CFIHOS Handover
Checklist (Excel)

CFIHOS (Capital Facilities Information HandOver Specification) is the international standard for owner-operator information handover, maintained by USPI-NL. The current major version is CFIHOS 2.0. The handover dossier is the structured set of documents and data the EPC contractor delivers to the owner-operator at project handover, organised across nine CFIHOS classes (plant, area, system, document, tag, discipline, phase, activity, asset). Each class has defined attributes and relationships per the CFIHOS schema. Owner-operators including Shell, BP, ExxonMobil, Aramco, and ADNOC require CFIHOS-compliant handover for new petroleum and petrochemical facilities.

CFIHOS Class 1 (Plant) covers facility-level definition and metadata. Class 2 (Area) covers physical area boundaries within the facility. Class 3 (System) covers process and utility systems. Class 4 (Document) covers every engineering and vendor document delivered. Class 5 (Tag) covers every equipment, instrument, line, and valve tag. Class 6 (Discipline) covers the engineering disciplines. Class 7 (Phase) covers project lifecycle phases. Class 8 (Activity) covers project work activities. Class 9 (Asset) covers the physical asset entities the operator manages long-term. The handover dossier ships deliverables across all nine classes.

Pathnovo, an engineering document intelligence platform, audits CFIHOS handover dossiers in 2 weeks. It reads the EPC contractor's full document set (P&IDs, datasheets, MDR, vendor data books, as-built drawings), maps every entity to the CFIHOS class structure, flags missing deliverables per the operator's CFIHOS implementation profile, and produces an exception register the EPC contractor closes out before final handover. Typical CFIHOS audit cycle drops from 8 to 12 weeks manual to 2 weeks auto-audited. See the engineering handover workflow.

CFIHOS, ISO 15926, and DEXPI are complementary standards. ISO 15926 is the upper-level reference data library for process plant data with broad scope. CFIHOS is the implementation specification focused on owner-operator handover scope, with practical class structure and attribute lists. DEXPI is the open exchange format for P&ID data. In a typical owner-operator handover: P&ID data exchanges via DEXPI, plant data exchanges via the CFIHOS schema with ISO 15926 reference data alignment. Pathnovo supports all three. See the CFIHOS standard reference and the ISO 15926 reference.

CFIHOS is the international standard with a generic class structure. Many large owner-operators (Shell IPS, BP Common Data Model, ExxonMobil EDM, Aramco SAES) have internal implementation profiles that align with CFIHOS but add operator-specific attributes, mandatory deliverables, or class extensions. The EPC handover dossier must satisfy both the CFIHOS base schema and the operator profile. Pathnovo supports the standard CFIHOS schema plus the major operator profiles. The checklist template includes columns for operator-specific cross-reference.

After CFIHOS-compliant handover acceptance, the structured data feeds the owner-operator's maintenance and asset systems. SAP PM equipment master is bootstrapped from the CFIHOS Class 5 (Tag) entities with the attribute mapping per SAP PM master data structure. IBM Maximo asset register is bootstrapped from the same Class 5 entities mapped to Maximo data model. AVEVA AIM ingests the CFIHOS data via the AVEVA Connect bridge. See the SAP PM integration and the IBM Maximo integration.

CFIHOS applies at construction completion handover, after Mechanical Completion (MC) and pre-commissioning closure. The EPC contractor delivers the handover dossier at MC, the owner-operator runs CFIHOS audit during the punch-list and commissioning period, exceptions are closed out before Final Acceptance Certificate (FAC). Some owner-operators run a CFIHOS readiness review at IFC (Issued For Construction) stage as well, to catch CFIHOS gaps early. The checklist template supports both IFC readiness and MC final-handover use.