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QUALITY BY DESIGN
How Parametric BIM Generation Rewrites the Rules of Quality in Vertical Transportation
Andres Garcia Damjanov | 2026
Last week, I was in a meeting with a C-level executive at one of the world's largest elevator manufacturers. His statement was unambiguous: "BIM is mandatory — this is a no-brainer."
That moment prompted me to revisit an article I published in the Ernst & Sohn BIM Special 2015, titled '3 Ratschläge und ein Dekalog' (Three Pieces of Advice and a Decalogue). It offered three mindset corrections and ten commandments for anyone serious about implementing BIM quality management systems.
I wrote it from Solibri, a Finnish BIM quality checking platform with over 15 years of global experience at the time. The underlying assumption of everything I wrote was this: models arrive from somewhere, and you must inspect them, find the errors, communicate them, and iterate until quality is achieved. The whole framework was built on the premise that errors and inconsistencies are inevitable in model production and coordination, and the job of a BIM QMS is to catch them as early and as systematically as possible.
I still believe everything I wrote. But I want to revise it — not because it was wrong, but because something has happened in the industry that changes the sequence of logic. The industry has produced a category of tool that I did not fully account for in 2015: parametric BIM generators. And the most mature, most widely deployed example of that category in vertical transportation is DigiPara.
DigiPara does not check whether your elevator BIM model is correct. It makes an incorrect elevator BIM model structurally impossible to produce.
That single shift — from quality control to quality by design — is what this article is about. It does not replace the 2015 framework. It revisits it, point by point, through the lens of what parametric generation means for architects, engineers, vertical transportation consultants, and manufacturers in 2026. And it asks a question that the industry has not yet answered clearly enough: if quality is already encoded into the generation engine, what does that mean for how we think about BIM quality from now on?
PART ONE
The Three Pieces of Advice Revisited
The "Three Ratschläge" of 2015 were not technical. They were mindset corrections, designed to clear away the most common misconceptions before any serious implementation discussion could begin. All three remain valid. But all three have been significantly recontextualized by parametric generation.
Advice 1 — You Cannot Buy BIM. Or Can You Now?
The first piece of advice in 2015 was blunt: ‘Man kann BIM nicht einkaufen.’ You cannot buy BIM. The time needed to learn and implement BIM in an organisation is difficult to estimate, but it is entirely proportional to how intensively the organisation engages with the subject. BIM is not a software license. It is a process, a culture, and a competence. Organisations that believed they could simply purchase a BIM solution and hand it to one person who ‘can do some programming’ were heading for a costly awakening.
This remains fundamentally true at the organisational level. BIM as a process — encompassing how information is requested, delivered, validated, and used across the supply chain — still requires genuine institutional commitment. No tool automates that.
However, something important has changed at the operational level.
For the specific domain of vertical transportation design, DigiPara has compressed the learning curve in a way I did not think was possible in 2015.
A VT consultant using DigiPara Liftdesigner can produce a geometrically correct, code-compliant, LOD 400 elevator model on their first project, with accurate shaft clearances, certified component data, and IFC 4.3 export, without a BIM expert in the room.
Not because BIM has been made trivial. Because the BIM expertise has been encoded into the tool itself, over twenty years of development.
You still cannot buy BIM as a process. But you can now deploy BIM-quality outputs from day one in vertical transportation.
The nuance, then, is this: you still cannot buy BIM as a process. But you can now deploy BIM-quality outputs from day one in vertical transportation, because DigiPara has industrialised the production logic. The learning curve has not disappeared; it has shifted. The question is no longer ‘how do I model an elevator correctly in BIM?’ but ‘how do I integrate parametric VT outputs into my broader BIM process correctly?’ That is a harder, more strategic question, and it is the right one to be asking in 2026.
Advice 2 — BIM Consumption Drives the Market: Confirmed and Accelerated
The second piece of advice in 2015 was a reframe of where the real market pressure around BIM originates. Most practitioners assumed that BIM was primarily driven by the producers, the architects and engineers who model buildings. My argument was different: the strongest market forces around BIM are located on the consumption side. Builders, developers, banks, insurers, facility managers, building owners — these are the parties who ultimately define what quality means, because they are the ones who receive and use the models. Manufacturers and consultants who could not deliver quality to these consumers would find themselves displaced.
Eleven years later, this has been confirmed so completely that it barely needs restating.
The pressure from building owners, developers, and public sector clients for BIM-compliant deliverables has become a commercial precondition in most developed markets.
In the UK, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Singapore, and increasingly across the DACH region and southern Europe, BIM deliverables at defined LOD levels are contractual requirements, not optional enhancements.
What has changed is the mechanism of that pressure in vertical transportation specifically.
In 2015, the pressure was theoretical: this is coming, prepare. In 2026, it is transactional. Architects expect to receive a valid BIM family from their elevator supplier when they send a request. They expect it to load cleanly into Revit, carry the correct IFC properties, and not require manual cleanup. DigiPara’s White Label configurator has made it possible for manufacturers to embed a parametric BIM generation tool directly on their own website, so that the architect never even needs to make a phone call. They configure the elevator against their shaft dimensions, validate against the manufacturer’s certified range, and download the Revit family in minutes.
The consumption-led market I described in 2015 has arrived. And the manufacturers who invested in parametric generation infrastructure are the ones now positioned to serve it without friction.
Advice 3 — DIY is a Dead End: Spectacularly Confirmed
The third piece of advice was perhaps the most direct: do not attempt to build your own BIM quality infrastructure through internal programming. The scale of the undertaking is systematically underestimated. One employee who ‘can do some programming’ cannot build the data structure checking, rule management, standard compliance, and interoperability that a serious BIM QMS requires. The organisations that tried in 2015 abandoned their attempts within three years.
In the context of parametric BIM generation for vertical transportation, this warning has been validated at an even deeper level. Consider what it would mean to build DigiPara’s capability from scratch: over 100,000 valid combinations of shaft dimensions, car sizes, payloads, speeds, and floor configurations; certified product data for Schindler, TK Elevator, Otis, and dozens of other manufacturers; compliance encoding for ISO 8100-30 and regional variants; IFC 4.3 property set generation; Revit family export; ERP integration; and twenty years of refinement based on real-world projects across 130 countries. No elevator manufacturer, VT consultancy, or engineering firm can replicate that with an internal development team.
The DIY impulse in BIM remains one of the industry’s most expensive errors.
The companies that tried to maintain their own parametric elevator families in Revit are now a decade behind in quality consistency, output speed, and format compatibility.
PART TWO
The Ten Commandments — A Parametric Revision
The Decalogue of 2015 established ten principles for any BIM Quality Management System worth implementing. Each was written from the perspective of quality checking, on the assumption that models exist and must be validated. What follows is a revisitation of each commandment through the lens of parametric BIM generation, asking: how does DigiPara change, fulfil, or reframe this principle?
COMMANDMENT 1
A BIM QMS Must Be Open and Infinitely Expandable
In 2015, this commandment addressed the need for a quality checking system to function like an open grammar — not a fixed set of checks, but a rule engine capable of formulating any quality question that might arise in the future. The reference was Solibri’s template and parameter architecture, which allowed rule sets to be combined, adjusted, and extended without hitting a ceiling.
In the parametric generation world, this principle maps onto something structurally different but functionally equivalent: the rule engine is not applied after the model exists. It governs what models can be produced. DigiPara’s configurator only permits valid combinations. The open grammar is the parameter space itself.
The expansion of that grammar happens at the platform level: IFC 4.3 support, custom property sets, new manufacturer product ranges, new standards compliance. Each version of DigiPara extends the valid configuration space without requiring the user to manage that complexity. The commandment is fulfilled upstream.
COMMANDMENT 2
A BIM QMS Must Be Independent of Modelling Tools
This was one of the most strategically important commandments in 2015, and it remains so. The warning was clear: never tie your quality infrastructure to a specific modelling software. Your modelling tools will change. Your collaborators use different ones. A QMS that only works natively within one software is a strategic liability.
DigiPara has understood this principle at its core. The output of DigiPara Liftdesigner is not a Revit-native model. It is a parametrically generated object that exports to RFA (Revit families), IFC (open standard), DWG (AutoCAD), and feeds directly into Autodesk Inventor, PTC Creo, and SolidWorks for manufacturing workflows. The generation is tool-agnostic; the outputs are format-plural.
DigiPara’s LDBIM format, combined with IFC 4.3 export, means that the parametric quality embedded in the generation process survives translation into any downstream workflow.
COMMANDMENT 3
A BIM QMS Must Be Based on Globally Exchangeable Standards
The third commandment argued that quality management and modelling must be learned simultaneously, not sequentially. The metaphor I used in 2015 was pointed: ‘Learning to drive with your eyes closed.’ Starting to model without understanding quality standards means the first years of BIM work are wasted.
DigiPara encodes global standards directly into the generation layer. ISO 8100-30 dimensional requirements, IFC 4.3 schema, COBie property structures, VDI 2552 — these are not applied as post-production checks. They are the constraints within which the parametric engine operates.
An architect or VT consultant using DigiPara learns what a compliant elevator BIM looks like by seeing it generated correctly from the first project. The standard is made tangible through the output, not through a rulebook.
COMMANDMENT 4
A BIM QMS Must Be Able to Integrate Project-Specific Stakeholders
The fourth commandment addressed the collaborative dimension of BIM quality. Projects are temporary organisations in which multiple companies contribute models that must work together. The QMS must support exchangeable, globally standard rule sets that can be shared across parties.
DigiPara’s architecture addresses this at the supply chain level. The DigiPara Liftdesigner Cloud allows component manufacturers to publish their current 3D BIM data and make it accessible to elevator planners and builders worldwide. The LDBIM format ensures that elevator components become individual, properly structured Revit families, schedulable, filterable, and coordinated with the architectural model.
The coordination issue is resolved at parameter agreement stage, not at clash detection stage — a structural improvement the fourth commandment was pointing toward.
The BCF integration that the ninth commandment addresses is less necessary for VT coordination when parametric generation is in use, because the shaft openings, ventilation requirements, and clearances are already correct in the first model.
COMMANDMENT 5
A BIM QMS Must Be Based on Proven, Established Products
The fifth commandment was pragmatic: do not trust your BIM quality infrastructure to products without track records. Your QMS is the most important part of your data management. The product you choose must have global validation, institutional trust, and long-term commitment to the standards it implements. A startup product launched a few years ago to test market response is not an appropriate foundation.
DigiPara meets this standard without reservation. Founded over two decades ago in Germany, deployed in more than 130 countries, with certified product integrations for Schindler, TK Elevator, and Otis, DigiPara is the established infrastructure of the vertical transportation BIM world, not an experiment. The fifth commandment was partly a warning against the DIY impulse and partly a call for institutional maturity. DigiPara represents exactly the kind of mature, specialised platform the commandment was describing.
COMMANDMENT 6
A BIM QMS Must Be Able to Enrich Models with Information
The sixth commandment addressed a persistent reality of BIM workflows: models that arrive for quality checking are often incomplete. They lack the information they should contain. A QMS that can only check what is there, but cannot add what is missing, is only half a solution. The quality system must be able to attach classifications, data, and properties to the model directly, so that the checking process is not dependent on the original modeller having done everything correctly.
In parametric generation, this commandment is resolved by inversion. DigiPara does not enrich an incomplete model. It generates a complete one. LOI (Level of Information) properties including item numbers, technical specifications, manufacturer data, COBie parameters, and IFC property sets are populated automatically at generation time, based on the configuration selected. The model arrives at the architect's Revit environment already carrying the information it is supposed to carry.
Enriched information added by a checker is an intervention in someone else's model; it carries coordination risk, version control risk, and ownership ambiguity. Information generated parametrically is native to the model from the moment of creation. The sixth commandment described a workaround for a problem that parametric generation eliminates.
COMMANDMENT 7
A BIM QMS Must Support the Continuous Improvement Process
The seventh commandment drew a critical distinction between QC and QA. Quality Control finds errors in a specific project. Quality Assurance builds the capacity to prevent errors across all future projects. A BIM QMS must do both, but the QA function is the more strategically important one. The system must store findings, enable pattern recognition across projects, and feed that learning back into the rule sets and templates that govern future work.
This is the commandment where parametric generation makes its most profound contribution. In a traditional BIM workflow, QA learning happens through rule set refinement in the checking tool: someone analyses repeated errors across projects and updates the rules to catch them earlier. In a parametric generation workflow, QA is not an overlay on the process. It is the process. Every refinement to DigiPara's parameter engine, every new manufacturer certification, every new standard encoded, is automatically applied to every future project generated on that platform.
The continuous improvement is institutionalised at the platform level, not at the individual practitioner level. An engineer using DigiPara in 2026 benefits from twenty years of accumulated quality refinement without needing to understand or manage any of it. This is QA operating at industrial scale, which is precisely what the seventh commandment was calling for.
COMMANDMENT 8
A BIM QMS Must Be Rule-Set Based
The eighth commandment argued for transparency in quality logic. A BIM QMS must express its quality criteria as legible, structured rule sets, not as opaque algorithms or manual inspection processes. Rules should be readable, adjustable, and organised into hierarchical structures that reflect the building systems they govern. This transparency is what makes a QMS auditable, transferable, and improvable.
DigiPara's entire architecture is a rule set made executable. The valid configuration space is defined by rules: minimum pit depths, maximum speeds for given roping configurations, certified clearances per manufacturer series, mandatory ventilation parameters. These rules are not visible to the user in the same way that Solibri's rule templates are, but they are structurally equivalent. The difference is that DigiPara's rules prevent invalid configurations from being created, while Solibri's rules identify invalid configurations that have already been created.
A rule that prevents an error is always cheaper than a rule that catches one.
COMMANDMENT 9
A BIM QMS Must Integrate an Open, Compatible Communication Process
The ninth commandment addressed the communication of quality findings. Once errors are found, they must be communicable, to other consultants, to contractors, to clients. The BIM Collaboration Format (BCF) was the standard mechanism: a project-neutral, globally compatible format for communicating issues across the model. A QMS that generates findings but can only communicate them through native formats or flat text is not a BIM QMS. It is a private inspection tool.
In vertical transportation workflows powered by parametric generation, the nature of BCF communication changes significantly. The majority of clash reports and coordination issues related to elevator shafts — incorrect pit depth, insufficient overhead clearance, missing ventilation openings, wrong door pocket dimensions — do not occur when the elevator model is parametrically generated. The shaft openings, structural penetrations, and service requirements are encoded in the model from the first delivery.
This does not eliminate BCF communication. It relocates it. The conversation shifts from 'your elevator model is wrong, please correct' to 'please confirm the shaft parameters before we generate.' That is a fundamentally more efficient coordination dynamic. The ninth commandment's insistence on open communication remains valid; parametric generation changes what needs to be communicated, not whether communication matters.
COMMANDMENT 10
A BIM QMS Must Define a Project-Specific Review Cycle
The tenth commandment, the BIM Hygiene Cycle, addressed the timing of quality checking. Quality checking is not a last-day activity. The number of inconsistencies in a complex BIM model is typically in the hundreds or thousands, and discovering them the day before submission renders most of them unfixable in any meaningful timeframe. A project-specific review cycle, weekly or fortnightly depending on project scale and rule complexity, is the minimum discipline required for a functional BIM QMS.
In parametric generation workflows, the review cycle for vertical transportation collapses dramatically at the model production stage. There is no point running weekly clash detection on an elevator shaft if the elevator model was generated parametrically and is, by construction, dimensionally correct. The review cycle that remains, and it does remain, is at the parameter agreement stage: confirming shaft dimensions, confirming product range selection, confirming LOD requirements for each project phase.
This is a compression of effort, not an elimination of discipline. The tenth commandment's underlying principle, that quality must be managed through a structured, recurring process and not left to chance at the end, is unchanged. What parametric generation changes is where in the project timeline that discipline must be applied, and how much effort it requires when applied correctly.
PART THREE
The Shift — From QC to QA to Quality by Design
Looking across all ten commandments, a pattern emerges that deserves to be stated explicitly. The 2015 framework was built on a three-stage model of quality maturity.
QUALITY CONTROL (QC)
Finding errors after they have been made. Reactive, project-specific, dependent on the skill and attention of the inspector. Most of the BIM industry in 2015 was operating at QC level, running clash detection at the end of design stages and hoping the coordination issues were manageable.
QUALITY ASSURANCE (QA)
Building systems that prevent errors from recurring across projects. Proactive, process-oriented, and organisational rather than individual. The ten commandments of 2015 were a blueprint for moving from QC to QA, building rule-set-based, tool-independent, standard-compliant quality systems that learn and improve over time.
QUALITY BY DESIGN (QD)
Encoding quality requirements into the production process itself, so that non-compliant outputs cannot be generated. The most mature level of quality management, familiar from manufacturing industries where tolerance specifications are built into machine parameters rather than checked by inspectors after parts are produced.
The BIM industry in 2015 was learning to move from QC to QA. DigiPara has brought Quality by Design to vertical transportation BIM, and the implications are industry-wide.
This matters beyond vertical transportation. The elevator industry is not unique in having complex, configure-to-order products with thousands of valid combinations and high consequences for dimensional errors on site. Structural steel, curtain wall systems, MEP equipment — all of these domains would benefit from the same parametric generation approach. DigiPara represents a model for what product-specific BIM generation can look like when a software company invests seriously in encoding domain expertise into a parametric engine.
The broader BIM industry is beginning to recognise this. The growth of product manufacturer BIM portals, the maturation of library standards like NBS Source and BIMobject, and the increasing expectation that manufacturer-provided BIM content should be configurable rather than static — all of these trends are moving in the same direction. The static, manually-modelled BIM family is becoming obsolete. The parametrically generated, standards-compliant, LOI-complete BIM object is the direction of travel.
PART FOUR
What This Means for Each Audience
For Architects and Engineers
The parametric generation of vertical transportation BIM objects changes your relationship with elevator manufacturers and VT consultants. You no longer need to accept incomplete or dimensionally unreliable BIM families and manually correct them. You can expect, and increasingly demand, that manufacturer-provided elevator models are parametrically generated, certified, and LOI-complete from first delivery.
Your BIM coordination workflows for vertical transportation become faster and less error-prone. Shaft coordination, structural opening specification, and service zone definition can be resolved earlier in the design process, at parameter agreement stage rather than at clash detection stage. This compresses the BIM coordination timeline for VT and frees your team's attention for the coordination challenges that remain genuinely complex.
The skills you need are not reduced; they shift. Understanding what parameters to specify, what LOD is appropriate for each project phase, and how to integrate parametric VT objects into your broader federated model workflow is more valuable than the ability to manually model an elevator shaft correctly in Revit.
For Vertical Transportation Consultants
Parametric generation tools like DigiPara Liftdesigner represent a structural competitive advantage, but only for those who integrate them fully into their workflow. The consultant who can produce manufacturer-neutral LOD 400 General Arrangement Drawings and certified 3D BIM models faster than any draughtsman, with no dimensional errors, at any point in the project lifecycle, is a different kind of service provider from one who relies on 2D CAD templates.
The value proposition of VT consulting shifts upward. When the technical drawing production is automated, the consultant's value is concentrated in specification intelligence, knowing which product ranges are appropriate for a given building type, traffic analysis, future-proofing strategy, and contractual clarity around BIM deliverable requirements. DigiPara enables VT consultants to compete on expertise, not on drawing throughput.
For Elevator Manufacturers
The manufacturer implications are the most strategically significant. Parametric BIM generation changes the commercial dynamic at every stage of the sales and order process. In the pre-sales phase, a manufacturer who can deliver a validated BIM family within minutes of receiving a shaft specification, directly from a configurator on their own website, is operationally faster than a competitor who requires a week of technical department time.
In the order processing phase, ERP integration with DigiPara's parametric engine means that General Arrangement Drawings and BIM models can be generated automatically from order data, without manual engineering input. This is not a marginal efficiency improvement. It is a structural reduction in the cost and time of technical order processing.
Most importantly, the quality of BIM deliverables becomes a differentiator. Architects and contractors who receive clean, certified, LOI-complete Revit families from one manufacturer and flat DWG or PDF files from another will form preferences that influence future specifications. BIM delivery quality is becoming a commercial variable in elevator procurement, and parametric generation is the infrastructure that makes consistent quality deliverable at scale.
CONCLUSION:
The Bible Holds. The Chapter Has Changed.
Eleven years ago, I ended my article with a poem about the necessity of learning: 'Lernen kann man, Gott sei Dank, aber auch ein Leben lang.' One can learn, thank God, but also for a lifetime. The sentiment was aimed at the BIM community's resistance to engaging seriously with quality management as a discipline, not a task to be delegated or deferred.
The learning has continued. The industry has matured in ways that were difficult to predict in 2015. The BIM quality checking market has consolidated around serious, institutional platforms. The standard-setting work of buildingSMART and national BIM frameworks has provided the global interoperability infrastructure that quality systems require. And in vertical transportation, DigiPara has done something that changes the terms of the quality conversation entirely.
The ten commandments of 2015 remain valid. They describe the properties of a serious BIM quality management system, and those properties do not become irrelevant because a generation tool encodes them upstream. If anything, the commandments are more important now, because the quality conversation in BIM has matured to the point where the industry can engage with them seriously, rather than still arguing about whether BIM is real.
But the frame has shifted. In 2015, the question was: how do we catch errors in BIM models before they reach site? In 2026, the question for vertical transportation is: how do we ensure that the parametric generation infrastructure encoding our quality rules is the best available, most current, and most deeply integrated into our workflow?
That is a better question. It is the question of an industry that has moved from reactive quality control to proactive quality by design. DigiPara did not answer all of BIM's quality challenges; no single tool ever could. But in the specific domain of vertical transportation, it has moved the industry to a higher floor.
Quality by Design is not the end of the BIM quality conversation. It is the beginning of a more sophisticated one.
The bible holds. The chapter has changed. And the learning, as ever, continues for a lifetime.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Andres Garcia Damjanov is a Dipl. Ing. Architect, MBA, PMP, MPM. In 2015, as Sales and Marketing Manager for Solibri D-A-CH, he authored '3 Ratschläge und ein Dekalog,' published in Ernst & Sohn Special 2015 – Building Information Modeling. The article became a foundational reference for BIM quality implementation across the German-speaking and broader European construction industry. He now writes on the intersection of parametric design, BIM maturity, and vertical transportation technology.
ABOUT DIGIPARA
DigiPara GmbH is the global leader in elevator CAD and BIM software solutions, headquartered in Germany and deployed in more than 130 countries. Its flagship products, DigiPara Liftdesigner and DigiPara Elevatorarchitect, enable automated 2D drawing production, parametric 3D BIM generation, and ERP-integrated order processing for elevator manufacturers, vertical transportation consultants, and architects worldwide. For over two decades, DigiPara has been the technical infrastructure behind BIM quality in vertical transportation.