How Lake Flato Architects Turned Firm History into Everyday Speed and Quality with Pirros
Summary
Lake Flato, known for its innovation in architecture technology, set out to make its decades of Revit knowledge instantly findable, trustworthy, and teachable, without adding another tool that people would ignore.
What began as a research initiative became a focused pilot and then a firm-wide rollout of Pirros, the leading design content intelligence platform.
The difference-maker was the combination of the intuitive Pirros platform and hands-on change management led by Lake Flato and Pirros together, resulting in faster detail retrieval, higher confidence in reuse, and a visible lift in team energy around documentation quality.
About Lake Flato
Lake Flato is an architecture firm nationally recognized for innovation, design excellence and meticulous delivery. Like most modern practices, the firm’s “institutional memory” lived inside thousands of Revit models, archived PDFs, and a handful of detail libraries—valuable, but time-consuming to search and uneven in quality. Staff were losing hours opening files, upgrading models, and recreating work that already existed.
The Challenge: Great Tools, Real Adoption
- Buried know-how: Strong details were trapped in past projects and hard to discover at the pace of live work.
- Standards vs. reality: Curated libraries helped, but committees couldn’t keep up with the volume of high-quality project solutions.
- Software fatigue: Teams had seen “one more platform” before. The risk wasn’t capability, it was whether people would actually use it.
- Onboarding pressure: Newer staff needed a clear path to the best version of a detail, without digging through models or relying on the memories of more senior staff.
Lake Flato needed more than a database. They needed a product that felt lighter than the old habits and a partner who would guide adoption in the flow of real project work.
The Spark: Research → Pilot → Rollout
Dan Stine is a registered architect and the Director of Design Technology at Lake Flato. Inside Lake Flato’s research program led by Dan, the team raised an intriguing question for investigation:
"How can a searchable database of details culled from a wide range of Lake Flato projects improve efficiency during the documentation phase of a project and serve as an educational resource and inter-office communication tool to promote beautiful, functional, and sound detailing?"
So Dan turned to Pirros. With leadership support, a real-work pilot was designed and users working in the late DD / early CD phases—where pain is highest and results are most visible—signed up to test Pirros on their projects. A dedicated Teams channel captured questions, quick wins, and patterns.
The Comparison
To make the best decision backed by comparative data and evidence, Dan led pilot evaluation processes in parallel comparing Pirros to content management systems on the market including Content Catalog, Avail and Hive.
Lake Flato recognized the importance that their details, specifically, serve as part of the design process, and Pirros’s native emphasis on details helped win over the team. In addition to its:
- Simple, user-friendly interface
- Ability to tap into past project details
- Ability to capture live "detail views"
- Robust search engine not reliant on manually added tags or metadata
- Method for senior staff and non-Revit users to reference details in a PDF format
After more than a year of these real-project pilot evaluations of various tools, Lake Flato chose Pirros because of its strengths in detail intelligence and usability. Lake Flato designers reported their experiences with Pirros were faster, easier to trust, and “hard to go back” from. So they moved to roll out Pirros firm-wide.
Why Pirros (and How It Stuck)
Pirros is a content intelligence platform for design teams. Pirros ingests full Revit models, extracting each detail and family to make them instantly searchable (no naming conventions or manual tagging required), and helps firms proactively build a standardized content library.
In addition to the features that won the team over during the initial pilot comparison period, the Pirros product capabilities that Lake Flato leaned on included:
- Whole-model ingestion: Pirros unlocked details across firm history without opening or upgrading old files.
- “Typicals-first” discovery: Curated standards were surfaced to the top of detail search results, while strong project details remain visible for inspiration and reuse.
- Full-text + similarity search: Lake Flato users could find the right detail in Pirros, even if they didn’t know what it was called. This was the robustness of search felt even early in those first few weeks of the pilot.
- Practice-aware filters: Content was kept organized by project type, climate, materials, offices, and more.
- Lightweight governance: Flags, markup capabilities, approval workflows, and version control helped keep quality high without slowing work.
- Usage analytics: Dan and his teams could see which details were used where, when and by whom, to guide QA/QC and training.
“I pulled up Pirros during a meeting with a colleague to look at some different details together and we were thrilled at how fast it was to compare details and discuss assemblies with this tool.”
—Lake Flato pilot user giving feedback on Pirros
Plus, a human-enablement focused partnership with Pirros that accelerated adoption:
- Contextual setup: The Pirros customer success team configured search facets and result ordering to match Lake Flato’s standards.
- In-flow enablement: Short, live sessions with active project teams; 60-second tips and quick clips embedded in Teams.
- Cadenced touchpoints: Early weekly office hours tapered to a steady monthly rhythm as usage matured.
- Proof loops: CS helped measure “time-to-first-win,” typical detail usage, and flag/approval throughput, turning anecdotes into momentum.
Pirros’s product strength removed friction for Lake Flato while its customer success team helped translate that strength into everyday habits. This dual approach—both strong product and customer success—meant the experience felt obviously better and simple to adopt.
Overcoming Software Fatigue: The Adoption Playbook
Pirros and Lake Flato worked shoulder-to-shoulder so adoption was natural, not forced. Here are a few adoption lessons from Dan and the team at Pirros:
- Co-design around real deadlines
Focus on active projects in late DD / early CD so value shows up in real training meetings, not in future ones. - Champions, then cohorts
Align with library champions on search patterns and vetting rules, then guide cohorts of project teams through short, task-specific sessions. - Make the first win quick and in real-time
One search → compare similar details → insert the best version. Two minutes, tangible time savings. - Lightweight enablement, continuous support
Dedicated Teams channel, quick tips, and progressive training; questions answered where the team already collaborates. - Measure what matters
Track time from first search to insert, as well as growth in standard content usage, and steady
flag → review → promotion cycles. - Close the loop on standards
Designers flag strong project details; champions review and promote. Standards improve where the work happens.
Powerful Results
Overall, the results realized by Lake Flato since partnering with Pirros have been powerful:
- Time back to teams: The Lake Flato teams spend 50% less time opening models, upgrading, and previewing Revit content. With Pirros, they save 5 minutes per detail found and 15 minutes per detail download.
- Dollars back to the firm: Applying those time savings to their average hourly billable rate, the firm is saving more than $200,000 annually.
- Higher confidence in reuse: Curated standards lead search results and are most frequently used. Plus, strong project details have a clear path into the library.
- Cultural lift: The enthusiasm around rollout sustained throughout adoption—rare for BIM tooling—reflected immediate and tangible benefits for staff.
- Sustainable governance: Lightweight flags, approvals, and analytics keep the library improving without slowing production.
Pirros has been a massive help in searching for details. Prior to Pirros, I had been working on compiling/consolidating details across multiple higher-ed projects and it was such a drag to sit and wait for older Revit files to upgrade and open, copy over details, deal with the messy linework... I'm getting frustrated just talking about it.”
—Lake Flato pilot user giving feedback on Pirros
Daily Life Today at Lake Flato
More than a year into their partnership with Pirros, day-to-day at Lake Flato feels fast and confident: designers search the firm’s history in seconds, compare similar details side by side, and drop the best version into Revit while the team is still talking. Project teams start with a large standardized library, plus project-specific variations easily surfaced and reviewed. New hires level up quickly. And behind the scenes, staff are using flags, notes, and analytics to continuously tighten standards rather than waiting for committee reviews.
Pirros didn’t just improve how Lake Flato accessed Revit details, it enabled Lake Flato to turn its own design history into a foundation for further innovation.
