Success Story: Armstrong Flooring
Armstrong Flooring Australia, a leader in resilient flooring for over 50 years, partnered with IGS Group to develop a customer-focused BIM strategy that met the expectations and growing demands of specifiers. The collaboration included the creation of a high-quality Revit library for their commercial flooring solutions, and BIMcontent.com Partnership.
In this Success Story, we’ll explore:
- Why Armstrong Flooring invested in a BIM strategy
- The solutions provided by IGS Group
- The outcomes and benefits of the partnership
Background & Challenges
Armstrong Flooring has built a reputation for delivering innovative and high-quality flooring solutions, including luxury vinyl plank and tile, hybrid plank, and commercial vinyl sheet ranges. With a significant footprint across Australia, the company is a trusted supplier for various project typologies, particularly in the healthcare sector.
As Architectural design technology has rapidly evolved in recent years, the surface-based building product category broadly known as ‘Materials’ has become one of the most in-demand types of BIM content among specifiers. This has been largely driven by the increasing importance of project visualisation in the design process. As project owners place greater emphasis on seeing what their completed spaces will look like during the design process, the ability for designers to create high-quality visual depictions of their projects, such as virtual reality (VR) experiences, real-time rendering, and detailed photorealistic images, has become a critical component of modern design workflows.
Although a lot of manufacturers provide ‘high resolution images’ and material ‘swatches’ for their materials-based products on their websites, they are often unsuitable for creating the kinds of digital assets used in generating high quality project visualisations.
After considerable research and due diligence, Armstrong Flooring sought to invest in a BIM strategy and engage IGS as their partner due to several key factors, such as:
- Growing Demand for BIM Content
Specifiers increasingly requested BIM content – specifically in the Revit format – to streamline their design and specification processes. This trend was driven by the rise of rendering and VR experiences developed during the design process, which require accurate, high-fidelity, format-specific digital representations of materials. - Complexity of Creating BIM Assets for Materials
Developing BIM assets for flooring can be especially complex, as it often involves creating Physical-Based Rendering Materials that ensure realistic visualisation and consistency across rendering platforms. Creating content for materials that incorporate a degree of randomised variability such as timber finishes can be especially challenging. - Time-Consuming Product Visualisation
Without pre-built BIM assets, designers often had to create their own materials, a process that is both time-consuming and prone to inaccuracy and inconsistency. The absence of readily available BIM assets posed a barrier to Armstrong Flooring being seen as a preferred supplier within certain sectors, but equally, presented an opportunity to fill a void that was otherwise present in the market. - Seeking ‘Category Leadership’
Within the commercial flooring category, very few suppliers globally offer ‘fit for purpose’ BIM content. Providing project-ready BIM assets not only support designers in meeting client demands but also positions the manufacturer as a valued, preferred partner in the design and construction process. This fosters stronger relationships with specifiers and increases the likelihood of their products being selected for high-profile projects.
Head of Marketing, Armstrong Flooring: “Our goal was to provide specifiers with an intuitive, high-quality resource that made it easy to select, visualise and specify our products in their projects. We wanted to be seen as the leaders in our product category among specifiers. Based on market research, IGS was identified as a market leader in developing BIM content for manufacturers and their work was highly regarded by the specifiers we were seeking to work with.”
Solution
IGS Group worked closely with Armstrong Flooring to deliver a BIM strategy that enabled architects and designers to visualise, specify, and integrate Armstrong Flooring products into their projects with ease and confidence.
1. Comprehensive Revit Library Creation
IGS developed a robust BIM library for Armstrong Flooring, featuring their commercial flooring solutions. Highlights of the library include:
- Physical-Based Rendering Materials: Ensuring accurate, high-quality visualisation for renders and consistency across various rendering software platforms.
- Embedded Product Identity Data: All Armstrong Flooring Revit assets include product identity data, such as product names, descriptions and URLs to corresponding product-specific web pages, ensuring designers can easily identify and reference Armstrong Flooring products within their projects. This streamlines project documentation, reduces the risk of errors, and provides a seamless link between design and procurement processes.
- Flexible Download Options: The library is available as a Revit ‘Virtual Showroom’, range-based Collections, or Individual Families in the four latest Revit versions at any given time, providing specifiers with flexibility in the way they access, manage and utilise the content.
- Tailored Revit Workflows: Designed specifically for Revit, the library integrates seamlessly into commercial project workflows, enabling intuitive application, precise scheduling, and realistic visualisation.
2. Enhanced Visual Resources
To ensure the Revit materials could be developed to the best possible quality standard, IGS assisted Armstrong Flooring with product photography and postproduction image editing. By photographing physical flooring samples in controlled conditions and to exact specifications, then editing these images using specific methodologies, IGS ensured the resulting materials were seamless, tile-able, and ideally suited for use in project rendering applications.
Head of Marketing, Armstrong Flooring: “Having the materials photographed and edited in a way that makes them optimised for specifiers to use in their project renders makes a significant difference in how our products are presented in digital environments. The high quality of the images also means we’re able to repurpose them for use in other mediums such as product literature, websites, marketing collateral and online visualisation tools”.
3. Leveraging BIMcontent.com
Being a BIMcontent.com Partner allowed Armstrong Flooring to execute a complete ‘go to market strategy’ for their extensive, high-quality BIM library, ensuring maximum reach and engagement with specifiers and streamlining the process of ongoing library hosting, management and updates.
Key aspects of BIMcontent.com partnership leveraged by Armstrong Flooring include:
- Content Syndication: Updates are simultaneously reflected across the BIMcontent.com website, Armstrong Flooring’s website, and the BIMcontent.com Revit Plug-in, ensuring specifiers always have access to the latest content wherever it’s accessed from.
- Analytics and Insights: Live analytics provide valuable data on how specifiers interact with the library, helping Armstrong Flooring quantify the success of their BIM strategy and refine their sales and marketing efforts with specifiers.
- Specifier Engagement: BIMcontent.com’s growing community of specifiers who regularly use the platform allows Armstrong Flooring to significantly increase their visibility and engagement within the design community.
- Marketing Support: IGS developed a suite of marketing assets such as copywriting and various graphics, enabling Armstrong Flooring to communicate the features and benefits of their BIM library effectively, even without deep technical expertise of access to the Revit software.
Head of Marketing, Armstrong Flooring: “Being a BIMcontent.com partner has helped us connect with specifiers and ensure the market is not only aware of our BIM library, but able to access and use it easily. The access to analytics and marketing support have allowed us to grow and measure the impact of our BIM strategy and ensure our products remain top of mind among the growing community of specifiers who use the platform to design their projects.”
4. Supporting Digital Asset Creation
Subsequent to the BIM content creation project, IGS leveraged the high-quality digital assets developed for Armstrong Flooring to produce a series of 3D rendered images showcasing their various flooring accessories. These renders which can be used in various forms of technical and product marketing literature visually depict Armstrong Flooring accessories such as skirtings, stair nosings, cappings in-situ, providing specifiers with a clearer understanding of how these components integrate into real-world projects.
Example Accessory Renders
By repurposing the BIM assets for these visualisations, Armstrong Flooring benefited from:
- Enhanced Product Presentation: High-quality renders provide a realistic and visually engaging way to communicate the functionality and aesthetics of Armstrong Flooring’s accessories.
- Greater Clarity for Specifiers: Designers can easily see how different accessories work in conjunction with Armstrong Flooring products, aiding in informed decision-making.
- Multi-Purpose Digital Assets: These images can be used across various marketing channels, including brochures, websites, and client presentations.
Head of Marketing, Armstrong Flooring: “The ability for IGS to generate accurate renders of our flooring accessories using the BIM assets has helped us present our products in a more consistent and visually clear way, supporting both our specifiers and our broader market engagement efforts.”
Outcomes
1. Improved Specifier Collaboration
The Revit library has made it significantly easier for architects and designers to visualise Armstrong Flooring products and incorporate them into their projects with confidence.
2. Enhanced Visualisation Capabilities
Physical-Based Rendering Materials have increased the quality of renders designers can create, enabling them to efficiently produce accurate visuals that meet the expectations of their clients.
3. Increased Market Reach
By leveraging BIMcontent.com, Armstrong Flooring have expanded visibility of their products across Australia, particularly among Tier 1 firms and with healthcare project specifiers who frequently utilise the BIMcontent.com platform as a primary resource of manufacturer-specific BIM content.
4. Integrated Digital Content Creation Workflows
Having IGS involved in the product photography process provided Armstrong Flooring with images that were not only essential for creating high-quality BIM assets, but also well suited for a variety of marketing applications which saves time and costs. This process also ensures consistency in the way the products are represented in the BIM assets and in other sales and marketing collateral such as brochures, websites, and online visualisation tools.
What Did The Client Think?
Head of Marketing, Armstrong Flooring
The feedback from specifiers has been overwhelmingly positive. They’ve highlighted how the BIM library saves time, assists them in decision making, and improves their ability to deliver high-quality visualisations, which is exactly what we aimed to achieve.
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