —Nothing for a project mandated onto a client's own common data environment
• —Not worth it for a single-discipline sole trader with two live projects