NEWSLETTER

BSD Customer Case Study: 
BSD SpecLink Helps Elness Swenson Graham Architects Exceed Expectations

Since the early 70s, Elness Swenson Graham (ESG) Architects of Minneapolis, MN has remained consistent in its commitment to excellence by helping clients create environments for living, business and community.

ESG is a nationally renowned architectural practice with over 80 talented staff members and projects that span more than half of the fifty states. ESG collaborates with clients in the residential, hospitality, senior living, corporate/commercial, urban design, mixed-use and higher education/student housing markets. For over 20 years, it has been a leader in multi-family residential design, with over 30,000 dwelling units constructed. Design leadership in this and other markets is evidenced by the firm’s commitment to high quality creative architectural design.

The Need: With an 80-person office and multiple specification writers, ESG needed a better way to standardize the process of managing its specifications. Says Craig Hess, vice president, “In 1997, after I joined the firm as quality assurance director, I discovered that there were multiple specification formats being used. Also, there were multiple ‘masters’ being used.” With no consistency among specification formats in place, a decision was made to unify the staff and specification writing process with a new system and office master specification.

The Solution: ESG discovered the numerous benefits of BSD SpecLink immediately, and the firm has used it on well over 200 projects. Hess has been involved with SpecLink’s implementation at ESG since the beginning. He says, “There is now much better consistency among our specification writers because of the quality and high standards written into all of the pre-written master text provided by BSD. They know that they can trust the standards incorporated into our office master now.” Since many of the projects ESG works on require the same type of specification, editing for a specific project frequently requires only the selection or de-selection of sections.

As a first-hand user of SpecLink himself, Hess knows how important it is to have a reliable and fast system for producing specifications, “SpecLink significantly speeds up the specification writing process. The retention of a ‘fixed’ database speeds up production and permits us to respond faster to short time deadlines. After having written multiple projects, we know what the default language is in certain sections, which expedites the editing time.”

ESG is also very satisfied with the level of technical support and training provided by BSD. “Technical support at BSD is top-notch. They are always readily available when needed,” says Hess. Users quickly learned the SpecLink basics on their own. After they had been using it for about a year, they took a training class where they learned information on user-added links that was very valuable. This was something they may not have attempted without the class.

The Outcome: Reflecting on the decision to use SpecLink, Hess says, “After considering and sampling the programs written for our industry, we selected SpecLink. We felt that the SpecLink database system and automatic linking were best at addressing and utilizing the advantages offered by electronic specifications. After seven years of using SpecLink and having heard stories from users of one of the other systems, we are extremely happy with our choice.”