Software for engineering consultancies, built around review and issue

Review is the 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 — and when it lives in a PDF markup or an email chain, closing it out becomes an afternoon of searching. Making review a first-class record is the single biggest change most consultancies can make.

The consultancy sits 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. See drawing management.

What it does not do

Ofivio Engineering is the delivery and commercial side of the 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.

The three fee traps in consultancy work

• ✓The extended programme. The fee was agreed for a nine-month project now in month twenty. The scope did not change; the calendar did. Without staff cost tracked against the fee, nobody notices until the project closes at a loss.
• ✓The review that never ends. Comments issued, responded to, re-issued, re-commented. Each round is small; six rounds is a month of somebody’s time that was never priced.
• ✓The coordination nobody scoped. Sitting between an architect and a contractor produces work that belongs to neither, and it lands on the consultancy by default.

What a consultancy should actually measure

Utilisation says whether people are busy. Cost against fee, per project, says whether being busy was worth it — and a fully booked team delivering under-priced work is a firm losing money efficiently. The second number requires staff to carry a cost, which is why the roster and the project have to be in one system rather than in HR and a spreadsheet.

The products behind this