BIM automation in n8n and AI in the sales of building materials

BIM automation for manufacturers — how can the latest technologies help your business?

Process automation or the use of AI agents are improvements that are widely used in many industries. For example, in e-commerce we can automate the handling of orders, the generation of reports or product photos in such a way that these processes take place without human participation. A typical example of the improvement used in many companies is the automated invoicing process, thanks to which entrepreneurs save up to 40 hours of work per month. But what repetitive actions can manufacturers of building materials automate? In this specific industry, the most popular automated processes are sales and marketing activities — from product data management, through communication with designers, to the efficient use of BIM libraries. How to do it? This is where the integration of design tools (such as Revit) and ERP systems, CRM or business intelligence dashboards comes to the rescue. The automatic workflow of processes, built for example in the n8n tool, means that data between these systems is transmitted and processed without the participation of employees. Thanks to this, manufacturers not only recover time, but also begin to efficiently collect business data that realistically affects the development of the their business.

How to Use BIM Automation in Business Processes

Before implementing any improvements in the company, we should think about what problem we want to eliminate or what goal we want to achieve. Each problem has it own solution — that is why, for each of our clients, we implement different integrations, often “tailored” to the business' needs. To better illustrate how process improvement in construction manufacturers can look in practice, below we will present examples of automation that our customers use the most.

Smart Lead Scoring with BOM in Revit

Building materials manufacturers invest huge amounts of money in marketing and sales activities, but they still face the same challenge — how to quickly and accurately capture those sales opportunities that have the greatest potential? The right integration of Revit and CRM can help us with this.

How can such integration work? When a designer generates a bill of materials (BOM) for his project in Revit, you will immediately receive information on which project, which of your products and in what quantity were used.

In addition, the automation immediately analyzes the list value, categories and the number of elements, and then starts scoring leads from the BOM based on this. Thanks to this, CRM can automatically identify the most promising projects (e.g. those that have exceeded 300 000 EUR worth of materials) and immediately pass them on to the relevant salespeople. To speed up the response of the seller, it is also possible to implement integration with a company messenger (for example Teams or Slack) - to which alerts about the biggest leads would be sent. In such a message, the salesperson receives not only a notification, but also a direct link to the customer's profile in CRM with the details of the project. Thanks to the integration of Revit with business systems, the response time is reduced to a minimum and the quality of the leads is significantly improved. Traders can focus on the most promising projects, which naturally translates into higher conversion of processed leads.

Automatically update prices in Revit and inform designers of changes in BIM files

Nowadays, designers often use product data that quickly becomes outdated — material costs, exchange rates or just your offer, can change from day to day. As a result, the quotation prepared by the designer quickly becomes outdated and requires correction.

How can we prevent this from happening? A dedicated BIM plug-in comes to the rescue. The BIM plugin is a type of application that allows designers to download and configure products directly in Revit in a 3D model. Thanks to such a plug-in, designers do not have to search for information on a website or in PDF files - they have everything at hand when working on a project.

Designers who have used your plug-in or who download BIM files from your platform (after logging in and leaving the relevant data) can receive automatic notifications about changes in product families. Such alerts mean that any modification of attributes, variants, or changes in geometry in a given family will be passed on to the designers who used it. By automating the notification of changes in data from BIM models, they will be able to avoid placing outdated products in their projects.

As you probably know, the prices of the products in the offer depend on many factors - the place of construction, the number of elements in the project, current discounts or individual offers. For this reason, the constant assignment of prices to products is unoptimised and quickly leads to outdated valuations. The answer to these problems can be the implementation of automation, which, with each generation of an offer based on BOM, retrieves current data and pricing policy. This allows designers to immediately receive an item with the right prices, and saves your team time on manual corrections. Manufacturers who use this type of customer service optimization respond faster to the needs of designers and thus gain an advantage over the competition.

If you are interested in implementing your own Revit plugin, take a look at our article about product configurators in BIM plugins: https://www.bimstreamer.com/en/blog/configurators-of-products-systems-in-revit

BI dashboards and actual data on product usage by designers

Information about how designers use BIM libraries is a real gold mine for product and marketing departments. Did you know that by implementing several integrations it is possible to obtain this data automatically? Properly implemented Power BI dashboards for construction manufacturers allow you to find out which of the downloaded BIM libraries are the most popular. Such statistics can be presented in both Power BI and other business intelligence tools (e.g. Looker Studio or Airtable). BIM automation tools are able to retrieve information about files downloaded not only from the manufacturer's website, but also those that they find on external BIM portals (thanks to integration via API). It is also possible to implement Revit integration with analytical systems — the solution then sends all data about whether a given product actually went to the generated BOM, and not just whether it was downloaded (we wrote about how to use this information above).

The interactive business dashboards for manufacturers created in this way show, among other things:

• which products are gaining popularity,
• in which regions interest in a particular product line is growing,
• what are the patterns of use in different types of projects.

An additional improvement in the data analysis process using BI dashboards is the use of automatic alerts. Such notifications can be sent by the system, for example, when detecting a growing trend for a particular product. The product manager would then receive a message with a proposal for a marketing campaign or an increase in the production of a given SKU. Alerts can be set correctly for each of the factors that are processed in the dashboard, and thanks to them the manufacturer can react faster to any deviations in the data, without involving a business analyst in the process.

AI assistant to enrich customer profiles

In many companies, salespeople see only the basic contact details of the customer in CRM. However, they lack information about the projects themselves, which makes it difficult to assess the potential of investments or to give proper priority to leads.

Thanks to the combination of Revit with business systems and the use of artificial intelligence, a much more complete approach to lead management is possible. For example, the moment a designer provides the name of the investment in Revit, the system can automatically pass it to the CRM, and the AI based on it will search industry portals, tender databases and news sites to enrich the project profile with additional data. The integration of Revit with CRM means that salespeople do not have to manually search for information about projects, because data such as location, scale, general contractor or planned completion date will be automatically substituted into the lead. In addition, if there are more potential customers in the system, automation can determine the scoring of leads and assign them the right priority or prompt sellers about existing cross and up-sell options.

Such advanced AI functionalities allow you to gain a competitive advantage before the first contact with a potential customer even occurs. With a fuller context, conversations become more substantive, better suited to investment needs, traders work more efficiently, and their productivity increases.

Personalized marketing campaigns

Information about which BIM files were downloaded or which product configurations in the plugin were most often chosen by designers are key statistics for both Customer Support teams, internal marketing departments and marketing agencies. It is these data that provide valuable signals about the interests of designers — which is why it is worth using them later in the automation of communication processes. How can manufacturers of building materials do this?

Integration of business dashboards with tools for sending newsletters, such as MailerLite, allows you to automatically run personalized email sequences. For example, the designer who downloaded the window families will receive a case study with interesting realizations, and the one who regularly configures ventilation systems – a guide on the latest trends in air conditioning.

This automation can also be extended by segmenting your audience based on their activity. As a result, users who regularly download new products are distinguished from those who have only registered but are not active. Dedicated reactivation or educational campaigns can be prepared for each group. The effect? Higher conversion of downloads to real queries and better email marketing metrics.

So, who is BIM automation for?

Process automation with BIM is not only a momentary trend related to digitalization, but above all a real support for business. Our customers, who use these solutions on a daily basis, make faster decisions and better manage data. BIM Automation will work primarily for:

• Manufacturers with BIM catalog, who want to reduce the time from downloading the bill of materials to presenting the offer.
• Sales and marketing departments, because these professionals need lead scoring and BI dashboards.
• BIM teams, to ease the burden of manual exports and updates.
• Product management, because they need reliable data on the use of products to make strategic decisions.
• Companies with multiple SKUs, that have a problem with the actuality of the data on different systems

The most important aspect is the fact that BIM automation tools bring measurable business benefits. The main benefits of implementing BIM automation are:

• Faster response to leads — from a dozen hours to a maximum of several.
• Better conversion — by focusing on the most promising projects.
• Elimination of pricing errors — up to date data in real time thanks to automatic price updates in Revit from ERP.
• Faster response to trends — identifying business opportunities ahead of the competition
• Higher customer satisfaction — thanks to a better quality of service and always up-to-date information.

Where to start the implementation?

Implementing BIM process automation doesn't have to be complicated! Contact us and find out how you can use the ready-made components of our BIMStreamer tool (Online Library, Backoffice and Revit Plugin).

In addition, we can create dedicated marketing and sales automation for you, which will fully integrate BIMStreamer with your internal systems (PIM, CRM, ERP, BI, marketing automation systems). Thanks to this, you will not only improve your internal processes, but also have a real impact on the sale of products online.

Contact us

As Sagiton, we are automation agency specialized in the AEC industry, and BIMStreamer is our tool for managing and distributing BIM models. We combine the knowledge of the digitalization of enterprises with the experience of our programmers working with manufacturers of building materials. Schedule a free consultation where we will tell you how we have helped automate sales processes for companies like Uponor, Aliaxis or OBO: https://www.bimstreamer.com/en/contact. Our specialists will be happy to analyze your needs and existing systems in order to propose a dedicated automation of business processes on this basis, which will be a real support for your marketing and sales.