CAD-Magazine spoke with Edwin Schalk, business development director of Stabiplan, about the history and future of MEPcontent.com and this platform's necessity for the installation industry. This article was written by Lambert-Jan Koops and published in CAD-Magazine no. 1 2017.
Content-based site as a bridge between the manufacturer and engineer
The MEPcontent.com platform is the successor to the www.cadsymbols.nl site, which was launched by Stabiplan in 1999 (!) and which was a content platform for both 2D and 3D DWG drawings. The platform design was changed in 2010. The emergence of BIM particularly ensured that the users of the platform had an increasing need for more than just the geometrical information of the products. That is why Stabiplan decided to include both DWG drawings and REVIT/IFC-files in their database, with which the manufacturers of the various MEP products deliver all the required information in order to provide the desired representation in both a generic and a specific model and to perform system calculations. The elements contain a symbolic display, correct measurments and a 3D view along with product codes from the manufacturer. This makes MEPcontent a unified object library. Adding supplementary classifications also enables connection with calculation and ordering software.
Checks
Stabiplan works with more than 150 manufacturers in order to maintain the MEPcontent database. They either provide their own content or have their content built by Stabiplan. In both cases, the content runs through an extensive test process before it is placed on MEPcontent.com. The parameters are controlled within the development team. If these are in order, a MEPcontent tester checks the content using a checklist regarding, for example, the detail level, the structure and correct dimensions. Finally, the manufacturer approves the content before it is published on the site. Whenever there is a change in the product line (for which data is stored on MEPcontent in the form of a product line sheet), the respective adjustments are tracked and monitored, and the new product line becomes available.
The graphic article data is provided free of charge by the manufacturers. This is why the content on the site is available for everyone to download. The content is explicitly not tied to the use of specific REVIT or CAD software, as Schalk has emphatically noted. "Stabiplan may provide Autodesk-related software; the information on the platform should be useable for everyone. This actually supports the exchange of models and drawings. Especially when collaborating parties work with different design software."
Growing together in BIM
The number of users of the content platform is increasing each month by about twenty percent. According to Schalk, this fact proves that the platform meets a need. Moreover, according to him, MEPcontent is essential for the designer to evolve in the BIM process. "We think that the role of the designer in the near future will change thanks to platforms like MEPcontent. He gets involved in the ordering process. If the engineer can actually have all the relevant data already during the design process, he can concurrently see the effects that his decisions have on, for example, the cost of a design at that stage. Suppose the device from supplier A is much cheaper than that of B but a minor modification is needed for A, the designer can take this into account. Of course, some things can then always be overruled by the purchasing department, but we see in practice that the choice proposed by the engineer often prevails and his task therefore becomes broader."
Contact
According to Schalk, the importance of the manufacturers in MEPcontent.com is clear: by making their information available on the platform, they are in direct contact with the engineer. Which is indispensable in times of BIM, says the business development director. "Communication is surely the core of BIM; therefore, simplifying the access to information is one of the most important steps that a supplier can take. That is why manufacturers make extra effort to publish their data on the platform, which frees up their employees for other tasks. And if they do not have the know how in-house, they involve third parties, such as Stabiplan. In this case, we can assist with the classification of the data, with checking errors, and creating the content. For this, we have a content factory in Romania, where our employees build content."
Stock products
Since the platform is used with such enthusiasm, it is clear that there is a need. However, there is still a question remaining related to such a specific site, which is whether or not it could have been possible to set up a more general platform. Schalk: "Yes, that was possible and there are such platforms, but they are often designed for architects and the difference is that they make a lot of construction-related items, such as windows and walls, while MEP-related items, like boilers, for instance, are stock products. Moreover, the MEP engineers are frequently interested in quite different things than the architects. The MEP designer needs to make specific heating calculations, for example. The information he needs for this is not usually available in the general databases. A specific MEP platform is really indispensable."
As can be deduced from the platform's URL address, MEPcontent.com is not intended just for companies in the Netherlands. Schalk explains why they opted for this. "The Netherlands is too small in the area of MEP to have its own platform. Many of the manufacturers of MEP products have their headquarters in Germany or France and deliver throughout Europe, and the demand for corresponding data is similar in all countries. The construction process and the regulations may vary from country to country, but the data that the engineer needs are the same everywhere."
