NEWSLETTER

BSD Customer Case Study: 
SpecLink® Helps DSGW Produce Specifications in Half the Time

DSGW is a Minnesota firm with offices in Duluth, Virginia, Grand Rapids and the Twin Cities.

Since that time, the firm has grown to an average size of forty and has continued to attract design commissions successively larger in scope and technical complexity. In 1984, the name of the firm was changed to F&S Partners Incorporated in order to reflect the nature of the firm as a corporation headed by several principals.

DSGW provides architectural services to public and private community groups. They know that the word “community” has many meanings because communities come in every size and character. They work with private businesses, public institutions, neighborhoods, towns, suburbs and cities to design environments that enhance their daily lives, providing creative solutions that meet their clients’ aesthetic needs, quality expectations, budget and schedule parameters.

The Need: The concept of "community" and creating solutions for them permeates the way DSGW conducts business. One definition for community can be a group that has common goals. They knew that a good specification writing system should mimic a community: every part of the software should work together to produce the end goal. For example, when information is added, deleted or changed in one section, that modification should flow through to other parts of the specification.

Word-processing based specification writing systems lack this kind of coordination between sections. Sections can be added, deleted, or changed, but there is no synchronization of the data. This was something they wanted to change. It was one of the needs that motivated them to look at SpecLink.

The Solution: SpecLink’s formatting features have helped DSGW reduce their specwriting time by 50%. Joe Watson, Specifier with DSGW in Duluth, Minnesota, says, "SpecLink has considerably reduced the time if takes for us to change footers and clean up imported text. As soon as you name the project, the footers formatting is done. And imported text takes on the formatting of the section to which it is imported. SpecLink has helped us in cleaning up the word processing 'quirks' associated with importing text from various sources."

This ease of formatting was impressed upon Watson during a recent project. He recalls, "One of the best projects where we have been able to utilize the features that SpecLink offers was the Carlton County Maintenance Facility. This was a very large job that was done with mostly imported materials. With SpecLink, we were able to have specifications to our client in three days."

The Outcome: DSGW has been using SpecLink now for four years. They have taken advantage of how easy it is to create an Office Master in SpecLink, creating one for standard projects, and have benefited by using SpecLink's automatic updating of reference standards. These two features have made creating specifications at DSGW much faster and easier. "Knowing that everything is being updated—such as ASTM numbers and other reference standards—was another major reason for our switch to SpecLink," says Watson. "And being able to use the Office Master for similar jobs—easily removing paragraphs that don’t apply and adding new ones that do—has given us a great productivity advantage that we will use to continually grow our business."