For almost 80 years, the Construction Specifications Institute (CSI) has worked with thousands of industry experts to create and maintain MasterFormat®, UniFormat®, and OmniClass®. These standards provide structure, meaning, and a common language throughout a project lifecycle as information moves through documentation, bidding, construction, handover, and operations. The industry has relied on CSI’s standards for decades to:
- Prevent rework
- Decrease excess RFIs
- Mitigate legal liability
- Increase collaboration across teams
- Reduce back-and-forth between teams
- Support accurate project staffing
- Improve estimator accuracy
- Increase transparency of costs
- Decrease insurance premiums and number of disputes
- Support more predictable, coordinated, and maintainable buildings
Historically, updates to MasterFormat, UniFormat, and OmniClass have been published as books and PDFs. But work results are becoming more specialized, systems are more integrated, and materials and technology are evolving at a pace that requires a new model. In partnership with CSI, we reached a point where it was time to go digital to better serve the construction ecosystem end to end with CSI Dynamic Standards (CDS).
Where the Standards Shape Enterprise Processes
Throughout a given project, a scope of work passes through hundreds, and sometimes tens of thousands, of hands between architects, design engineers, specifiers, estimators, contractors, BPMs, facilities managers, and owners. MasterFormat, UniFormat, and OmniClass provide a single, industry-standard taxonomy to scale across that construction ecosystem.
A clear taxonomy also supports clean scalability across projects, business units, and acquisitions, which matters most in complex infrastructure and commercial building projects – and licensing at the organizational level allows all project teams, workflows, and processes to leverage authorized use at every level.
Where CDS Is Going
Construction is changing faster than a static document can keep up with – and new work doesn’t always fit into decade-old classifications anymore, which hurts coordination, data, and software tools. Fixing that takes frequent operational updates that PDFs cannot deliver. A digital model allows us to deliver smaller, more frequent and coordinated improvements to metadata, relationships, search capabilities, APIs, and software integration.
As the standards get more connected, the tools built on top of them (estimating software, scheduling platforms, BIM, and cost coordination) will need less manual correction and reconciliation. CSI’s established consensus process will continue to govern and approve new editions.
We look forward to sharing more detail in our upcoming releases.
