BSD Customer Case Study: 
BSD SpecLink^® Takes Novice Spec Writer to the Next Level at F&S Partners

The Dallas, Texas company that would become F&S Partners Incorporated was founded in 1962 by consolidating the existing practices of J. Herschel Fisher and Pat Y. Spillman under the name of Fisher and Spillman Architects.

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.

Architectural services include feasibility studies, facilities programming, project budgeting, scheduling, conceptual design, detailed design, construction documents, technical specifications, construction cost estimating, construction contracts, bid consultation and evaluation, lender inspection, construction administration, computer aided design and drafting (CADD), and facilities database management.

The Need: In 2001 Jerry Tims, associate principal with F&S Partners, was just learning to write specifications for the firm. He was using their word processing-based specification writing system and found the process slow and arduous. He recalls, “The ‘masters’ weren’t really masters, but rather edited sections that were simply saved to a central location. It was not easy to tell which items should be added to the various sections. This made the old system difficult to learn.” It was also time-consuming for both Tims and his boss. Tims suggested they look at BSD SpecLink^®.

The Solution: “I think my boss got tired of ‘redlining’ my sections,” said Tims. “That’s one of the reasons he agreed to give SpecLink a try. With our old word processing system, masters were created on the fly. That meant they didn’t always include information that was applicable to a project type—especially if that information was different in the ‘master’ you opened.”

With a true master file, such as the type created in SpecLink, the user doesn’t need to try to remember what sections should or should not be used. In contrast to word-processing based systems, SpecLink users also don’t need to worry about losing data that may have been deleted from previous office masters. In SpecLink, all of the information is always available—nothing is ever deleted. You select rather than delete data to create specifications. “This has been a major time saver—we’ve easily reduced our spec writing time by at least 40 percent. And it has reduced the stress of meeting tight project deadlines,” says Tims.

The Outcome: Tims was a novice spec writer when he began using SpecLink. He was able to learn the program by reading through the user’s manual. And he believes that with each specification he writes, he just gets better. “With each job, I not only learn more about effective and efficient ways to use SpecLink, but also how to do a better job of writing specifications. SpecLink has taught me something on each and every job I have worked on. And the great thing about SpecLink is that, due to its ease of use and reliability, I know that every project I do will be a high quality product.”