You are not allowed to edit IFC models – ever!
Not only are you allowed to, but if you think about it, you absolutely should edit them – always! Of course, you should be allowed to further process the data you get from the designers. How else are you going to do your work? You have always enriched the design data you receive in document format. BIM doesn’t change this in any way.
This claim probably comes from the commercial needs of model author tools, model checker and model viewers. Don’t be easily fooled by it!
Maybe the better word to use here is manage instead of edit. The basic data management rule here is simple: everybody should edit/manage and enrich their own data. The data they create or produce, with the tools they have. The designers create and edit their data in model author tools. The production teams create and edit the data they produce in their own tools.
The catch with IFC is, that it can and should contain both design data and downstream data. You need to be able manage this data, to enrich and re-structure the data in the IFC models, such that it becomes fit for your purposes. The alternative would be to demand IFC models that always fit your needs 100% from others, which is neither practical nor realistic by any stretch of the imagination.
Simplebim is the perfect tool for creating, managing, editing and preparing model data for downstream usage, for example for production. It can even all done in an automated and centralized way. For more information, read our blog post about editing IFC models.