Beyer Blinder Belle Customizes Ideate Software Solutions to Meet Their Specific Needs

Press Release: San Francisco, CA, January 24, 2024

On the recommendation of a staff member who spoke highly of Ideate Software, Beyer Blinder Belle Architects & Planners (BBB) reached out to learn more about the Autodesk® Revit® software add-ins developed by Ideate Software, an Autodesk Authorized Developer and member of the Autodesk Developer Network. 

“To get to know the software, we started with Ideate Sticky,” said Matthew Breau, Design Technology Specialist at BBB. “We were impressed that it did just what it was supposed to do, and it was easy to learn and use. We added another Ideate Software product, then another. We now subscribe to the entire Ideate suite and encourage all designers at BBB to leverage those offerings in their day-to-day work.”

In 2022, BBB added Ideate Automation to their toolkit, and in 2023, they started to explore ways to customize several of the scripts that ship with the software to meet their specific needs. When discussing these customizations, Matthew mentioned:

• Structuring PDF Exports to Meet Teams’ Requests – People from various teams across BBB requested one PDF per type of drawing series. “Although Ideate Automation does not come with a script that can structure PDFs in that particular way, it comes with a lot of editable examples. We were able to study the many scripts as references and then we pulled in the pieces we needed and created a hybrid script that performs perfectly,” said Matthew. 
  
  
• Model Health Reports – BBB developed a firm-standard model health dashboard by customizing several of the Data Export scripts that ship with Ideate Software tools. The exported data includes information about file-open times, model-in-place families, component family size and naming conventions, view organization, and model warnings.

• Scaling Overnight Automations – To fully integrate Ideate Automation into BBB’s data-centered processes, BBB developed a workflow using Microsoft Power Automate to capture front-end Ideate Automation command line arguments and send them to the backend to run on a specific schedule. This allows for additional tasks to happen before or after Ideate Automation’s data export, beyond the Revit environment. “The flexibility of Ideate Automation’s task engine and its ability to work independently of the front-end UI is a huge plus for us,” said Matthew.

Read Spotlight on BBB for more information.

Visit www.ideatesoftware.com to learn how Ideate Software add-ins for Revit help users save time, increase model accuracy, improve deliverables, and elevate design. Give them a try by downloading trial versions or purchasing the bundle.

About Ideate Software - Ideate Software, Autodesk® AEC Industry Partner and Autodesk® Authorized Developer, empowers Revit users to gain unprecedented control over their data. They developed Ideate BIMLink, Ideate Explorer, Ideate Sticky, IdeateApps, and Ideate StyleManager to solve persistent problems in architecture, engineering, and construction, and owner-operator (AECO) workflows. They developed Ideate Automation as a scripting solution to easily automate repetitive Revit and Ideate Software tasks for consistent and repeatable results.

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