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Why Manufacturers Need BIM Content: An Open Letter To Industry

IGS Group have collaborated with industry partners to outline a set of principles, standards and practices that we believe best represent the state of BIM in our industry.


The Letter

Last updated: 3/06/2024 – Download a PDF copy here

Introduction

Australian Building Product Manufacturers are reading / hearing a lot of information about BIM. Some of it is incorrect, a lot of it is confusing and much of it is irrelevant to manufacturers in the context of their efforts to collaborate and provide better service to design practices.

For this reason, the undersigned practices have collaborated with IGS Group to generate this letter as a way of providing clear direction on our requirements, requests and understanding of BIM data being received from building product manufacturers, commonly referred to as ‘BIM Content’.

Our hope is that the design and manufacturing communities are able to view this letter as a solid, centralised perspective on BIM content and its role within the industry. More to the point, we would like to outline a number of principles that our industry partners can agree on. So, from the mouths of the design community directly, we’d like to make the following things clear:

The Reality of BIM Content

  • Firstly, software platforms. Revit is the most widely used design & documentation software by Architects and Engineers. Therefore, supporting and maintaining a strong Revit content library is mandatory if you’re looking to have your products accessible by the lion’s share of the industry.
  • Designers & design firms DO want manufacturers to provide GOOD BIM content. It cannot be put any more plainly: designers actively want BIM content, and they want the product manufacturers to provide it. The easier a manufacturer makes it to source and include BIM content in a project, the more specifications that manufacturer is likely to receive.
  • A manufacturer that is able to provide high quality BIM content has a strategic benefit that their competitors don’t. The more companies that provide BIM content for their product ranges, the more that it becomes an expectation – a requirement to even compete for designer attention.
  • Clients of project designers are pushing for high quality visualisations. Project delivery partners need accurate, structured and coordinated data. This is the way the industry is moving – projects with these resources have lower costs, faster rates of completion, and are dramatically lower in errors and mistakes. Manufacturers that can tick these boxes are simply seen as providing a commercial benefit.
  • The quality of BIM content matters. For ANY of these strategic and commercial benefits to apply, the standard of BIM content needs to be high-quality and built to benefit designers. Cheap, rushed or repurposed content provides minimal value, or at worst is actively damaging to projects. Design firms actively employ subjective processes for checking and evaluating content before inclusion. Content that doesn’t meet these rigorous standards is ignored along with the manufacturer that gave it to them.
  • BIM content is really difficult to produce and really complex to understand. The requirements for a ‘good’ piece of content are subjective, yet strict, and without being a specialist or coming from a content background, it is very difficult to get it right. Trying to develop a solution in-house or use contractors that don’t live and breathe quality BIM content is likely to be a waste of effort and money when the content doesn’t meet the quality standards and is subsequently discarded and ignored.
  • IGS Group are a reputable provider. Numerous design firms have greenlit our content, actively appreciating the standards to which we build and the values that we uphold in our content creation. We are endorsed, recommended and spoken highly of in the design community. It’s not just our company saying all of these things about our content, or even about BIM content as a whole. This letter represents the wider design community standing behind these sentiments and behind us as a provider.
  • Designers actively use BIMcontent.com to find their content. Manufacturers hosting their content on the BIMcontent.com platform is the equivalent of directly handing their products directly to their customers. It makes sense to place a strategically beneficial resource directly where the people that need it can access it, and on a platform that is trusted and endorsed for quality standards.
  • Even designers use BIMcontent.com as a quality benchmark for BIM content. Despite how subjective content standards can be, designer-to-designer, adherence to BIMcontent.com’s Revit Content Quality standard is an excellent benchmark that designers use to consider content inclusion in a project.

What This Letter Means

This letter is a reflection of the design community’s perspective and wishes surrounding BIM content. It should be incredibly clear that there is a massive desire for this content, and that the responsibility for sourcing and providing that content lands squarely on the manufacturer. We hear time and time again that manufacturer’s don’t hear the demand for BIM content from designers, or that they don’t see the value. This letter is designer demand. This letter outlines the commercial and strategic value of BIM content.

There should be no reason to misunderstand the role of BIM content in the industry, nor any reason that manufacturers should not understand the demand for high-quality BIM content coming directly from designers and their firms. The benefits are obvious, both to the manufacturers and the designers that are able to access a larger variety of content. BIM content is not an optional component. It is an essential tool for competing for your customers attention.

IGS Group has never been quiet about these issues. We developed our company and our processes with these attitudes in mind, and have been able to serve the design community the content they have been demanding as a result. Our quality standards have been passed to our platform, BIMcontent.com, as a way of allowing designers to trust the source of their BIM content. By using the platform, both manufacturers and designers are benefiting from a closed ecosystem with trusted and endorsed quality benchmarks, a standard that benefits everyone to maintain.

We know that the BIM content industry can be a sensitive one. We know there are challenges in the construction and implementation of BIM content that cause many to overlook an otherwise vitally useful tool. Through the creation and sharing of this letter, we want to provide a central perspective, one where the key points that designers wish they could communicate can be shared. We welcome additional input or feedback from any and all sources, and hope that together we can continue to assist manufacturers and designers to the best of our ability.

Sign The Letter!

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Signatories (14)

Logo

Company

Title

Industry

Dulux logo, in collaboration with IGS Group, underlining their joint efforts in innovative paint technologies.

Dulux Australia

National Specification Manager

Paint & Coatings

GHD logo, signifying a strategic collaboration with IGS Group, emphasizing advanced engineering and consulting services.

GHD

BIM Manager

AEC