Go from Schematics to BIM in Minutes with Skema

Architects and Designers are well-aware of the sheer number of hurdles that conventional AEC processes throw their way, when going from Early Concept/Schematics to Construction Documentation. With weeks of iteration to achieve a fit and bullet-proof design scheme, followed by more weeks to rationalise it and arrive at BIM models for construction, it can be rather tedious and painstaking to push AEC projects forward. 

More often than not, a lot of design intent, data, and hours of effort get lost when moving from the schematics phase to BIM, resulting in significant amounts of re-work. Similarly, because of the limitations of BIM workflows, you redo the same design problem - be it an assembly or a layout - in every new project, even when you have BIM-solved the same in a number of previous projects. Firms pour in significant labour-hours re-modelling spaces, objects, and components, as there is no optimised, intelligent way around it. The result? A lot of time and resources that could otherwise be spent on the actual design process, is lost. 

Thankfully, we have a new product up and coming in AEC tech-town that aims to eliminate these very particular pain points. Skema (skema.ai) is a design software running on the cloud, and it promises to take you from Schematics to BIM in minutes, not months, using your own styles, standards, and models! We at AEC+Tech sat down with the co-founders to know more about their product, their vision to optimize time frames in projects, and to understand how they fast-forward past the mundane modeling and repetitive drafting tasks, and quickly get to crafting one-of-a-kind designs.

Read on to find out more!

Fig. 1) Introduction to Skema

1) What inspired Skema's development, and how does it tackle challenges in architectural software? Why is the name "Skema"?

Most firms use distinct and separate tools at various design stages. As they move from one tool to another, some data loss occurs. This is particularly true during the schematic to BIM transition, in most cases requiring complete rework of data. Each instance of data loss introduces additional time and potential errors. We focus our efforts there – hence the name Skema.  

Skema gives Architects a path to embrace design automation while leveraging the inherent value locked in the BIM systems used by a majority of firms globally.

Skema focuses on repetitive work in an architectural practice, offering designers easy-to-use tools that run on a web browser. The significant reduction in time Skema achieves in delivering a LOD350 BIM model gives architects a major advantage in driving the shift to modular construction across the industry’s highest growth segments. 

• Data Integrity

In Skema, the work performed during conceptual and schematic design isn't lost or discarded. Instead, once the process moves into Design Development and Construction Documents, a boost in production is realised with zero data and time lost to the process.  

Our customers are saving weeks and months of rework because of the Skema workflow.  

• BIM Reuse

There are elements of BIM that lend themselves to AI & automation, specifically the highly repeatable design elements that have been well-defined in past projects. Even the most complex designs have highly repeatable interior elements. 

Modern building methods are forcing architects to provide more and higher levels of design detail earlier in the process. 

The Skema workflow produces high integrity models that owners, builders, and developers can trust. 

Fig. 2) Get BIM in Minutes, not Months, with Skema

2) Who uses Skema, at what project stages, and for which types of projects?

Skema is for commercial architects and designers, particularly those designing buildings with repetitive room/unit typologies: schools, hotels, residential, healthcare, data centers, etc.  Our tool allows them to pursue new work with less risk, while saving two-plus months of manual BIM entry on every project. 

Because Skema leverages past designs for new designs, it doesn’t fit neatly into traditional design phases.  

Skema’s front-end conceptual design environment has familiar and simple-to-learn sketching tools. We have push-pull, mass, and Sketchup-like type modeling, as well as geospatial context.  You can quickly resolve site planning, site context, massing, and sustainability challenges during the early schematic design phase.   

But there’s one major difference between Skema and every other conceptual design tool: its BIM knowledge reuse capability. 

Skema transforms a firm’s proven and BIM-rich unitized design elements – whether created in Revit, ArchiCAD, IFC, or any other BIM software – into Design Catalogs for new build, adaptive reuse, and modular projects. By turning a firm’s valuable BIM outputs into BIM inputs, designers can resolve detailed design elements during the schematic phase. This greater precision and accuracy supports Modern Methods of Construction (MMC) and can save weeks of laborious BIM modelling tasks. 

3) Can you share success stories showing how Skema boosts efficiency and productivity?

In design charrettes and pilots with our Pioneer Partners, firms estimated a savings of 6-8 weeks in their schematic-to-BIM workflows.  

These firms say that addressing and solving for detail design during schematic design frees up a significant portion of the fee budget, delivering a design detail package 30-40% more quickly, for example. This gives firms control over how to reallocate that fee budget, such as by delivering designs faster, or at a higher level of quality assurance. 

Skema lets us create custom libraries tailored to specific clients, typologies, or markets. We can quickly iterate multiple conceptual schemes, live and in progress with the client. Each scheme can then be used to generate a highly detailed model solution, and within minutes, produce a fully integrated Revit model. -Michael Hodge, Principal, Digital Practice and Design Technology at TVS.

4) What are the primary benefits that clients typically experience when implementing Skema into their workflow? 

• Win work with less effort: Skema helps architects easily and quickly create multiple high-quality design options to share with a client, reducing the time, effort, and risk that architects currently undertake while pursuing new project work. 
• Exceed client expectations: By automating the repetitive parts of a programmatic design —roughly 50%—the designer can focus on the remaining 50% for the signature spaces such as lobbies and experiential elements of the building. 
• Maintain design control: Skema's BIM Knowledge Reuse Engine unlocks a firm's IP stored in previous BIM projects, turning selected, repeatable design elements and firm standards into high-fidelity design catalogs that the firm, and only that firm, can apply to new projects. 

• Get more value from your successful designs: Skema lets designers quickly arrange, adapt, and morph their firm’s fully vetted design elements to fit new concepts. Addressing and solving for detail design during schematic design frees up a significant portion of the fee budget.  

I have not seen a tool that harnesses AI more effectively than Skema to save time and money at the most critical times in the development process. -Jeff Shaw, CEO, Bridge Commercial Real Estate and Senior Managing Director, Bridge Investment Group.

• Produce more informed options: A designer can create multiple design options using Skema's puzzle piece approach and/or Skema's integrated metrics to reach a desired aesthetic and functional design proposal.

• Get BIM in minutes not months: When the designer is ready to move forward from Schematic design, Skema almost instantly generates high-quality BIM LOD350 models, accelerating the creation of BIM deliverables by as much as 6-8 weeks.

Skema’s Design Catalog Manager gives us new opportunities to get more value from our BIM investments. -Nicholas Kramer, LEED® AP, Associate and Director of Inspire Design at LPA, Inc.

5) Can you explain how Skema helps leverage design knowledge from previous BIM projects? 

With Skema, clients are able to reuse and repurpose their existing successful projects for various building typologies. Skema is the only conceptual and schematic tool that uses a firm’s own high LOD BIM as input, and we call that our BIM knowledge reuse engine.   

Firms select the project(s) they want to use and pull specific unitized ensign elements into their Skema app. These new unitized design elements form their new Skema Design Catalog. They incorporate all your design standards from those BIM models, including sheets, line types, and font types. If the data are in your BIM model, they’re in Skema.  As your schematic layout goes to BIM, your design standards remain intact, so you don’t need to redraw any of that. 

The elements in the Design Catalog are flexible, morphable, and deterministic “puzzle pieces” that easily snap into new layouts, providing designers with complete freedom to customise their own designs in new ways. They can experiment with whole chunks of the building to solve the overall arrangement during the feasibility phase.   

Fig. 6) Creating a Design Catalog

6) What specific repetitive tasks does Skema automate in programmatic design, and how does this accelerate proposals and deliverables? 

Our approach to generative design is not to generate a complete building; it’s to generate ideas. We fast forward designers through mundane modelling and repetitive drafting tasks. The designer is still in control. Our idea is that we're the fastest way to get the 50% or 60% complete. And you can solve the building to 100% with the tool of your choice.   

Any element that repeats in your design at any scale is a good candidate for Skema. The repetitive units we describe can be as large or small as the designer wants. It can be a unit as large as a 3-bedroom apartment or a surgery suite, or it could be as small as a bathroom pod. Not only can the designer move those units around to solve the program, but they can also morph them. 

Once the design is ready to move out of schematic, no redrawing is necessary. By eliminating rework and automating those repeatable elements in your design, Skema decreases errors in the design process. In minutes, you have a BIM model that you can use for further refinements as is typical as a project moves forward. 

Fig. 7) Handle Multiple Layouts across Multiple Floors with ease, using Skema.ai

7) How does Skema integrate with existing tools and workflows used by AEC professionals? 

Skema isn’t trying to replace Revit. In fact, Skema makes Revit better. 

Skema produces extremely high quality Revit model data, leveraging its own technology stack (there is no reliance on Autodesk or any other major platform). Skema also has native IFC capabilities to interface with any other BIM authoring solution as required.  

8) What are the user's main challenges in adopting Skema? 

As automation and AI change the rules of thumb about how long it takes to deliver a design to a client, architects are in a position to deliver better value in less time. Firms are still coming to grips with how best to adjust their business models.   

In many firms, the fee-generating team is separate from the production team. Because Skema offers a more circular workflow, rather than linear, this new way of working requires communication and coordination. 

9) What feedback have you received from users about Skema, and how has it influenced the tool’s ongoing development?

Product market fit is essential to us. That’s why we have our Pioneer Partner Program. Composed of a dozen tech-savvy, forward-looking firms, our founding Pioneer Partners have been and remain an essential part of our development process.  

We give them early access to our technology and work with them very closely as they introduce the solution to their teams and in projects. In return we get a deep understanding of their workflows and business issues, which informs our development.   

For example, our Pioneer Partners loved the Design Catalogs and wanted to be able to create and their catalogs directly. In response, we prioritized that capability and introduced our Design Catalog Manager in Skema 2024, our latest major release (June 2024).

10) How does Skema differentiate itself from other similar solutions in the market? 

We are the only tool that uses BIM output as the input for new designs.  

We offer a conceptual design environment, but the real differentiator for us is in the schematic to BIM process. Skema is not a throwaway conceptual design tool. What you create is used in the next phase. 

11) Do you currently have any competitors in the space? If you do, would it be possible to elaborate on your differences?  

In the design automation space, we see solutions that handle some aspects of Skema’s capabilities, but we are the only solution that connects the workflows, and we do it in a way that is easy for firms to adopt. We work with the tools that are entrenched in firms so that they can get into design automation and see the productivity benefits right away. With our focus, we make Sketchup better, we make Revit better.

Our value is in time savings and reducing the percentage of fee that architects use to get to the same point of project completion. No one else is addressing this data loss/ redraw problem in a meaningful way. Only Skema harvests more than simple blocks and families, creating repeatable unitized design catalogues for the typologies that represent more than 60% of new global construction; Multi-Family, Hospitality, Medical, Education, Data-Centers (industrial), and Commercial.

12) How user-friendly is Skema for architects who may not have extensive experience with AI-powered design tools? 

Skema is very user friendly with a shallow learning curve. For example, when we held a charette at one of our Pioneer Partner firms, a principal who doesn’t use Revit went from his Skema design to a Revit model at the end of a one-day charette. He was pleasantly surprised by our BIM in Minutes capability! 

With the flexibility of the Skema Design Catalog, designers can address the overall arrangement during the feasibility phase. The puzzle pieces are easy to move around, and Skema’s integrated metrics provide architects with greater certainty regarding their pro forma metrics. No more using Excel on the side!

Inside the Skema app are an ever-growing number of demo projects in various building typologies so that designers can get a feel for how it works even if they haven’t yet created their own Design Catalogs.

Fig. 10) Reporting Options with Skema

13) What is your pricing model?

Skema offers a two-phase pricing model to keep the cost of schematic proposal creation low, and only charge for Skema’s advanced BIM downloadable deliverables once the project is won. 

All of Skema’s schematic proposal creation capabilities are included in Skema’s monthly subscriptions – priced for Individuals, teams, and enterprises – giving unlimited use of the unique Design Catalog capabilities.

Each subscription package entitles you to a number of BIM project downloads where the firm downloads the fully functional Revit file. Then additional projects can be purchased as and when the workload requires.

           Subscription packages

• Individual - $199/mo
• Team licensing (5 seats) - $750/mo
• Enterprise licensing (12+ seats) – custom

14) How do you ensure the security and privacy of data collected and processed by Skema? 

We comply with AWS security protocols, typical for cloud software companies like ours. We have a very detailed policy that we can provide to interested companies. 

With regards to AI, we do not use a firm’s data to train our AI, and that is a fundamental distinction that we believe will remain a gating factor to the adoption of AI tools in AEC firms. Skema converts the BIM data representing spaces into a mediating technology of knowledge graphs. By using knowledge graphs, the firm's data and the architect’s IP remain separate from the AI. 

15) What future developments or enhancements do you envision for Skema? 

Skema solves a long-standing and difficult-to-solve productivity problem, and it is designed to exist alongside other solutions. We are working on integrations with other tools to offer an ecosystem of web apps –  including Sketchup, Speckle and other disciplines.

Conclusive Thoughts

Needless to say, Skema seeks to address a very particular and pressing industry-wide problem that hasn’t been tackled head-on before. The co-founders have conceived just about the right set of features and capabilities to go into the product, eliminating a ton of pain-points for Architects as they go from Schematics to BIM.

In all truthfulness, we at AEC+Tech have not come across any other product in the last few years, which harnesses your firm’s specific BIM intelligence, and lets you reuse that knowledge for substantial improvements in time and resources. It’ll certainly be very enthusing to see what comes next for Skema, and how conventional AEC processes transform for the better.

And as we always say, exciting times ahead for the AECTech space!