You can't prioritise what you can't see

If you answer for fire and building safety across a large, varied estate — a university, a council, an NHS trust, a major housing provider — the hard part isn't doing the work. It's seeing it. Assessments pile up in one-off documents and contractor reports scattered across departments. Per-user fees mean half the people who need access don't have it. Nobody holds the whole picture, so nothing gets prioritised with confidence.

Most fire safety software assumes one site, one team, one set of rules. Your estate breaks all three assumptions. Here's an estate that broke them harder than most.

550 buildings, one live view

The University of Edinburgh runs 550 buildings: offices, teaching space, gas and chemical labs, historic sites, student halls. 45,000 students and 18,000 staff move through them. Every building has its own hazards and its own contractors, and at any one time the health and safety team is sitting on 4,000+ outstanding actions. Until mid-2024, the detail behind those actions lived wherever the last report was filed. Hundreds of staff needed access; per-user fees ruled most systems out. Nobody could see the whole estate.

What changed

In mid-2024 Edinburgh adopted RiskBase and shaped the platform around the university — its departments, its contractors, its mix of buildings — instead of bending the university around the software. The team adapts assessment templates themselves, so a chemical lab, a listed building and a student hall each get assessed on their own terms, in-house, without waiting on a vendor.

Picture one survey. A contractor finishes a specialist assessment of a chemistry lab. Before, that report joined the pile: read once, then filed away to age. Now it lands in the building's live record beside every assessment that came before it, and its actions appear in the same picture as everyone else's.

• Every assessment went into one system, whether their own team did it or a contractor did. Nothing got filed and forgotten.

• They adapted the assessment templates themselves, so more buildings were assessed in-house, without waiting on a vendor.

• Dashboards updated as work happened, so admin staff and the safety team all looked at the same picture.

• No per-user fees, so everyone who needed access had it.

For a large university campus with a variety of buildings, we needed an adaptable, simple to use, and cost-effective solution. RiskBase provided that.

Wes Boulstridge, Fire Safety Advisor, The University of Edinburgh

The result

Edinburgh's 4,000+ actions now sit in one live view of all 550 buildings, where each risk is seen as part of the estate rather than an isolated snapshot. The team prioritises remedial work with confidence and closes it sooner. Duplicate surveys stopped. Wider oversight didn't come with a wider bill.

A report is a snapshot. Edinburgh's record is live, and it grows more valuable with every assessment.

If your estate looks anything like theirs, see how RiskBase would map yours. Book a walkthrough of your estate on RiskBase.