NEWSLETTER

BSD Customer Case Study: 
BSD SpecLink® Provides Access to Corporate Knowledge at Lord, Aeck & Sargent

Lord, Aeck & Sargent has served clients with high quality design for more than 60 years. The company’s corporate mission is “Responsive Design, Technological Expertise and Exceptional Service.”

Responsive design is important because every project is unique, and every design must be tailored to the specific needs of the client. Technological expertise allows Lord, Aeck & Sargent (LAS) to provide services for a wide range of projects, including Science, Historic Preservation, Education, Arts and Culture, and Housing and Mixed Use. LAS experts in each area often collaborate across disciplines—combining their knowledge to come up with better solutions.

Exceptional Service results from listening carefully to the client before offering solutions. The results of this three-pronged approach can be seen in the beautiful, functional and long-lasting buildings designed by LAS. 

Lord, Aeck & Sargent employs more than 100 people. The staff—comprising architects, interior designers, heritage preservationists and construction cost managers—provides services ranging from master planning and programming to design, construction administration, conditions assessment and facility management support.

The Need:  There is a vast amount of corporate knowledge at Lord, Aeck & Sargent. Its architects, planners and specification writers had years’ worth of knowledge and experience—and both were freely shared. But people aren’t always available exactly when their expertise is needed, thus adding time to the specification writing process. Outside consultants can also provide assistance, but sometimes it’s not exactly what is needed.

The Solution:  SpecLink turned out to be the “missing link” in Lord, Aeck & Sargent’s process. Richard Robison, principal, says,”SpecLink provides a large number of ready to-use specifications in an automated, intelligent database. We build on this database to create our own office masters that incorporate our own preferences and experience.” SpecLink became the repository for all their corporate knowledge.

Ease of use was another feature that Robison liked. He states, “[t]he software is quite easy to learn. In the hands of an experienced architect/specifier, the creation of a project specification can be lightning fast. For the novice user or intern architect, SpecLink allows them to access our corporate knowledge in a powerful way.”

The Outcome: Ease of use and the capability for building in corporate knowledge sold Robison on the system. As his staff used SpecLink, they realized that the formatting and editing features make a good thing even better—especially the ability to add user notes to any paragraph and add their own links to further improve the automation.

When asked which was their best project prepared using SpecLink, Robison—like many SpecLink users—says, “our last one.” What does he like best about SpecLink? “It has powerful capabilities for building in corporate knowledge.”