Passive Fire Teams: Saving Hours on Administration Tasks with Onetrace

For most passive fire protection teams, proving it still means digging through text threads, paper sign-off sheets and undated photographs in a bid to reconstruct a timeline that should never have needed reconstructing. The install was compliant. The record just wasn’t built to answer the question on demand. As such, a routine ‘ask’ turns into hours of administration work or, worse still, a dispute.

Onetrace exists to close that gap and grew out of this exact trade. It was founded by a former fire protection company owner who lost a set of drawings on a live project and decided to digitise the process rather than risk such a scenario happening again.

That origin shows in the product: Onetrace isn’t a main contractor’s project system with fire stopping bolted on. It’s not a generic QA tool stretched to fit, either. It’s built around how passive fire teams actually evidence work.

The ‘mechanics’ are straightforward, which is precisely the point. Site teams work directly from the drawings, pinning photos, forms and approvals to the exact location as the job progresses: specification, penetration, seal type. That builds a time-stamped and connected record as the work happens, not after it.

There’s no separate reconciliation step and no reconstruction from memory. When a client, a Tier 1 or an assessor asks for evidence, one click turns that record into a branded and client-ready PDF or Excel report, sorted and ready rather than assembled under pressure.

It’s the same core record whether the job is fire protection, fire stopping, drylining, roofing, façade work, M&E, plumbing, electrical or specialist maintenance. Something that’s used by everyone: from single-site fire stopping specialists to multi-trade enterprises working across the UK.

Case Study: CLM Fireproofing

CLM Fireproofing – itself a £37 million passive fire protection specialist running simultaneous projects across commercial, residential, public sector, social housing, healthcare and defence projects – moved from carbon paper to digital years ago, but still found its systems slow, disconnected and manual, with management spending weekends building spreadsheets just to understand project productivity.

Subsequent to adopting Onetrace as its ‘single source of truth’, the business reported a 50% reduction in administration work and reporting time. As operations manager Heather Eldridge stated: “We have most definitely halved the amount of time we’re spending on discrepancy identification.”

An evidenced, structured record doesn’t just satisfy the compliance ‘ask’ when someone comes checking. It also gives back precious hours to management: hours that used to go into chasing, formatting and reconciling instead of running the business. One record, doing two jobs: proving compliance and cutting administration tasks.

For passive fire protection teams who live under audit pressure on a daily basis, that’s the shift worth making. Stop treating evidencing as a task you take on after the install and start treating it as something the install produces on its own.

*Further information is available online at www.onetrace.com

**Fire Protection Contractors: Digitising Compliance and Quality Assurance