We constantly hear, “I want to know who did that, and when” from all our customers, in all countries, and across all disciplines in the building design industry. It’s the blessing and the curse of a parametric building information model (such as that delivered by Autodesk Revit): a change in one place percolates throughout the model, and quite often those side effects are not apparent at the time of the change.
So, this data forensics ambition is understandable.
To accommodate this long-standing request, we’ve added both “Created by” and “Last Updated by” to our Ideate BIMLink data model. You can find this as part of our quality control built-in sample links called “QC-MC-WhoDidThis”.
I asked our software developer Stephanie Fitzgerald, who has been reviewing Power BI for us, to help with a visualization of this data. Using the data from Ideate BIMLink and Power BI, we were quickly able to investigate the contribution per team member to both the creation and modification of the Revit model elements for two linked files that are part of the same project.
Through Power BI, it’s easy to take our BIMLink data and use a slicer to analyze just the Level and Grid elements.
I was alarmed to see that the mysteriously named “Employee2” has been modifying these critical building datum elements; now that’s an actionable piece of data!
Within Ideate BIMLink, we strive to highlight essential pieces of the Revit database for your use by building our Quality Control (QC) sample links. Using this data in conjunction with tools such as Power BI extends this value by making it easy to spot the outliers. You can test drive this new data by downloading the latest version of Ideate BIMLink and using the Sample Link, as shown below.
Now it’s time to go and have a chat with Employee 2.
About the Author
Glynnis Patterson, NCARB – Director of Software Development
Glynnis is a registered architect and has worked within the building information modeling (BIM) industry since 1998. A graduate of Carnegie Mellon University, she has worked as an architect, educator and construction site manager. Glynnis is the Director of Software Development Services and continues to work with AECO clients worldwide, developing, and consulting on solutions to BIM challenges. In her spare time, Glynnis volunteers for the local high school and with growitgreenmorristown.org. Find Glynnis on LinkedIn.