Rawsome!

Rawson Homes is a project home builder based in Australia. While they could never be as bespoke as hiring an architect, the kind of designs they were doing were more stylistically modern and gave more capacity for customisation than their competitors. 

At the time, the Design Technology team were investing in building a browser based interface that would allow the clients to do more to choose material finishes and layouts. However, since having a BIM Manager was intermittent, there were 2000+ Revit models that had diverged in nomenclature for materials, which families were being used, and other standards. Yet the browser renderer they were using for visualisation had a limit of only 100 materials. So I developed a series of Revit buttons that would extract from the models the names of materials used and output that to Excel.  From here, we could do manual semantic matches to reduce the complexity (for example, "wood" vs "timber").

Other buttons would come in and standardise with a find replace, including updating families within the model, and properties of families to reflect the standardisation. 

Computational BIM Management is the less glamorous cousin of Computational Design. Instead of pretty geometry, it often involves crunching through data to clean it up. But this is exactly where the big cost savings can deliver.