A new sales channel inside the architect's CAD
A large construction material manufacturer opened a new sales channel with our delivery of add-ins to Revit and ArchiCAD, allowing architects to use their product specifications right into their plans and to export BIMs for tenders easily, built and delivered the working app in 2 months allowing the client to test with real customers earlier, ultimately launching new market channel.
What the business got
Challenge
A construction supply manufacturing company needed a new sales channel to compete better on tenders.
Their customers are the general contractor companies, however the selection of materials that go into the buildings is done before the contractors come in to play. Essentially the tenders are already defining the necessary material strength, amount, etc., making a narrower selection at this point.
Strategy
Getting earlier in the process of architecting a new building gives a lot of leverage by comfort, the ease of choosing their materials will likely show up in how the tenders are written, driving selection toward their supply.
Client decided to target the architect's early decisions, allow them to use specific materials in their plans and get a position before even the tender to supply is finished.
Our delivery
To benefit from this shift, the client needed a solution that embeds into the top architecture CAD software:
- ArchiCAD
- Adobe Revit
For this, we:
- set up a team covering all aspects of the application: ingestion, processing, user interface and integration,
- we built the ingestion with a Kedro pipeline to process multi-country varied data sets into a globally used set for the CADs,
- we built the generic web application to show and enable selection of materials, plus to export the BIM for tenders,
- and we built both integrations to reuse the same common web application by keeping the integration module thin.
Outcome
We delivered on the UX vision in under 2 months, into production and the user research interviews that were originally planned with UI prototypes to use real application instead.
In month 3, we handed over to in-house development team fully to build upon the initial prototype and went on for 2+ years plus widening covered data sets by countries and material types.
Client testimonial
"I worked on this product for years to bring it to reality and thanks to Sandor and his blazingly fast team, it is real now."
— Product Owner at client.
The container architecture
Keeping the system complex and data flowing in one direction enabled the team to focus on the real difference: the quality of the content and user experience.
Aiming at a few material types at first established the system, easy to scale to other materials, while proved its viability rapid fast.
Flow of data is not circular, working from established data sets created over decades of work now pays off. An ingestion to bring them to a common data set and a standardized user interface focused our engineering efforts on what matters.
Keeping the native plugin layers to the minimum possible allowed the hardest part to be simply reusable. After building the Revit plugin for a month, a single engineer was enough to spin up the ArchiCAD plugin in two weeks to deliver the same experience.