How Applied Building Information Turned Complex Information Into Clear, Reliable Specs with RIB SpecLink 

Company Name: Applied Building Information 

Location: USA 

Industry sector/s: Construction Specifications 

Products used: RIB SpecLink 

Speclink provided me, as the spec writer, the most control to do specifications better. 

Beth Stroshane, Managing Partner, Applied Building Information 

The Customer 

Applied Building Information (ABI) is one of the largest independent spec writing consultancies in North America, specializing in construction specifications for projects of all sizes – from small interior jobs to large-scale projects spanning multiple city blocks. They develop high quality product specs for manufacturers and help design professionals with their own specs, customizing solutions to unique business needs. ABI has experience in architecture, interiors, construction, and engineering – they’ve invested heavily in content and processes to tailor documents to project needs, and are dedicated to improving clarity, consistency, and risk reduction across construction documents.  

The Mission 

Design teams often work from outdated or inconsistent specs. ABI’s focus is to help designers shift to smarter, current, and more reliable specification workflows. The specific challenges they identified were the combination of information quality and project pressure. Specifications are often assembled under tight timelines, which can lead design teams to inadvertently compromise quality. They lack clarity on what is current, what needs editing, and what should remain untouched. Errors can ripple across bidding, procurement, and construction. As a result, risk and rework increase. This is what drives ABI’s mission to raise the bar on specification clarity and consistency. 

The Solution 

To optimize specification quality and workflow, ABI has leveraged RIB SpecLink’s structured, intelligent content to deliver high quality, accurate specs across diverse projects and client needs. SpecLink’s relational content has become a guide to decisions as a high-value framework that saves users from having to rewrite text from scratch. It supported the application of ABI’s best practice processes to keep specs accurate, coordinated, and aligned with current standards. And ABI, in turn, provides coaching, community support, and workflow guidance to help teams get more from the tool. 

The Result 

ABI noted better projects, stronger specifications, and reduced risk as a result of their implementation of RIB SpecLink. There is higher consistency across project documents with fewer coordination gaps, requiring less rework. Thanks to the structured content, spec development moves at a faster pace. Teams feel more confident in the accuracy and clarity of their specifications. It has helped ABI produce a scalable, repeatable process that supports long-term quality improvement. 

Solving Specification Logistics with Consistency 

Stroshane, Managing Partner at ABI, recalls a time when the first issue that comes to mind writing specifications for a job is Word file formatting – the inability to make headers look the same, for example. It’s a logistical nightmare that takes away focus from content and getting the right products into the project. Designers would spend a lot of time detailing items the spec writer didn’t even know existed, so they never made it into the job. 

ABI’s mission to increase consistency (so that never happens again) is to ensure that specs are usable. With more consistent use of the content, it becomes easier to understand and more useful in a time-sensitive environment. 

When you’ve got a tool that allows you to make connections within your content ahead of time, then it’s easier to respond to that last minute project or that last minute change. 

Beth Stroshane, Managing Partner  

How RIB SpecLink Helps Make the Connection with Content 

The core question ABI aims to answer for their clients is how to make the best specs for the project and then go about selling. The goal is not to produce the minimally viable specs for as cheap as possible. That’s why they focus heavily on optimizing specification, so that workflow and quality are better. And the main challenge with specifications is logistics. 

No one is coming to hand over information on all 10,000 materials for any project. Yet everything must make it onto that project. How do you avoid losing something in the process or spending all your spec fee formatting headers and getting the table of contents coordinated. This is all admin work that takes up a lot of time without providing much value. 

Stroshane has worked with other design and large institutional owner companies that have master specifications, figuring out how to configure the tools to be useful to them. Some of them work for a dozen different municipalities, for example, that like to be called ‘city’, ‘county’, or ‘state’, etc. So, for some, working with global terms is important. 

The ABI team can use SpecLink to make this process easier – to ensure that what needs to be on or off for a lead project can be linked together ahead of time. It means going from ‘lead’ to ‘not lead’ in a couple of minutes as opposed to days. It’s something that can be done consistently. Even if a word or phrase needs to change across an entire section – there’s no need to pay someone to do that painstakingly across thousands of instances at the risk of missing something. This is how SpecLink provides the value they need to pass onto their clients – the value of tailoring a solution that works for their practice. 

Because it’s tagged, you can present 20 pages, once it’s updated, with running a new report. So, it’s not like you have this huge, arduous to pull all this information out of the current specs. That’s just not logistically possible.  

Beth Stroshane 

Automating Specs to Create Better Projects 

Far from dictating how spec writers write specs, RIB SpecLink is designed to be used how you want to use it. ABI utilizes its automation capability to spot errors rather than duplicate them. It’s a huge time (and headache) saver. Stroshane notes that spec writing is often an ongoing, work-in-progress kind of job. They have specifications that they started years ago that won’t get done for another couple of years. In that instance, finding one Word file and its multiple copies to change one bit of text as many times is challenging. It’s easy to miss things. She is happy that SpecLink has allowed them to manage those logistics in a way that they never have to relive that Word file nightmare again. 

It always boils down to making better projects and how to do that. It can mean everyone involved gets to spend more quality time with their families because they don’t have to work. overtime reviewing submittals. It can mean a contractor giving the owner exactly what they wanted for the price they quoted, while asking as few questions as possible. Whatever it means to the individual spec writer, for ABI, it’s about tailoring the specifications to objectives. 

How ABI uses SpecLink to streamline specification: 

• Reduce maintenance on master files. Some clients have several copies of each of their files as master and attempt to maintain each one separately. By layering the content on top of each other, only the one section needs to be maintained. They can then be consolidated to make the maintenance lift lighter – again customizable to exact requirements, whether it’s the same thing for an architect or an engineer. 

• Build infrastructure automation. The software makes it possible to turn on or off the exterior components within a master. For owners who have interior and exterior masters and must maintain both, ABI is building the ability for them to say ‘no exterior’ in one section and it turns off hundreds of paragraphs across hundreds of sections. Then it becomes as simple as going through everything to check without paying someone to open each section, read through, turn off what isn’t required, possibly skip some by accident, and then have to go back in to review again. 

• Tagging for linking. The tagging allows ABI to report on content and review it, while linking allows it to be automated. It enables global editing of headers, footers, and font, so that spec writers don’t spend ages doing that in Word. Once a template is set up, users can visually switch projects in minutes, because the formatting work has already been done. 

It’s raised the bar on clarity and coordination for ABI and helped them meaningfully shift quality outcomes. 

Start with tagging, see what it tells you, and then use that to link for instantaneous value. 

Beth Stroshane 

Reliable, Timely Specifications that Support Collaboration 

After using RIB SpecLink for many years, Stroshane has deep appreciation for how well the solution supports collaboration. ABI is using it to collaborate across huge projects, leveraging its reporting capability. All the information is in one place – they can easily run a report of all the training conducted across a job, not only for one discipline. Having it closer together has been a huge help making collaboration more efficient. 

Efficiency is one of the reasons they chose SpecLink over competing products. Linking information together allowed her to be more efficient with reporting and get clients to engage more within specifications. It can be challenging to get people to review the content if they’re being presented with a big stack of paper to read through. But getting precise lead information into a targeted report means getting the lead consultant to review only their content. ABI has seen much better engagement and better input from teams as a result. It streamlines chunks of complex information, turning it into specifications that are clear, reliable, and actually usable. 

The ability to dedicate a period of time to set up a template once that saves half an hour on every project going forward is a huge investment in efficiency. Setting it up correctly substantially saves effort down the line and embeds quality at the outset. Speed of iteration counts as a big win. Specs can change many times as design iterates, but they can still run a report to show the status of what is important to the project. 

For ABI, it circles back to tagging. Partly because it’s such a quick win. Mostly because it allows the team to look at the same content across sections for consistency. If it’s tagged, it will be visible. If it’s not visible, it falls out of the game play. Tagging items creates a map that you can automate. It instils greater confidence in spec accuracy and clarity. Stroshane recommends treating the tagging capability as the first solid step on the staircase of implementing SpecLink solutions to elevate both efficiency and quality. 

So, it’s like you can write specs on your worst day like it was your best day – this is how these tools can help you function.  

Beth Stroshane