Case Study: Ideal Heating

Introduction

Ideal Heating is the market-leading British manufacturer of high-efficiency commercial and domestic heating solutions. The company’s commercial division is the market leader in commercial heating and in keeping with the company’s forward-thinking approach, they have been making the transition to low carbon product offerings.

Heather Thompson is Ideal Heating – Commercial Products Brand Manager, Chris Caton is the Product Director for the Commercial Heating Division, and Richard Brown is the Head of Specification Sales.

The Challenge

In 2014, Ideal Heating identified there was a move towards BIM and it was just starting to be promoted as the future in terms of modelling, clash detection and so on. The company saw it as an opportunity to be ahead of the game and ready themselves for the customer enquiries that would inevitably follow once BIM started to become more widely adopted. This resulted in Ideal Heating being one of the first in the HVAC commercial heating sector to launch BIM content.

The Solution

Due to Ideal Heating being BIM pioneers in their sector, they required a partner who matched their vision and ambition. Chris and the team reviewed the available options and concluded that bimstore was the standout option, as they could provide thought leadership, commercial guidance and technical support.

The Progress

Today, the company values being able to provide an efficient service to a customer who wants any of their products as a BIM object.

It is great for us when a customer asks if we have the BIM object for a particular product and we can direct them straight to it on the website. We also know that the object has all the associated data that they will need. - Chris Caton, Product Director, Commercial Heating Division

Heather utilises the reports from the platform to gather insight on which products are popular and spot any trends. The leads that are generated are passed through to the respective sales managers and specifications team. Richard and his specification team have identified how much easier it now is for the engineers involved on a project to obtain their BIM objects. This makes their lives easier and can help to secure or tighten a specification.

The Results

The ability to meet customer requirements is one of the main benefits that Ideal Heating identify as a result of utilising their BIM content. The collaboration of their Marketing, Product Management and Specification teams provides a highly effective process for ensuring new and existing products are brought to market successfully and get specified into projects. 

Having BIM content available has enabled us to qualify for projects that we’ve then go on to win further down the line. Without it, we would have certainly lost some projects or not even been considered in the first place. - Richard Brown, Head of Specification Sales

The Future

Ideal Heating is excited to be launching a lot of new products over the coming months, which are in line with the decarbonisation of heating equipment. The company will continue with their approach of ensuring that the BIM content gets produced alongside launching these products and making the BIM objects available to their customers via bimstore and their own website.

I will continue to ensure that we make use of the marketing support offered by bimstore. The team there have helped to publicise our case studies and help to get our products in front of more people. Over the last year or so, we’ve been far more proactive in this area and we’ve seen the results in the increase in product views, so I’m looking forward to seeing what else we can do in the future. - Heather Thompson, Ideal Heating, Commercial Products Brand Manager

Read the full version of the case study here.

To find out about how bimstore works with manufacturers to maximise the benefits they get from their BIM content, take a look at this page. More information on Ideal Heating can be found on their manufacturer profile on bimstore.