AVAIL Sales Director Will Rouse has conversations every day with prospective customers about the cost of content management systems (CMS) like AVAIL’s all-in-one content management solution for the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry. The best place to start, Will says, is looking at the cost of your current state of content management. Files and information should flow smoothly from source to project to deliverable. But when that delivery pipeline breaks—when content is hard to find, inconsistent, or outdated—time and money start leaking out. Does your content delivery pipeline have a leak? Read Will’s thoughts below.
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Lots of architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) firms are grappling with the cost of content management solutions.
Are they expensive or are they free? Is somewhere in the middle the right price?
It is difficult to make a comparison on price alone. The best place to start is the cost of the current state in the workflow—or at least a clear problem definition. In other words, calculate a baseline to compare against.
One of the frameworks I have built through conversation is below. It’s fairly easy to use and provides a good-faith estimate on the cost of content in a design firm of any size.
The rows show different types of costs associated with content, where that cost is incurred, and what that cost is (or how to think about it).
Library and Resource Maintenance
In short, the business will hire staff to create, maintain, train on, and build awareness of various library assets. This can include different types of plugins or tools in order to do this job. These costs are specific to an individual or a small group (compared to overall business size).
Search and Reuse Effort
The next bucket of cost is tough because it is broad and filled with a lot of tiny little “charges.” The second column, representing Search and Reuse Effort, is the cost incurred to the business by staff as a result of simply needing to find and use the library content. This has always been challenging but I came to my estimated cost—$2,500 to $4,000 per person per year—by identifying four common practices with content (searching the network, searching the internet, modeling in place, going to a past project) and then surveying different-sized firms how often their staff spent on those activities. We then multiply those results by two billable rates (junior and senior) and then arrive at the per person, per year expense.
Quality Loss and Rework
The Quality Loss and Rework column represents billable time lost to fixing models due to rogue content entering the project. This is another area where there can be lots of “little cuts” but undoubtedly there are big, thorny issues that bring application software to a stop and teams now spend their time troubleshooting software instead of working on the core task and deliverable.
Liability and Litigation
If we move further out, then the final column provides some ideas on broader risk or what can happen if rogue content produces issues that results in claims or litigation. Maybe these are rare, but they are part of the overall cost management framework that business leaders are trying to understand.
Essentially: There’s a pipeline for content and information delivery in the firm, and it is usually broken in the middle.
Some symptoms of a broken delivery pipeline include:
Application software like Revit slows to a crawl or locks up entirely
Creating accurate and automatic schedules becomes impossible
Graphics of the drawings themselves do not clearly communicate what’s on the page
All of these can lead to frustrated employees, wasted time, costly errors, and poor reflections on your business.
Content management systems (CMS) like AVAIL’s all-in-one content management solution for the AEC industry help patch the leaks in your content delivery pipeline. Files are easier to search for and find, and the reliance on old projects or building new content is greatly minimized . Thus, overall, more standards-compliant content makes it downstream, with fewer errors and omissions in the final deliverable.
However, any new technology—especially a content management system— has a cost of ownership.
New little tasks now exist that didn’t previously exist, and this wouldn’t be a fair assessment without owning that. For instance, if you use AVAIL, you can’t reasonably expect the cost of search to drop to zero. But, can you expect to cut it in half?
Further, if staff are finding library assets on a more consistent basis, then isn’t the business protecting their investments into the library and also reducing risk? Are BIM teams now spending less time troubleshooting projects at the expense of other core tasks? There are quantitative and qualitative aspects to the analysis that need to be fully appreciated.
Arkance’s Digital Transformation in the AEC Industry: 2025 State of the Market Report showed that the most profitable service inside a design firm is the development of construction drawings. In the face of flat billings and fees, protecting the margin inside the company’s most profitable area should be a key objective.
Founded in 2016 as a solution for architecture and engineering firms to find the information they need faster, AVAIL creates software for the global architectural, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry. AVAIL’s content management system (CMS) platform and Revit, AutoCAD, and Civil 3D application tools help designers and engineers take control of their intricate network of files in one visual, streamlined solution. AVAIL’s customers include industry leaders Gensler, Perkins&Will, IMEG, LEO A DALY, and Populous.
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