Stantec: Feeling Secure About Its BIM Content

Stantec is a global leader that provides services spanning the building lifecycle and employs nearly 22,000 people working in over 400 locations across six continents.  Stantec’s Building Group, comprised of architects and engineers who work with Revit, employs over 3,500 people across 100 geographic locations called business centers.  Despite its distributed team, Stantec encourages cross-office collaboration and sharing among its business centers.  After learning that their content management solution would no longer be supported, Stantec needed to find an alternative that would provide access to a centralized content in a secure, yet easily accessible manner.  They turned to UNIFI.

Challenge

Stantec’s former content management vendor actually recommended that they take a look at UNIFI.  David Spehar, Principal in Stantec’s Buildings Digital Practice, was tasked with the investigation.  David is a registered architect who was an early adopter of Revit, so he possessed a hands on understanding of how digital building content was used and the challenges around maintaining consistent, standard content – especially for an organization on the scale of Stantec.  David was looking for a solution that offered a centralized library of BIM content that everyone could easily access while enforcing a baseline of standardization and ensuring the highest level of security.

Solution

Stantec embarked on a multi-month pilot of UNIFI’s solution.  An extensive security audit was performed to validate data and ensure content was protected, which UNIFI passed with flying colors.  “Security is a major concern for us, as we are involved in several government projects,” says David, “UNIFI worked with us to provide the level of assurance we needed.”  Stantec started “small”, piloting the solution to 100 Revit users in order to understand how they used and access content.  With the success of the pilot, Stantec embarked upon training and communication across the Building Group to get all users on the UNIFI platform.

“With an organization of our size, we wanted a solution that minimized re-creation of the wheel,” says David, “and a file sharing, network-based solution was a non-starter.”  UNIFI’s cloud-based access provided access to a single source of content that could easily scale to meet Stantec’s needs and making it easy to find content while ensuring uniform standards.  Plus, UNIFI was flexible to accommodate the unique needs and structure of Stantec’s business centers.  A corporate library houses all approved content to be used across the Stantec organization, while each business center has its own library for content unique to that specific geographic location.  Moving forward, David’s vision is to leverage UNIFI’s analytics to understand what content is most used across all offices, and consolidate that into the corporate library and develop saved searches for easy access and use in Revit models.

Today, UNIFI is deployed across Stantec’s Buildings Group. Over 3,000 users are enjoying the benefits of a single-source, cloud based content management solution and David feels confident that Stantec’s content is safe and secure.