A significant roll for contractors in the construction industry today is to prepare and produce documents such as; equipment lists, product data sheets, warranties, spare part lists, preventive maintenance schedules, and other information. This information is essential to support the operations, maintenance, and the management of the facilities assets by the owner and/or property manager.

"The rest of the world is in awe of the UK BIM strategy and the progress made so far."

The IFC/COBie Report 2012 is a document created by The NBS along with the OpenBIM network with input from some of the major Tier 1 contractors and their supply chains. It is a description of a series of test run on Autodesk, Graphisoft and Vectorworks BIM authoring software to test the capability of the buildingSMART IFC file format to find out whether it is capable of supporting the creation of COBie datasets from the Building Information Model.