Unlocking data with Speckle: How leading AEC firms use data accessibility as a market advantage

Getting data out of design tools shouldn’t be a battle, but it usually is.

Speckle fixes that by pulling data from your design app and making it accessible and instantly shareable with your team, no matter what they use. Because data that's stuck in silos is your wasted potential.

In this article, we’ll show how Gensler, Bollinger+Grohmann, Pomerleau Inc., Stantec, ICD, and Lozinger Marazzi are using Speckle to open up their data, work smarter, and deliver better projects.

Tool silos: Software choice locking you down?

Forcing your professionals to use specific authoring software to achieve company-wide compatibility is madness. Different professions require different tools; no one solution fits all in this situation. However, the authored data still needs to be federated into a single space where comparisons can be made and data daylighted, regardless of the authoring tool.

As the team and projects grow in complexity, you will need systems in place that become a common denominator between them, a linkage that allows everyone to operate in their specialised tools while having a space to come together and collaborate.

This is where Aleseng Serape and Maceau Brunner at Losinger Marazzi have turned to Speckle as the foundation to build a custom tool to comply with complex building standards that would otherwise be laborious to calculate across competing authoring software packages.

ArchiCAD - Speckle - PowerBI Workflow. Copyright: Losinger Marazzi

Discipline silos: Breaking down professional boundaries

The construction industry is a team sport; every project is the combined effort of hundreds of individual professionals, toiling away each day to create a beautiful and functional constructed world. However, collaboration is not inherently easy, especially now that more systems are becoming increasingly interconnected and interdependent.

Alex Richards from Stantec has evolved from using Speckle as a means to transfer data from Civil 3D to Revit to realizing Speckle as a collaborative tool for Computational Designers to communicate effectively with clients, and ultimately to federating separate models for the effective comparison of individual and competing realities in complex structural problems.

Additionally, this evolution from simple data transfer to comprehensive collaboration is echoed across the industry. Ljuba Tascheva from Bollinger+Grohmann demonstrates, through one of their latest high-rise projects, how they utilize Speckle as the backbone for interdisciplinary collaboration, enabling design checks and data dashboarding.

With Speckle, Bollinger+Grohmann, and Stantec are achieving previously impossible things, real innovation in a classically slow-moving sector.

Automate diffing between two models. Copyright: Stantec

Phase silos: Data shouldn't die at handoff

Much like handing off to other disciplines can be a recipe for information loss, so too is the constant waterfall “CA-CHUNK” of landing into the next design phase.

Oscar Mannarella & Araham Martinez from Promerleau are doing this in the most critical stage, construction. The stage where projects live or die on effective communication. They demonstrate how using Speckle has reduced costs, enhanced collaboration, and unlocked long-term value.

While Lasath Siriwar from ICD demonstrates the use of Speckle to bridge the phasing waterfall, bringing their designs for the complex timber roof to the construction phase. No easy feat to be sure, especially for such a beautiful project that manages to be carbon neutral!

Speckle is instrumental in breaking down silos between phases and facilitating open communication across cross-disciplinary teams. Speckles' low barrier to entry means that anyone can gain oversight of increasingly complex and integrated building systems, regardless of their expertise or background.

IntCDC Building – Indoor Lab for Robotic Prefabrication. Copyright: IntCDC Planungs GmbH

Organizational silos: Scaling without losing control

The true test of any solution is how it scales across large systems; even the best-laid plans fall apart when they come into contact with the enemy. Gensler is one such extensive system, one of the biggest in fact, and a perfect example of how Speckle can scale from an individual AEC hacker to organisational integration.

The bigger the system, the more siloed and specialised information becomes; it's just a natural scaling of the friction that exists between individuals and teams. Things that are good enough for a small team quickly fall apart when you're dealing with 100+ individuals spread across a global network.

Vignesh from Gensler demonstrates how they brought Speckle from pilot to integration with gBlox, Power BI, and custom solutions to gain a competitive advantage in the market.

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Speckle liberates your data at any stage of the design process, providing pathways to effectively utilize all the data you produce in meaningful and constructive ways.

Whether that involves moving data from one application to another, breaking down occupational boundaries, or facilitating the construction of your next masterpiece, Speckle is the common denominator, providing access to your applications, teams, and organizations.

Don't just take our word for it, hear straight from the professionals in your fields using Speckle in their day-to-day and how they're gaining a competitive edge with Speckle.