NEWSLETTER

BSD Customer Case Study: 
SpecLink helps The Boldt Company achieve unparalleled time savings

Since 1889, The Boldt Company has offered consulting, construction and maintenance solutions. They are headquartered in Appleton, Wisconsin, with offices throughout the United States.

Their 100 employees are united around a strong set of values: honesty, fairness, hard work, performance and a love of what they do.

The Boldt Company handles the planning and implementation of complex projects in four primary sectors: healthcare, senior living, higher education, and commercial. Their professional staff blends the disciplines of planning, architecture, real estate, construction, finance, and law, bringing clients flexible and innovative solutions for today and the future.

At The Boldt Company, they understand that no two projects are alike—each requires specific services and solutions. They work to develop a tailored scope of services for each project based on the specific needs of the customer. Their ability to generate ideas and options, create plans, develop project budgets and analyze value eliminates the stress that often accompanies this process. The earlier they are involved in the process, the more effective their team will be in shaping their client’s dreams.

The Need: Design firms often work on different types of projects. Because of this, a design firm’s informational needs can differ, particularly in the area of specification writing. The system or process used should be flexible enough to effectively satisfy the needs of the firm. In 2001, the system that The Boldt Company was utilizing was not meeting their needs. They found it was taking too long to develop specifications with their wordprocessing based spec writing program. They wanted a faster, more flexible system. They found what they wanted with SpecLink.

The Solution: “Using SpecLink, we have been able to reduce the time it takes us to create a specification by as much as 90%,” remarked Kevin Shumann, Architect, The Boldt Company. “We can now write the entire specification in one place. With our previous system, we had to go through three steps. Even then, we were not assured of having an accurate product.” Much of this time savings can be attributed to the fact that so much of SpecLink is automated – from the automatic coordination of cross-references to the automated Table of Contents generator.

While the are a lot of areas the program will take care of automatically, there are also many ways to customize it. This gives SpecLink users the best of both worlds: speed through automation and flexibility through customization. By creating an Office Master, the user is able to plug in unique items that they use in their particular type of construction or geographic area. They can then start with this master specification and know that there is no danger of leaving out critical items.

The Outcome: The staff at The Boldt Company attended the training class at BSD’s offices in Atlanta. Schumann says that instruction was all they needed to start using the software. In addition to the timesaving features, Schumann also likes the ease of use and updates that SpecLink offers. He also mentions another aspect of SpecLink that he finds helpful, “What I like best about SpecLink is that I can continuously see the spec as I am writing it. I am able to edit and save each project as its own unique file without losing any of my edits. Because of this, I don’t have to wait until the end of the writing session to review my specification.”