One of the biggest time wasters for a BIM management team is finding the right content. When content is buried in a complex folder structure or requires team members to recall exactly how to navigate to an item, it uses up a team’s valuable time and money. UNIFI’s Saved Search feature eliminates this problem by allowing you and your team members to find content in seconds. In this article, we want to give you some ideas on how you can use this tool to your best advantage.
Project Kickoff
One fantastic way to utilize UNIFI’s Saved Searches is by creating a group of “Project Kickoff” categories. These saved searches can house the Revit Template and commonly used items that normally would be stored in the Template file (for example, walls, doors, and windows that are company-standard). By saving project kickoff items as saved searches in UNIFI, you can batch insert exactly what’s needed and nothing more.
Application-Specific
Another way to utilize saved searches is by creating a saved search that is specific to a particular application (such as Dynamo). For example, you could have one saved search for custom packages and one for Dynamo-version-specific packages. You could also have saved searches for Alpha, Beta, and General Population scripts. Since UNIFI can store all content types, using a Saved Search helps makes it easy to quickly store and locate your non-Revit content.
Stage of Work
Another way to take advantage of saved searches is by grouping them in the same way that you would organize the work on a project. For example, materials could be organized based on which ones are Enscape-ready. Or maybe you have saved searches organized by render-ready content, such as people, vegetation, and vehicles. Organizing content based on the stage of work allows you to have everything that you need for that particular task right at your fingertips.
Area of Work
You can also create save searches based on the area of work. For example, a marketing team could create saved searches that consolidate marketing materials, colors, and even previous projects so that they are easier to find. Or perhaps a firm that works with a wide range of residential and commercial content could separate content by those categories, since residential content could vary greatly from those used in commercial construction. This organization helps specific teams find the content that they need quickly.
How-to Internal Documents
Saved searches can also help you organize your company’s standards documents, how-to guides, and best practices so that your team can access them quickly. For example, you could store templates for common practices on projects, BIM standards/naming conventions, getting started guides, instructional videos, and more.
Conclusion
Hopefully we’ve given you some ideas on how to get the most out of UNIFI’s Saved Search feature. This tool prevents your team from having to hunt down content that they need or, worse yet, re-creating the same piece of content because they couldn’t find it.
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