Forty Lifts in a Working Day
How a Lift Planning Team Delivers Full Elevator BIM Models Without CAD
"Lift planning consultant Jens Kuhfuss on traffic analysis, manufacturer-neutral tenders, and why specifying a lift is not the same as drawing one."
Ana Arasaki | 2026
Based on the webinar with Jens Kuhfuss, 26 March 2026, and on the preparation calls behind it.
When Jens Kuhfuss mentioned that his team had drawn more than forty lifts for one development in about a working day, I asked him to say it again. And here is the thing, nobody in his lift planning team works in CAD and they still hand architects complete BIM models for hospitals, office buildings and large mixed-use developments.
I spent a few days with Jens before our webinar in March, and I kept circling back to the same question: how does that work, and where is the catch? There is no catch. There is a great deal of expertise, which is a very different thing, and I want to say that clearly at the start. “You do not need CAD” is easy to hear as “the job is easy”, and this job is not easy.
Jens has been in the lift industry for over thirty years and has worked as a lift planning consultant since 1999. He now runs a region in the lift planning department of one of Germany’s large independent technical inspection and advisory organisations, which means his team specifies and tenders lifts for building owners and architects with no stake in which manufacturer eventually wins the job. This is how he introduced himself to our audience:
“I have been in the lift business for more than thirty years. In that time, I have built lifts, maintained lifts, fixed lifts and occasionally broken lifts.
That happens now and then, but I really don´t mean to" - Jens says and laughs.
The traffic calculation happens first and separately, before any drawing exists. Everything after that, from shaft sizing to the component specification and the drawing set that goes into the tender, is built in DigiPara Liftdesigner. His team works with Liftdesigner and nothing else.
1. It usually starts with a floor plan somebody found online
Architects and building services planners come to Jens because they cannot do the calculation and the layout themselves. In the first project phases they are not thinking about shaft dimensions or traffic analysis at all. They want a floor plan that is correct enough to dimension the building around.
What they normally send over is a floor plan that already has lifts sketched into it, and this is where a problem starts that most people outside the industry never see.
“As a rule, the floor plans that land on our desk are based on the online lift drawings of the big manufacturers. That is not really our focus. We plan so that we can put the job out to tender manufacturer-neutrally, so that every lift company on the market, large or small, is able to develop a lift for that shaft.”
Those internet dimensions are almost always manufacturer-specific, taken from the configurator of one of the four big elevator companies. Copying them one to one would quietly hand that manufacturer the project. Jens told me what happens if nobody notices:
“Depending on which pre-configuration the architect has chosen, other companies’ lifts simply will not fit the shaft. The drive units have to sit differently, the cast-in channels have to sit differently, the door reveals are different. In short, it does not really work for anyone else, and the lift company that was in the plan from the beginning ends up with a considerable competitive advantage.”
So the first real job is redrawing the shaft so that anybody can bid on it.
2. What can go wrong if the lifts are wrong
Lift planning mistakes take a long time to surface. They do not appear at handover. They appear a few years later, when everybody arrives in the lobby at the same time in the morning.
“If there are too few lifts, the building will not work properly in daily operation. First thing in the morning, when everyone arrives at once, queues build up in front of the lifts. That makes tenants unhappy, and in the worst case you end up with a building that does not function, or that cannot be rented out.”
What I had not appreciated until Jens explained it is that the mistake runs in both directions. Planning too few lifts creates the queue. Planning too many, or lifts that are larger than the building needs, costs rentable floor area, and every extra centimeter of that area is lost money for the owner.
And the right answer changes completely depending on the building, as there is a world of difference between planning a school, a hospital or a high-rise.
This may sound obvious, but the sizes, openings, speed and other determinants can be easily overlooked. It is more than transporting people from A to B – It is like a dance, where all dancers must be at the right rhythm.
Some lifts get forgotten altogether. For example, a hotel must have a service lift big enough so that the mattresses can be replaced every few years, and if that lift is not in the plan, nobody discovers it until is a chaos and more time intensive as thought to get the mattresses out quickly, and the new ones back in. A decision made in the schematic phase still causes friction ten years later, and by then it is close to impossible to fix.
A hospital, on the other hand, need specific components that are easier to desinfect, a cabin that fits transport beds and medical equipment, and speed fitting to the emergency situations.
3. Why every drawing has to be manufacturer-neutral
There is a rule in german lift planning that shapes how Jens’s team works that is worth knowing about, even if you never tender in Germany. Public contracting authorities have to describe what they are buying product-neutrally. A specification is not allowed to quietly pre-select one supplier.
The formal explanation is in the paragraph § 31 Abs. 6 VgV, with § 7 EU Abs. 2 VOB/A covering construction works. Neither allows the description of the work to refer to a particular make, type or origin where that would favour or exclude specific companies. There are narrow exceptions where the subject of the contract genuinely justifies it, or where the work cannot be described precisely any other way, and then the wording “oder gleichwertig” has to be added. Justifying that exception is the contracting authority’s job, and the courts look at the effect of the specification rather than its wording.
Jens’s team goes further than the legal minimum and works this way on every project, public or private:
“We always work manufacturer-neutrally, as a matter of principle. We work with mid-sized lift companies just as much as with the large ones. At the end of the day, what counts is the size of the shafts and the price of the lifts that get bought on the basis of our tender and our specification.”
He also made the commercial argument rather than only the legal one, which I liked. If the floor plan already points to one specific manufacturer, there is no competition and no price war, which only costs the client more money. So guaranteeing neutrality from the beginning stages of planning is simply good economics for the client.
Several manufacturers offer their own lift planning software, and those tools draw from that manufacturer’s catalogue, so whatever comes out reflects one supplier’s range.
For a private client buying directly that can be fine. For a tender it is not, and it also makes it much harder for the client to see what else the market could have offered.
This is what the Common Components in Liftdesigner are for. They are manufacturer-independent, dimensionally correct and available on the open market, so you can build a complete lift, produce the full drawing set and publish the tender without ever committing to a supplier. Nothing in the drawing points to any company in particular.
And once the manufacturer has been chosen, you don´t need to start over: the Liftdesigner manufacturer library holds components from more than seventy suppliers, so the neutral model can be switched over to the real products and carried into the detailed phases.
It is the same model throughout, which saves rebuilding it at exactly the point when everyone wants to move fast.
4. Forty-plus lifts in just 1 working day
This number was the one that surprised me the most. Here is what the project Jens told me about looks like:
“We have a large development here that consists of seven construction fields on its own, and each field has three phases again, so in this one project we have over forty lift installations that have to be planned and drawn.”
But forty lifts does not equal forty designs, at least not with Liftdesigner.
Large developments use a handful of standard sizes throughout: the small passenger lift at 630 kg or eight persons, the mid-size one at 1,000 kg or thirteen persons, then 1,600 kg or twenty-one persons, and sometimes a goods lift at two and a half tonnes. Jens works out one lift of each type properly, then copies it and adjusts whatever needs to be customised between individual units.
In this case, he would re-use the templates created once, saving a lot of time.
The adjustments are the interesting part. Changing a lift from four stops to six is two mouse clicks, and everything above moves up with it, machine included. Widening the doors is a dropdown. When Jens tried exactly that in the webinar, swapping to a 1,300 mm door because a hospital bed one metre wide will not go through a door one metre wide, the model told him off immediately:
The adjustments are the interesting part. Changing a lift from four stops to six is two mouse clicks, and everything above moves up with it, machine included. Widening the doors is a dropdown. When Jens tried exactly that in the webinar, swapping to a 1,300 mm door because a hospital bed one metre wide will not go through a door one metre wide, the model told him off immediately:
“Oops, my elevator shaft is too small. We do now have a nice big door and the bed fits, but the lift does not fit in the shaft any more.”
We all knew he did it on purpose so he could show us how enlarging the shaft was just one click away. Jens described what the same change means for the CAD drafters elsewhere in the company when a height moves. They must change every shaft by hand, pull it all further up, put the cast-in channels back in, extend the guide rails and so on, while on Liftdesigner it all happens instantaneously.
He was careful not to speculate about how much longer the same project would take in CAD, and I respect that. His answer was that it would definitely take considerably longer, and he left it there.
The effort scales with the number of types, not the number of units, and that is also why late changes stop being frightening when using Liftdesigner. Shaft dimensions and floor heights move constantly during construction. One adjustment in the model updates every document that comes out of it.
5. And then there are projects in which elevator must be uniquely designed
The opposite situation to the 40 lifts comes up just as often, and it is where the specialist knowledge really shows. On a clinic project Jens’s team handled, there was almost nothing that could simply be copied and pasted. Cabin dimensions had to be worked out around the stretchers and hospital beds that needed to fit inside them. Wall protection had to be placed to survive daily contact with beds and trolleys. Surfaces had to meet hygiene requirements. Accessible use under EN 81-70 meant a second, horizontal operating panel on the opposite side of the car from the main one. None of that is a standard configuration, and none of it is something you can guess at from a catalogue page.
What makes it workable is that the components for all of it already exist, already parameterised and dimensionally correct, so they get selected and placed rather than drawn from scratch. Jens then showed us the fire brigade escape ladder built in behind the car panelling, with the trapdoor in the car roof above it, so that the lift is configured as a firefighter escape route.
When I asked whether he had designed the beautiful and specific cabin components he showed us all by himself, he showed us how easy it can be to fit even custom demands:
“No, I did not create anything. I took most of the components straight out of the Common Components. The only luxury I allowed myself was the natural stone floor.”
This is the large development seen from the other side. There the work collapsed into a small set of repeating types. Here every unit is its own type, so nothing collapses at all, and the planner’s judgement is what carries the project. The output is the same either way: a complete, tender-ready BIM model with every special requirement modelled rather than described in a note.
6. Handing over a model, not a drawing
In the construction industry, expectations have moved. Past the schematic phase, a floor plan drawing is no longer enough on most significant projects. What architects and contractors want is a BIM model that goes into the coordinated building model and can be worked with by everyone else on the project.
From Liftdesigner that is an IFC export. Jens enters the geo-coordinates so the lift sits exactly where it belongs in the building, and it drops straight into the architect’s model. When he demonstrated it, he hid the machine room floor so we could see the two through-loading lifts sitting underneath, in a shaft that lined up correctly with staggered floor levels between an existing building and a new wing.
“I have chosen a LOD 400 export here, which shows the individual components of the installation in fairly faithful detail. You can go finer than that, but it costs a lot of computing power, so I spared myself. The machine is shown, the diverter pulleys on the counterweight and on the car, the cross beams in the shaft. Everything the lift company later has to build in order to fit that lift into that shaft. And manufacturer neutrality is preserved.”
What he is describing is openBIM, and it is the part no 2D drawing can do. A model that every discipline can open, reference and check against their own work is a different kind of object from a drawing that gets attached to an email. A lift model from Liftdesigner can be loaded into the coordinated building model, clash-checked against the structure and referenced by the building services consultants working around it. It becomes part of the building’s digital record.
“Ventilation will happily run a duct straight through our shaft. That is ruled out here, because the clash checks you can do visually in BIM pick it up immediately.”
More and more of the people commissioning planners are asking for exactly this, which makes it increasingly the thing that separates a planning partner who fits into the process from one who has to be worked around.
7. Planning precisely without CAD
All of this adds up to the thing Jens’s team gets asked about most: how a team that does not work in CAD delivers a full BIM model at the end of it.
The answer is that Liftdesigner is not a drawing program with lift content added on top. You do not draw a lift, you specify one. You work through the decisions a lift planner already knows how to make, capacity, speed, door type, shaft dimensions, cabin fit-out, and the 2D drawings and the 3D BIM model come out of those decisions rather than being built by hand alongside them. The components are pre-dimensioned, the shaft adjusts to them, and the specification stays non-proprietary right through to the tender.
“I am not a CAD draftsman, I have to be very clear about that. I do not call myself a draftsman either. I am a designer. The last time I actually drew something, I was still drawing with India ink.”
There is one more benefit he mentioned: because a meaningful floor plan takes so little time to produce, his team sends one out with the fee proposal, before the job is even won. It is convenient for the architect and it makes a very good first impression.
What this changes for a planning office is not really about drawing at all. It widens who can do the work and shortens how long a new colleague takes to become useful, because the skill the work depends on is lift expertise: traffic analysis, the standards, and a feel for how a building will actually be used. Someone with that knowledge and no drawing background can produce a tender-ready specification.
What good lift planning looks like
Lift planning sits between architecture and engineering, between how a building performs and how it feels to be inside it. When it is done well nobody notices, because the lifts work and the people using them are thinking about something else. When it is done badly, the consequences arrive slowly and are almost impossible to fix.
So what does doing it well actually look like? It starts with taking the time to do the traffic analysis properly, before anything gets drawn, because that is the calculation everything else rests on. Then it is about listening closely enough to the client to understand what the building is really for, and what the people in it will be carrying, pushing or waiting for.
And it is about knowing the special things to look out for in that particular building type, the ones that never appear in the brief: the service lift a hotel will need for its mattresses, the accessibility panel a clinic will be inspected on, the bed that has to fit through the door as well as into the car. Those are the things a lift planner is really being paid for, and they come from experience rather than from any tool.
What the software does is take everything that follows off the critical path, so the expertise goes into the decisions instead of into the documents. That is the part I found most convincing after a few days with Jens. He spends his time on the questions that need thirty years behind them, and hardly any of it on producing the drawings.
About the author
Ana Arasaki is the head of marketing at DigiPara and has spent a few days with Jens Kuhfuss, a veteran and expert in the industry, to understand his team’s workflows, how they use our software and the inner workings of the vertical transportation industry. This knowledge was shared in an exclusive webinar in March 2026 and a recording is available to watch by request.
About DigiPara
DigiPara builds planning software for vertical transportation. DigiPara Liftdesigner covers complete lift specification and elevator BIM model creation without specialist CAD knowledge, using supplier-neutral component data that is tender-ready by design. DigiPara Elevatorarchitect brings elevator BIM families to architects working in Revit, and includes the White Label Configurator, which manufacturers embed on their own websites so architects can generate BIM families themselves.