For AEC manufacturers, fabricators and design firms
More revenue in the door, with the team you already have.
We help companies in Architecture, Engineering and Construction Industry identify bottlenecks and develop automations to increase output and revenue.
01 / Premise
Automation that increases Revenue
Goldratt's argument in The Goal is that a business exists to make money, and that throughput — not efficiency, not utilization — is what produces it.
The basic premise is: time saved anywhere other than the step that's actually limiting you doesn't show up in revenue. The work still gets done; the number at the end of the year doesn't move. Which makes the next investment harder to justify than the last one.
So the useful question isn't "what could we automate?", plenty of things could be. It's "which one step, if it stopped being a bottleneck, would let us take on more work?" We make sure to answer that first, then build the automation second.
That answer is different at every company, and it's worth a few hours to establish rather than assuming.
02 / Diagnostic
Finding the Bottleneck
We use a method called Value Stream mapping, developed by Rother and Shooks in their book Learning to See. It allows us to walk through your workflow backward from customer deliverable and record what actually happens at each step, visualizing it to better identify where your workflow is stalling.
value-added time / total lead time
This number comes from creating a map, and usually is one of the biggest shocks to a company. If six hours of actual engineering time sits inside a three-week lead time, that ratio is 5%. What we often find is figuring out where the work is piling up is more important than making that 6 hours go by faster.
03 / Build
What we build once the bottleneck is identified
Automation for your specific business
Rules extraction
The logic that lives in one person's head — spans, loads, allowable combinations, what you will and won't build — captured and made executable.
Engineering in the loop
Structural analysis, connection checks and calc packages that run as part of the process rather than as a manual step after it.
Drafting and model automation
iLogic, Inventor and Revit automation that generates drawings, details and sheet sets from the model instead of rebuilding them by hand.
Pricing that holds
Cost roll-up, margin rules, regional and volume adjustments and lead times — so the number you give is a number you can build to.
Shop and submittal output
Cut lists, BOMs, drawings and submittal packages generated from the same source as everything upstream, so nothing is transcribed twice.
Configurators and registry output
A configurator your team or your customer can drive, on the web or published into Revit via Informed Design — with optional .CTO / CIS export as that standard lands.
04 / The math
Putting a revenue number on it
Before building anything, we size the opportunity in your own figures. The two calculations that usually matter:
additional bids you could submit × win rate × average job value
Revenue you aren't capturing because quoting capacity — not demand, and not sales — sets how many jobs you can chase.
hours freed at the constrained step ÷ hours per job × average job value
Revenue from the work you could take on with the same people, once that step stops being the ceiling.
Cost savings show up too, and they're easier to calculate. They're also usually the smaller half — which is why I'd rather build the case on what you could take on than on what you could trim.
05 / Engagement
How to start
$7,500
Process Map & Automation Plan · two to three weeks · fixed fee
- Two day download, if you are a manufacturing facility this means onsite, walking the process from quoting to shipping. For design firms this usually is interviews with your key contributors to understand your workflows
- A current-state map with real numbers on it: cycle times, wait times, handoffs, rework loops, and the value-added ratio for the whole stream.
- A future-state map showing what the flow looks like once the constraint is gone.
- An automation plan - what to build, in what order, with the revenue math behind each phase and a firm bid for the first one.
Yours either way. Plenty of companies take the maps and do the work themselves, and that works- you'll know exactly where to aim.
Currently working with manufacturers in the Portland metro area or within a 3 hour drive so that onsite days are possible without an overnight stay. Further out and we can discuss if traveling makes sense.
06 / Who
Who you'd be working with
AEC Automations is run by Kyle Gilham. He owns and run a mass timber glulam truss fabrication company, and built its configurator, its Inventor and iLogic automation, and its structural analysis pipelines.
Before that he spent seven years at Autodesk, most recently on the Informed Design team. He chairs the steering committee of the Configurator File Type Project under the Linux Foundation's Joint Development Foundation, as part of his senior research fellowship at the Center for Offsite Construction, where his research is on moving building delivery from engineer-to-order to configure-to-order.
He has a mechanical engineering degree and MBA with extensive work in Mass Timber fabrication over the past 4 years.
- Operating
- Founder, mass timber glulam truss fabrication
- Platform
- 7 years at Autodesk · Informed Design
- Standards
- Chair, Configurator File Type Project (JDF / Linux Foundation)
- Research
- Senior Fellow, Center for Offsite Construction
- Background
- BS Mechanical Engineering · MBA
07 / Contact
Get in touch
Twenty minutes on how work moves through your shop and where it slows down. If there's nothing worth automating, I'll tell you that.