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One industry taken end to end on the Max Knowledge Platform: every commercial door opening — Division 08 doors and hardware, Division 28 electronic security — carried on a single Opening record inside Max Business System, from the door schedule to the annual fire-door inspection. This is our flagship worked example, the same pattern the Sample Companies demonstrate inside the app: a real trade, run on the platform, with nothing held in a side spreadsheet.
Door Opening Solutions is a surface of Max Business System — its home is with selling and serving, its delivery stages sit with operations — built on one disciplined extension of the platform's own records: the Opening. Projects, sales orders, bills of materials, work orders, documents, quality checks, and maintenance all stay on the platform's native models; the Opening links them, so an opening's money, manufacturing, and service work are never duplicated onto a parallel system. Eight subsurfaces carry the opening through its life:
The register starts from the door schedule: fire-resistance ratings, egress widths, ADA clearances, and the hardware set for every opening.
Takeoffs against the specification, with the Division 08 / Division 28 scope split made explicit before buyout — not argued about after it.
Hardware and keying schedules, templates, and approvals tracked per opening, so nothing reaches fabrication on a verbal.
Doors and frames built only from approved submittals; fire labels and factory preps recorded against the opening they belong to.
Frames set, doors hung, electrified hardware wired and connected — the field work recorded per opening as it happens.
Clearances, latching, and label checks verified per opening; the turnover package is the register itself, not a binder rebuilt at the end.
The signed-off opening becomes the building's door record: opening number, hardware set, warranty, and history intact from day one.
Annual fire-door inspections scheduled from the register, and repairs recorded against the opening — a managed book of business, not a pile of work orders.
An opening passes through seven stages and four material streams — steel doors, wood doors, standard hardware, electrified hardware — each stage governed by its own authorities. The record has to survive all of them.
The architect assigns fire-resistance ratings — 20 minutes to 3 hours — from the building code and the Life Safety Code, sizes widths to egress capacity, and checks every opening against ADA: 32-inch minimum clear width, maneuvering clearances, operating forces. The security narrative decides which doors take access control and fire-alarm integration.
Steel doors are specified to SDI (SDI-100 / ANSI A250.8) for standard commercial work or HMMA for custom and heavy-duty (08 11 13). Wood doors go to WDMA or AWI — veneer cuts, mineral cores for fire ratings, factory finish grades (08 14 16). Hardware is BHMA / ANSI A156, Grade 1, issued as hardware sets (08 71 00). Electrified hardware straddles Division 28 (28 10 00), with fail-safe versus fail-secure sequences and power responsibilities spelled out.
Estimators price to SDI and WDMA grades; distributors verify wall construction so frames carry the right anchors, and confirm fire-door hardware is approved for rated assemblies. The standing split: Division 08 supplies the electrified hardware and power supplies; Division 28 supplies card readers, head-end software, and pulls the low-voltage cable. The GC resolves the scope gaps at bid time.
Rated components are certified by UL or Intertek (Warnock Hersey) under positive-pressure fire testing (UL 10C) before manufacture. Factories machine to approved submittals and affix the label to door edge and frame jamb — and a rated wood door cannot be field-modified without voiding that label. Concealed raceways are built in, so electrified hardware wiring stays inside the rating.
Hollow metal frames go in early, anchored per SDI-105 — a frame out of plumb by even 1/16 inch binds its hinges. Wood doors arrive late, after climate control is running, or moisture voids the WDMA warranty. Division 28 pulls the wire; electric thru-wire hinges and electrified locksets are connected to NEC Class 2 standards.
The authority having jurisdiction verifies labels visible, legible, and unpainted, and measures clearances to NFPA 80 — typically 1/8 inch at head and jambs, 3/4 inch maximum undercut. Interior non-fire doors open at 5 pounds of force or less; fire doors positively latch. Mag-locks and fail-safe devices are proven against the fire alarm: power drops, egress is free, immediately.
NFPA 80 mandates a documented inspection of every fire door assembly at least annually, by a certified Fire Door Assembly Inspector. A closer that will not latch, gasketing gone, a label missing — and a single missing hinge screw voids the fire rating on the spot. Findings become repairs with equivalent BHMA-certified hardware, recorded against the opening.
Map who is Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed across the eight phases, and the gaps stop being anecdotes — they are structural. Accountability shifts or dilutes at exactly the handoffs where the work is most expensive to get wrong.
| Phase & core deliverable | Architect | Owner / Facilities | Hardware Consultant | Gen. Contractor | Distributor | Trades (Integrator / Elec) | Manufacturer |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Design & Code Analysis — door schedule, code requirements | A / R | C | C | – | – | – | – |
| 2. Specification Writing — Div 08 spec, hardware sets | A | C | R | – | I | C | C |
| 3. Bidding & Award — estimates, substitutions, buyout | C | I | I | A | R | I | C |
| 4. Submittals & Detailing — hardware & keying schedules | A | C | C | C | R | C | I |
| 5. Procurement & Fab — templates, POs, manufacturing | I | – | – | I | A | – | R |
| 6. Installation — setting frames, hanging, wiring | I | – | – | A | C | R | – |
| 7. Inspection & Closeout — NFPA 80 tests, turnover package | A | I | R | R | C | C | – |
| 8. Ops & Maintenance — annual inspections, upgrades | – | A | – | – | C | R | I |
R = Responsible (does the work) · A = Accountable (owns the outcome — one per phase) · C = Consulted · I = Informed
At installation the GC is Accountable, but Responsibility splits three ways — carpenters on mechanical hardware, electricians on high voltage, integrators on low voltage — while the Distributor, the one party who understands how the hardware actually functions, is only Consulted, disconnected from the wiring and the testing.
The Architect owns the project through closeout; at turnover the Owner inherits total accountability for life safety. The Distributor and the Consultant — the only parties holding clean data on the opening number, the warranty, and the hardware set — drop off the matrix entirely. The building's door knowledge is lost on day one of operations. This is the gap the Opening record closes by construction: the data never changes hands, because it never leaves the register.
The Consultant writes the specification, often subsidized by the Manufacturer. At bidding, accountability moves to the GC, whose incentive is cost reduction — and the value engineering and substitution requests land directly on the specification the Manufacturer invested in. On the register, the specified set and every proposed substitution sit on the same record, visible to everyone with a stake in it.
The complete document: the platform under the surface, the eight subsurfaces, and what changes for the company — bid day, the shop, the field, compliance, and the service book.
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