What the project involved
RAAF Base Oakey is a Royal Australian Air Force base 30 km west of Toowoomba in south-east Queensland, home to the Australian Defence Force's Army Aviation Training Centre. The Mid-Term Refresh program delivered upgraded accommodation, technical, and support facilities across the base under a Capital Facilities Infrastructure (CFI) contract for the Department of Defence. Procom was engaged to compile the project's Operations & Maintenance documentation — the structured set of asset manuals, warranties, certifications, as-built drawings, and maintenance schedules required at handover under the Estate Resources Information Kiosk (ERIK). The handover comprised 2,355 manual sections, making it the largest single-project O&M compilation in the Procom portfolio to date.
The handover challenge
Defence handovers run on the ERIK framework, the HOTO (Handover/Takeover) process, and the EMOS (Estate Maintenance and Operations Services) regime that governs what the in-coming maintenance contractor inherits. A mid-term refresh on a working base means multiple buildings handed over in waves rather than a single big-bang event — each wave with its own HOTO checklist, asset register, and rectification schedule. The compilation challenge was less about volume (large though it was) and more about keeping every discipline's evidence in sync as scope changed mid-build.
Specific complications on this project:
- Multi-trade coordination — over 40 subcontractors across electrical, mechanical, hydraulic, fire, security, and ICT disciplines, each with their own document templates and warranty conditions.
- ERIK evidence mapping — each piece of equipment required documentation traceable to the relevant ERIK clause, with version-controlled certifications.
- Sectional handovers — buildings released in tranches over 18 months, each requiring a complete HOTO pack before the next was opened.
- Rolling DLP windows — Defects Liability Periods started at sectional handover, not project completion, so DLP tracking began while compilation was still in progress.
How Procom delivered
The project lead structured the manual under Procom's Defence template, with one master tree spanning all buildings and discipline-level sub-trees per trade. Subcontractors uploaded directly into their assigned sections through the platform's secure portal; the Procom review team validated each submission against the section's evidence requirements before approving the document into the master manual.
Workflow features applied:
- Discipline-level review queues so each trade's documents could be cleared in parallel.
- Status dashboard with traffic-light indicators per section, viewable by the principal contractor and the Defence project officer.
- Push-notification emails to subcontractors when a section approached the documentation deadline or when a submission was rejected for re-work.
- OMM volume splitting for export — the final manual was split into building-specific PDFs plus a master index, matching ERIK's preferred handover format.
- An electronic interactive manual handed to the EMOS contractor at HOTO, hyperlinked from the asset register straight to the relevant warranty, datasheet, and commissioning record.
Outcomes
- 2,355 manual sections compiled across the program.
- 40+ subcontractors managed through a single platform.
- Sectional handovers cleared HOTO on first submission in every wave.
- EMOS contractor onboarding cut by approximately a week per building, because the interactive manual eliminated the FM team's usual hunt-and-peck through PDF directories.
What this proves
The Oakey program is the clearest demonstration in the Procom portfolio of how the platform handles scale (over two thousand manual sections), compliance regime (ERIK, HOTO, EMOS), and handover cadence (sectional rather than big-bang) on a single Defence project. If your project is in the Defence O&M services space — whether CFI, Estate Works, or a maintenance refresh — this is the operating model Procom will run. For the framework background, see our HOTO process guide and the ERIK plain-English explainer.
