What does buying a house have to do with downloading building product manufacturer BIM content / Revit families?

This post was written by:

Luke Johnston

-

Owner & Managing Director, IGS Group

This post was written and submitted by an individual contributor and does not reflect the views or attitudes of IGS Group or BIMcontent.com as a whole. About the author:

What does buying a house have to do with downloading building product manufacturer BIM content / Revit families?

The other day I saw a LinkedIn post from a Commercial Furniture Manufacturer that piqued my interest.

We’d previously spoken to this Commercial Furniture Manufacturer about developing a BIM (Revit) content library for them. However, despite explaining in great detail…

1) How important it is to get the quality of BIM content right, lest it be of little use to specifiers and a waste of their time/money, and
2) That the skills required to build quality BIM/Revit content are deceptively specialised, the client declined our offer, stating they’d assessed they had the skills to do it themselves.

The recent LinkedIn post hat piqued my interest was from this company and it stated with a sense of celebration and great confidence they had “high-quality… BIM Files Available”.

Naturally, I was curious to see how they’d gone in developing their own Revit families, so I downloaded a couple of files.

Any Revit user worth their salt will know exactly what I’m talking about when I say I didn’t even need to open any of the families to find out.

After downloading a ZIP file for a product range, this is what I saw.

When downloading Revit content from manufacturers there’s a few things that can give an indication for quality, potential usability and the capabilities of the creator before you even open a file, such as:

• File naming
• File sizes
• Library structure
• Thumbnail previews

Now, none of these things unto themselves are necessarily a total dealbreaker, but when several of them are done poorly or ‘questionable’, it can create a reasonably clear picture.

Think of it like this. If you’re looking to buy a house and upon arrival you see it has some relatively minor issues like peeling paint, a couple of tears in the carpet and a leaky tap, but everything else seems in order, you’d likely still invest in a building inspection with a view to buying the property if nothing major comes up.

But if upon arriving at the property you see the building is leaning to one side, gutters and downpipes hanging all over the place, and water leaking everywhere, that’s an altogether different proposition. Odds are the vendor hasn’t taken care of the property, and the visible issues are signs of even bigger problems that lay beneath. This is a place not worth wasting money on an inspection for, as it’s almost certainly going to be difficult or impossible to salvage. It’s a demolition job. No thanks.

In the example of the Revit content I downloaded from this manufacturer, they are the house that’s falling over. All the obvious hallmarks of a Revit content creator that doesn’t know what they are doing were there. They failed all 4 preview tests.

If a Revit content creator doesn’t know enough about creating Revit content to get any of these 4 relatively simple things right, there’s virtually no hope of them getting the more complex things right that would make the content useable and trustworthy in a project environment.

The issue of BIM (Revit) content quality is a complex one. But that’s not the purpose of this post.

The purpose of this post is to highlight the issue of ‘Technical’ team members overstating their capabilities to Management / Sales / Marketing Teams.

With this Commercial Furniture manufacturer, the technical team member(s) have clearly misled Management about their ability to build Revit content.

And this is very easy to do as almost all building product Management / Sales / Marketing leaders lack the ability to critique a Revit library, and they naturally have a high degree of trust their Technical team members.

Perhaps this technical person/people truly believes they’re capable of building quality Revit families and they’re just blissfully unaware of their shortcomings. Or perhaps this person knows they’re incapable, but not being entirely forthcoming as a means of job security. i.e. by having management think they’re capable of creating Revit content they can say they’re saving the company money by not needing to outsource the work to us (great job tech person!), or they think they can make themselves more indispensable and/or command a higher salary as they have a valuable and unique skillset.

Unfortunately, over the years I’ve seen this situation many times. And the people that end up losing out the most are:

• The manufacturer who has wasted their time/money, and potentially damaged their brand by offering poor quality assets
• The broader A&D industry who is still without useable BIM content from these manufacturers which would otherwise make their job easier

So, what are the takeaways from this post? Maybe it depends on who you are.

• Marketing people: Be careful about using the word ‘quality’ for things you can’t quantify what that actually means or how you meet this benchmark as you might be (unknowingly) ‘telling fibs’.
• Management / Sales / Marketing leaders: if you have technical team members that profess to be specialists in Revit content creation, you should do some independent research on the work they’re doing before getting too far down the track. Spoiler Alert: This rarely ends well.
  • NB: you could absolutely take the same approach even if you’re working with an external ‘BIM Expert’. In truth, a lot of them are not actual experts. They just know more about BIM/Revit content than you do… and that doesn’t make them an expert by any stretch.
• Technical people: rather than overstating your capabilities in an area like Revit content creation and trying to DIY, look at it as an opportunity to lead the project in collaboration with an actual specialist. You’ll still be the ‘BIM Champion’ by leading the initiative and you’ll provide greater value to your organisation, without the risk of wasting your company’s time/money or overcommitting on your capabilities.

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Written by:

Luke Johnston

-

Owner & Managing Director, IGS Group

This post was written and submitted by an individual contributor and does not reflect the views or attitudes of IGS Group or BIMcontent.com as a whole. About the author:

Luke Johnston is the Owner and Managing Director of IGS Group and BIMcontent.com, with over 20 years’ experience in building product sales and marketing. Internationally recognised as an authority on BIM content development, Luke is known for his strategic insights, partnering with manufacturers and design firms to implement and enhance their BIM strategies. He has advised and delivered BIM solutions to over 150 manufacturers globally and is passionate about helping businesses leverage design technology as a powerful tool for specification growth and commercial success.