NEWSLETTER

BSD Customer Case Study: SpecLink Helps Krech, O'Brien, Muller, and Wass Significantly Reduce Formatting Time

Krech, O’Brien, Muller and Wass (KOMW) is a unique collaboration of architects, structural engineers, interior designers and construction managers.

Established in 1985, KOMW has built a strong organization recognized for thoughtful design, comprehensive professional service, good value and unquestionable ethics.

The staff at KOMW knows that when individuals with a passion work as a team, great things  can happen.  They strive for responsible use of all ecological, human and financial resources as they collectively respond to programmatic issues, environmental forces and social conditions.  The resultant goals include creating aesthetically pleasing, functional, more
productive and healthier places
for people to live and work.

The professionals at KOMW specialize in community and educational facilities, churches and faith-based buildings, multi- and high-end single family homes, clinics, offices and interiors, veterinary hospitals, production and industrial facilities, agricultural buildings and greenhouses.  They have diverse experience with construction delivery from competitive bid to design-build, construction management and hybrid approaches.  Through collaboration with professional consultants, they can provide for every requirement for new projects, adaptive reuse, alterations and additions.  Their projects have construction budgets ranging from $1,000 to $25 million.

The Need:
Time is another valuable resource that the staff at KOMW wanted to use responsibly.  They knew that their time was ultimately their client’s time.  By utilizing an automated system, they were able to produce specifications faster than with a manual system.  

But the process they were using had some drawbacks.  Any updates had to be copied from project to project.  Not only did this take additional time, they also had to hope they didn’t forget to do this.  Formatting – which should be a simple process - could take hours on previous projects.  In 1996 they evaluated SpecLink.  One look and they knew it would help them achieve the timesavings they were looking for.

The Solution:
Vincent DiGiorno, Code and Specification Architect at KOMW, saw an immediate benefit from using SpecLink. He recalls, “Formatting the word processing files used to take 12-16 hours per project.  With SpecLink it now takes 1-2 hours to format our specifications.  I can set the formatting once and use it for almost all of our projects.”  He remembers that with the word processing system he always had to be concerned with headers and footers, as well as the outline numbering.  The page formatting and numbering are always right with SpecLink.

DiGiorno was impressed with how easy SpecLink was to learn, “A normal project would take me about 40 hours.  When I did my first project with SpecLink, I thought it would take additional time.  However – even with a learning curve - I was able to complete it in the same amount of time.  Our savings were immediate.”  Now that he has become more proficient with SpecLink, he says, “We are regularly saving 25%-30% on all of our projects.  The formatting we have set up for the various project types is always there.”

The Outcome:
Formatting was not the only area where KOMW saw timesavings.  They also saw it in initial project set-up.  DiGiorno credits this to the way the linking works, “Any documents referenced in our Master always have a link to the related standards section and referenced documents.”  KOMW has set up 3-4  “masters” for their various projects and construction types.  DiGiono says,  “When we add a new requirement to a master – it’s always there for the next project.”