Buehler Turned a Mature Detail Library into a Fast, More Usable Production System with Pirros
Buehler is a West Coast structural engineering firm known for longevity, craft, and a long-term view of practice.
“We have a lot of people that are 30, 40 years into their careers with the firm,” says Kevin Cissna, SE, Associate Principal. “Longevity is definitely something that we take pride in.”
That same legacy mindset shows up in how Buehler treats standards. The firm didn’t adopt Pirros because their details were disorganized. They adopted Pirros because they were already doing the hard work of building a high-quality library, and wanted the next step: making that knowledge faster to access, easier to compare, and simpler to distribute across engineers and production staff.
Pirros gave Buehler a way to operationalize firm knowledge across projects and teams, without changing how Buehler already works.
The context: A “legacy firm” mentality applied to standards
Kevin has spent his entire 20-year structural career at Buehler. About eight years ago, he began leading the Design and Practice Standards Committee (DPSC), a company-wide program with subcommittees across structural materials and technical areas.
The goal isn’t only maintenance. It’s leadership development and knowledge transfer at scale:
“We make it a company-wide effort. It’s not just maintaining our resources. It also gives people opportunities to take ownership of something, become the expert, and show leadership within the company.”
That culture created something many firms don’t have: a mature detail library, supported by dedicated ownership and a long-term approach to consistency. But even a mature library can become a bottleneck if access and distribution are slow.
The starting point: A mature library… in a PDF “detail book”
Before Pirros, Buehler’s library wasn’t chaotic, it was disciplined. At one point, they even had a homegrown internal platform, but maintaining it became too heavy. So Buehler did something both practical and telling: they turned their library into a deeply bookmarked PDF workflow.
“We ended up printing our library to Bluebeam with bookmarks,” Kevin explains. “We would just have a PDF, and you would Control-F your way through it. The feedback on this workflow was not cut-and-dry, while it technically met our needs, there had to be a better way.
But “kind of works” doesn’t scale when engineers need speed, comparison, and certainty under deadline pressure. Buehler’s detail library workflows had to scale.
The challenge: Standards existed. The friction lived in use.
Buehler’s bottleneck wasn’t creating details. It was getting the right detail in front of the right person at the right moment. And doing so fast enough to keep production moving, and reliably enough to reduce downstream risk.
1) Visual discovery and comparison were slow.
For engineers, choosing the right detail often means comparing many similar variations quickly.
“For us, the main things were the visual side: Being able to see multiple details at a time for comparison,” Kevin says. “Trying to look at multiple details on Bluebeam, it did not work. It’s not built for that.”
2) Search was functional, but not frictionless.
Even with a well-organized PDF, the workflow was still linear: scroll, search, open, repeat.
With Pirros cutting the unnecessary linear steps, Kevin describes the difference in simple terms: “If I want a detail, I can be looking at it within 10 seconds.”
3) The system had to enhance existing workflows, not disrupt them.
Buehler had already invested years into standards, committees, and a strong internal library. Any new tool had to feel like an accelerator—not a restart.
Buehler’s advantage was that their foundation was already strong. They wanted a platform that operationalized that foundation at production speed.
Why Pirros: “It seemed like it would fit perfectly.”
Buehler’s introduction to Pirros came through an internal connection. Kevin and principal Keith Bauer joined their first call with Pirros with modest expectations.
“We were not expecting much,” Kevin says. Then the demo ended, and their reaction surprised even them: “We talked to each other afterwards, and thought, ‘that seemed like it would fit perfectly.’”
So Kevin and Keith brought Pirros back to leadership, then pressure-tested it with the people who would actually use it.
“We added our whole library in,” Kevin says. “We engaged ten engineers and said, ‘Tell me what you hate. Why should we not do this?’ And there wasn’t much.”
Here was a way to make existing standards instantly searchable, visually navigable, and easier to apply across the firm.
The solution: A tool built for real design production behavior
Pirros made Buehler’s already-strong library exponentially more stable by aligning with how structural engineers actually work when they’re under time pressure and need confidence, fast. What changed with Pirros
● Faster discovery with less friction: Instead of hunting through a PDF detail book, engineers now quickly narrow to the right subset and visually scan options.
“When you tied the tagging with being able to see multiple details,” Kevin says, “I can get to a subset and quickly scroll through 30 details.’”
● A bridge between Revit and non-Revit users: Pirros makes details shareable as PDFs so Buehler engineers can review, compare, mark up, and communicate clearly, while production staff can execute in the tools they live in.
● Side-by-side comparison that matches engineering judgment: The ability to rapidly compare variations supports better decisions earlier—before work hits drafting and downstream coordination.
“It’s more than just the ability to see what we have in our library,” Kevin explains. “Often, we don’t know what specifically we’re looking for, but want to get ideas and see a related group of details, and now we can find the view faster.”
● Standards management becomes lighter, not heavier: For Kevin and the Design Practice Standards Committee, Pirros reduced the overhead of maintaining a large library. “Managing our database of over 2,000 details is certainly easier now,” he says.
● Human-supported enablement, not just software: Buehler also valued Pirros’s hands-on partnership model: Knowledgeable human support that shows up immediately in day-to-day work. “The hands-on support, immediate feedback, and quality of technical support is great,” Kevin says.
This is a core part of Pirros: outcomes aren’t just driven by features. Pirros’s “co-building” approach meant that Buehler received not just software, but an active partnership in onboarding, training, and ongoing iteration so standards don’t stall out after implementation.
The results: Compounding time savings and meaningful quality-of-life gains
Buehler’s team now operates Pirros at real scale with roughly 10,000+ detail views per quarter and 1,200+ detail downloads per quarter, saving 2-3 minutes per view as a conservative estimate.
Buehler’s early internal ROI conversations were pragmatic. Leadership asked the same question every firm asks: How much time does this really save us?
Back-of-napkin math puts Buehler at roughly 500 hours saved per quarter, from only the 3 minutes per detail view saved, not even counting detail downloads.
Kevin says, “We ended up saying, if it saves every engineer an hour a month, that would be worth it for us.”
Kevin also emphasized that value isn’t only financial.
“We discussed the frustration in finding and navigating things,” he says. “If we can make people’s lives easier, then we knew that Pirros was worth it, as it helped us make work easier and better for our people.”
The takeaway is the one Buehler actually uses to make decisions: even small per-detail gains compound fast at real usage scale—and the usability gains reduce friction, frustration, and rework risk at the same time.
What Buehler’s story shows
Buehler’s experience reflects a broader shift happening in AEC: The next leap isn’t building a standards library. It’s operationalizing it—turning static files into living, firm-wide intelligence that shows up inside real workflows.
Buehler didn’t adopt Pirros to “get organized.” They adopted Pirros to move faster with confidence, and to make their hard-earned standards easier for every engineer to benefit from.
For firms with strong technical culture, Pirros is a force multiplier: It makes vetted details and families more searchable, more accessible across roles, and easier to govern without slowing production.
And for a legacy firm aiming to become a defining name, that kind of leverage isn’t a “nice-to-have.” It’s how reputation is built—detail by detail, project by project, year after year.
