Our customer, a lift manufacturing company with over 50 years of history and a wide range of passenger, cargo, and hospital lifts, faced a typical industry challenge: how to stand out in the market and digitise the processes?
To become a preferable choice for designers, architects, and BIM specialists selecting lifts for their projects, the customer wanted to minimise the labour efforts when finding and selecting lifts, and preparing design documentation. The existing process was too labour-intensive:
- Time-consuming catalogue search;
- Necessity to contact sales managers;
- Individual drawing request for each lift;
Besides, it took a lot of time for Sales Department to ask for developing drawings for each offer.
We understood that designers highly appreciate having ready-to-use BIM families of lifts to include these in their projects. The BIM families of lifts are complex by virtue of their nature and contain numerous parameters and embedded sub-families. Adapting existing BIM families to specific project requirements is typically a meticulous and time-consuming task. Therefore, our primary goal was to simplify this process by enabling designers to complete it with just a few clicks, thereby significantly saving time and man-hours.
IT-ENECA specialists offered an innovative solution that allows generating customisable BIM families up to LOD500, as well as creating production drawings and installation documentation directly on the lift manufacturer's website.
We developed a web application (Configurator) that enables website users to:
- Configure necessary BIM family parameters in the Configurator and receive an optimised BIM family by email or by downloading from the website;
- Download lift models in various formats;
- Create production drawings in just 5 minutes directly on the website;
Our main priority was to make data input as simple and logical as possible for everyone. Following simple steps, users enter the necessary information into the online-app , and voilà!
In just 5 minutes, a unique BIM family and construction documentation are ready for use.
Thus, the web-application should have not only reduced the time needed for creating families, while maintaining high quality, but also decreased the likelihood of errors associated with the human factor.
Together with the customer, our UI/UX designers came up with a user friendly interface for web pages, which made a data entry process convenient and enjoyable.
Our programmers developed a reliable front-end infrastructure that checks all the entered values and remembers each selection made by a user.
No need to worry about expenses or managing a local server, as all safety requirements are already built-in. All that you need is a good internet connection, and you're ready to work.
When a user completes all necessary steps and accurately fills out each requested field, the data are sent to the application's server-side (Autodesk Platform Services). Using Forge Design Automation API, the server application updates the informational and geometrical data of the family.
After the process is complete, the model, drawings and as-built documentation are stored in Amazon S3 Bucket. From there, they are emailed to the user via MimeKit Library, optimising product delivery, and sent to Autodesk Object Storage Service to generate a download archive link. If the user remains on the page until a family is created, the family can be downloaded directly from the website using the link generated in OSS.
We applied Autodesk Forge to create a cloud-based application. C# processed back-end logic while Next.js client application ensured data validation and server interaction. ASP.NET MVC framework made it possible to process client requests while Forge Design Automation API modified the family data on the server-side. The output data were stored on Amazon S3 while MimeKit optimised email product delivery.
- Creation of BIM families in just 5 minutes;
- Significant reduction in family development time;
- Simplified project integration.
Moreover, engineers no longer needed to perform monotonous drawing creation and cost calculations. The tool automated these processes, allowing engineers to focus on more strategic initiatives.
Significant competitive advantage for the lift manufacturing plant. As a result, the lift manufacturing plant’s website became a key attraction point for architects and designers during the planning stage.