Miele Australia – Forever Better BIM Content

Miele is known for its premium brand of appliances produced in Germany and sold globally.  The company motto, “Imer Besser” translates into “Forever Better” which is a philosophy Miele applies across its entire organization, including the creation and distribution of BIM content.  With the release of UNIFI CONNECT, Miele found that UNIFI was not only able to create superior BIM content, but also deliver this content directly into the hands of designers.

Presentation is Critical

For AEC firms to consider adopting a manufacturer’s content library, consistency in creation is vital, especially for an extensive library like Miele’s Residential and Commercial Product Ranges which encompasses 11 product categories, 137 Revit families and 206 Miele products. Miele turned to UNIFI as a partner to create BIM content that fully captured the functionality, attention to detail, reliability and overall quality inherent to these products. “Miele is well known to have an unwavering commitment to quality in all things we do. Based on our interaction with the UNIFI team and research we did with our clients, it’s clear to us that UNIFI share this ethos and they are capable of delivering products and services in line with our standards,” says Ben Curmi, Head of Project Sales Australia/New Zealand for Miele.

Early on in UNIFI’s engagement with Miele, we identified it was important for the content to incorporate valuable features that provide assistance to designers in arranging, coordinating and validating their designs. These features include:

• Clearance zones: door swings, rangehood clearance heights
• Spatial requirements for installation: niches, ventilation zones, cut-outs
• Reference planes for placement: easy alignment and guidance for cooktop burner offset standards/ building codes
• Parametric families: models adjustable within actual product tolerances for design flexibility
• Data access: embedded ‘deep links’ to SKU-specific, online technical information

Appliances are ‘big ticket items’, both when it comes to design and when it comes to BIM content. Building elements like these need to present well in visualization outputs, but just as importantly, the content needs to document well and perform efficiently in a project environment. For example, in high rise, multi-residential projects there may be hundreds of each kitchen and laundry element (cooktops, rangehoods, ovens, dishwashers, microwaves) so models for these fixtures have the potential to have a big impact on how easy the project model is for designers to work with. Although it is standard practice for UNIFI when creating Revit content for architectural elements, it was particularly critical to build Levels of Detail (LOD) into the Miele Revit library with careful thought given to what should be shown at each level in both 2D and 3D based on how the content would need to document and how the content needs to perform from an efficiency perspective.

Following the completion of the Miele Revit library, UNIFI and Miele embarked on a ‘roadshow’ of exclusive launch functions attended by designers and BIM leaders from over 200 of Australia and New Zealand’s most prominent design firms. “During our series of events to launch our new Revit content library, we consistently heard from clients that what UNIFI had created was the single best resource of its type they’d seen to date,” says Ben.

UNIFI also created a ‘Content Overview and User Guide’ for Miele which allowed Miele to communicate the more technical elements of their Revit content directly with their clients.

A Direct CONNECTion from Miele to Designers

As a way of ensuring their Revit content library is easily accessible to designers, Miele made hosting their content on UNIFI CONNECT a major component of their BIM content management and communication strategy. “As a highly innovative manufacturer, Miele frequently develop new products. Being able to communicate updates to our BIM library in real-time with the design community through UNIFI CONNECT is extremely valuable to us,” says Ben.

“Our relationship with UNIFI is key to ensuring we stay at the forefront of innovation as it relates to design technology and providing the right design tools to specifiers. UNIFI’s strong, direct ties to our A&D clients means they acutely understand their needs and how we as a supplier need to be creating and communicating our BIM content.”  UNIFI is committing to ensuring that Miele’s motto of “Forever Better” is carried out through the creation and distribution of its BIM content.