Whether designing a new project or adding engineering details to an existing design, one of the most time-consuming tasks is adding the small details that have almost certainly been created many times in previous projects.
Pirros, a cloud-based design software platform, is able to identify similar design and engineering details from a company’s previous projects and extract them from Revit files in its repository, based solely on search terms or by finding matches for existing design elements. The Los Angeles-based start-up recently raised a $15 million Series A funding round from investor Elephant Ventures, and in recent years has grown to serve more than 300 customers with more than 15,000 users.
“It’s context intelligence for architects and engineers,” explains Ari Baranian, co-founder and CEO of Pirros. The system is able to ingest 2D designs and documentation, as well as 3D models and assets from previous projects, and categorize and annotate them for easy retrieval in searches. This addresses a common problem in larger engineering and design firms, where design details and other tedious tasks often recreate work done by others that is not easy to look up for reference.
Although Pirros is integrated into Revit software, Baranian notes that it is also bridging a gap between projects that is common in many widely used design software suites. “Historically, Autodesk’s approach to data has been vertical integration that works well on a project-by-project basis, the owner certainly likes to see everything from start to finish,” he explains. “We break that data down and look at it horizontally across many different projects, allowing for reuse and insights.”
Avoid duplicate work and save time
Working within modern digital document workflows, trying to recover a similar design from a previous project can be challenging, says Jordan Hague, director of DCI Engineers. The Seattle-based company has offices across the country, and Hague says that in the few months his company has rolled out Pirros company-wide, it has changed the way engineering drawings and project documentation are prepared. “We have more than 350 engineers across the country, so knowledge sharing is key for us,” he notes. “It was a challenge to try to avoid reinventing the wheel on every project.”
Working primarily on structural drawings in a variety of industry sectors, Hague says the company never had a good solution to ensure the company’s best practices were accessible. “Pirros was a perfect match for what we needed; we finally had a platform that was easy to search, very intuitive and easy to use.”
A central cloud repository contains all the Revit files from the company’s previous projects and has helped not only to find the solutions common to the company’s previous projects, but also to allow engineers in one region to quickly understand how another region is built. “We can have an engineer sitting in California doing work on one [project] in the Midwest, and they can quickly reference what that market is used to. Just knowing everything about how a certain type of engineering is done, you just have all these reference projects at your fingertips.”
And beyond drawing from the past, Pirros has allowed DCI engineers to avoid duplicating work on a given project. “Our engineers are doing the structural analysis while our design team is doing the Revit model,” Hague explains. This would often lead to parallel work as engineers and designers worked in different environments. “Historically, we had engineers go through their project repository and find the references and put in all the standard details, and then a designer would go through and retrace their steps. With Pirros, the engineer goes through, creates a repository of details that they pulled as a reference in that project, and then all that information is waiting for the designer.”
That was exactly the kind of bottleneck that Pirros aimed to address, Baranian says. “I used to be a structural engineer and there was no central warehouse of past materials, so I couldn’t see what kind of projects [my firm] had done since I isolated myself on the one project I was working on.”
With the common repository of their project data now available, some customers have requested that Pirros start offering references and searches for other repeatable aspects of projects, such as take-offs and schedules. at the moment the focus is on design documents and models rather than anything on programming and accounting, Baranian says.
If there is one place where the start-up wants to grow properly, it is to meet more needs of companies that do not have in-house development teams for design software plugins. “A larger company might have a team of 30 people to work with Autodesk APIs (application programming interfaces) to develop their own design repository system, but 90% of our customers don’t have that kind of resource,” Baranian explains.
For DCI engineers, the greatest efficiency gains have occurred in the early or pre-bid stages of projects, when budgets and time can be tight. “[Pirros] it has helped our entire business extensively, but the biggest gains have been in early drawing development due to the ability of the engineer and designer to work together without duplicating each other’s efforts. It’s really allowed our engineers to seamlessly hand off their work to someone who works entirely in the Revit space.”
