How to spend 85% less time finding products
As you well know, working as an architect, engineer or designer isn’t all design and glamor! When it comes to product/material research and selection, too often it involves work you’d probably rather not deal with — like digging through emails, rifling through old project drawings, and when that fails, contacting former colleagues — just to figure out why something got specified or why it was detailed or configured a certain way.
This is extra busy work, and it takes up time you’d prefer to spend on design—while making those deadlines feel even closer. But you can mitigate some of that stress if your firm has a coherent plan to capture institutional knowledge.
With a product knowledge management platform like Arazoo, you don’t need to go to the ends of the earth just to figure out what the product spec was on a previous project, or to find that cutsheet you saved months ago.
Arazoo is a data rich, searchable, organized way to save individual and collective product knowledge, take notes on it, share it with your team — and find it again easily.
How easily? Well, we did a little test to see.
The Old Way
We found that across 10 major manufacturers*, finding a product on their web site, saving its information to your server in the form of a “locked” PDF or JPG, and collating it into multiple presentation documents and schedules (not including revisions) takes an average of 15.5 minutes per product per project — that’s about 26 hours total for a project with 100 products and materials.
The Arazoo Way
With Arazoo, we found that the same process — finding a product on the web, saving it with our Bookmarklet, adding it to a project, adding spec details, and creating automated schedule and InDesign output documents — takes an average of 4.5 minutes per product, or about 7 hours total for a project with 100 products and materials. That’s a difference of 19 hours, or about 75% less time.
That’s a lot of hours — enough to go home on time a few nights per week!
But it doesn’t stop there. Because the first time you save a product in Arazoo, it takes an average of 4.5 minutes of total work from discovery to completed spec. But the next time you use that same product, it’s now in your Firm Library and will take less time to find and specify — an average of about 2.5 minutes — because you don’t have to go search the web, and you already have your notes and previous specs at hand for reference.
As you use Arazoo, the amount of time you need to access your product knowledge goes down—and the value of that knowledge goes up.
For a project in Arazoo with 100 products and materials that you’ve used before, that’s an average of about 4.25 hours total for all the work it takes to get from start to completed schedule output. That’s almost 85% less time than starting your research from scratch, as you often have to do.
Using Arazoo quickly becomes a virtuous cycle of time savings for your team, allowing you to spend more of your billable time doing actual design work—and less time looking for information you’ve already saved.
* We asked a handful of early Arazoo users to test their times saving product information. They saved products from these manufacturers: Armstrong, Ellison, Modernfold, Duravit, Wausau, Dorma, Dyson, Tyvek, Saarinen, and Porcelanosa.
