Case study
Rebuilding a golden thread platform the client did not own
Earl Kendrick used a golden thread platform that holds building safety documents building by building, but it was built as a third party's SaaS product and EK did not own the IP. Working from the data schema and a login to the live system, we are rebuilding it for EK on a cleaner model.
2025–today
What we built
- Organisations, buildings and their users
- Organisation admins invite their own users
- One taxonomy of categories and document types
- Categories switched on or off per building
- Renewal period on every document type
- Single or multiple documents per type
The challenge
Earl Kendrick used a golden thread platform to hold building safety information: organisations, their buildings, and each building's documents, from building safety case files to facilities management and lift maintenance reports. The idea is a repository a building's records live in, one a new managing agent or a supplier could be given access to. But the platform had been built as someone else's SaaS product. EK did not own the IP, and wanted a platform it did.
What we did
- September 2025 — a data-modelling session on the live system mapped organisations, buildings, users, categories, document types and documents
- The same session moved categories and document types into one global taxonomy, switched on or off per building, instead of being set up building by building
- Early 2026 — the existing system's data schema and a login became the reference for the rebuild
- April 2026 — the rebuild began, with the agreed data model as its foundation
What we built
In the agreed model, organisations own buildings and users, and an organisation's admins invite their own people. Categories and document types are defined once and enabled per building. Every document belongs to one building and one document type, and each document type carries a renewal period and a flag for whether a building holds one document or several.
The result
The rebuild is in progress. Its data model is agreed and documented both as a diagram and as plain text written for AI-assisted development. It also fixes a weakness in the original, where each building's categories had to be set up separately: with one taxonomy, every building starts from the same structure. The team saw that taxonomy as being as valuable as the document storage itself, and in the rebuild it is EK's.