BIM Objects and Revit Families: What Building-Product Manufacturers Need Now

If you make doors, windows, stairs, cladding, fitted furniture or any other building product, your real sales moment often happens months before an order: when an architect places a product in the building model and writes it into the specification. If your product is in that model, you are the default. If it is not, the architect drops in a competitor's object or a generic placeholder — and the specification drifts to whoever made the architect's life easier. This article looks at what the survey data say about BIM adoption, what specifiers expect from manufacturers, why configurable products are the hard case, and what an export from your configurator to a BIM object needs to contain.

BIM is now how buildings get designed

Building information modeling (BIM) — designing a building as a shared, data-rich 3D model rather than a set of drawings — went from niche to default in about a decade. The longest-running measurement is the UK's NBS survey of construction professionals, published every year since 2011:

The curve has flattened at around seven in ten: NBS's 2025 report says BIM adoption has remained largely stable since 2018. That plateau is the point for a manufacturer: BIM is no longer an early-adopter experiment you can wait out. It is the working method of most of the people who specify your product.

Public procurement pushed it there. The UK government required "fully collaborative 3D BIM on centrally procured government construction projects by 2016", and the EU's public procurement directive lets member states "require the use of specific electronic tools, such as of building information electronic modelling tools" on public works (Directive 2014/24/EU, Article 22(4)) — the legal hook several European countries have used for their own requirements. In the US there is no single national mandate; requirements come from individual agencies and owners, project by project.

Specifiers expect manufacturers to supply the objects

Architects do not want to model your product themselves. In NBS's 2016 survey, over 70% of respondents said they wanted manufacturers to provide BIM objects; by 2020, 81% said they needed digital product objects from manufacturers, up from the year before. Manufacturers have noticed. NBS's 2025 report tracks the supply side too:

Two readings follow. Offering BIM objects is now the majority position, so not having them is increasingly a reason to be left out of a specification. And the gap between "some products" (73%) and "all products" (22%) is where most manufacturers actually sit: a handful of hero products modeled, the rest of the range invisible to the architect. For a manufacturer of configurable products, that gap is not an oversight — it is a structural problem, and it is the subject of the next section.

A note on sources. You will find confident claims that products with BIM content are specified two or three times more often, or that half of architects screen out manufacturers without it. We could not trace any of those figures to a published survey, so we do not use them; the NBS series above is the most solid evidence available.

The configurable-product problem: you cannot hand-model every variant

A standard product can ship one BIM object per SKU. A configurable product cannot: a door range with forty widths, three heights, a dozen finishes and five glazing options is thousands of valid products, and a modeling agency will not hand-build them all. The usual workarounds each break something:

• A few "typical" objects. The architect places the nearest one and edits it — and the model now contains a product you may not be able to build, at dimensions nobody checked.
• A parametric Revit family. Better: the family flexes its dimensions and swaps materials. But a Revit family knows geometry, not your product rules. It will happily let an architect combine a width, a core and a finish your factory cannot produce together, because the compatibility rules live in your configurator, not in the family.

The approach that scales treats the BIM object the way an end-to-end configurator treats the bill of materials: as an artifact derived from a validated configuration. The architect — or your sales rep on the architect's behalf — configures the product against your real rules, and the configurator exports exactly that product as a BIM object. Everything in the model is buildable, because the same product model that prices it and generates its parts list produced it.

What a configurator's BIM export needs to contain

An exported object is judged by the architect who places it and by whoever later reads the model. In our experience the export has to carry five things:

1. Geometry at the right weight. Correct overall dimensions, openings and clearances, with a recognizable form — not manufacturing CAD with every screw. Heavy objects slow the architect's model the same way heavy assets slow a web configurator; the same simplification discipline applies (see 3D configurator performance).
2. The data specifiers filter by. Manufacturer, product name and code, dimensions, materials and finishes, and whichever performance properties matter for the category — fire, acoustic or thermal ratings, for example.
3. Classification. The classification system the market uses — Uniclass in the UK, OmniClass or MasterFormat in North America — so the object lands in the right place in the specification.
4. A link back to the configuration. A reference that reopens the exact configuration, so the object in the model can be re-priced, revised and turned into a quote without anyone re-describing it.
5. Validity by construction. Only configurations the rules engine accepted can be exported. This is the property no hand-built object library can offer.

IFC and native Revit families: do you need both?

Usually, yes. Many practices design in Autodesk Revit, and for them a native Revit family (.rfa) is the most usable object: it behaves like the rest of their model and carries parameters they can schedule. But plenty of specifiers work in other tools, and public projects increasingly ask for open formats. That is what IFC is for: an open, vendor-neutral standard maintained by buildingSMART and published as ISO 16739 — the latest official version, IFC 4.3.2.0, is ISO 16739-1:2024. A configurator that exports both from the same configuration covers the whole specifying market without maintaining two object libraries.

Frequently asked questions

What is a BIM object, and why do manufacturers need one?

A BIM object is a digital version of a real product — geometry plus data such as dimensions, materials, performance ratings and the manufacturer's identifiers — that an architect places in a building model. Manufacturers need them because specification increasingly happens inside the model: in NBS's 2020 survey, 81% of respondents said they needed digital product objects from manufacturers.

Do I need a Revit family, an IFC file, or both?

Both, ideally. A native Revit family is the most useful object for the many practices working in Revit; IFC (ISO 16739) is the open format for every other tool and for projects that require open standards. Generating both from one validated configuration avoids maintaining two libraries.

Is BIM mandatory?

It depends on the market and the client. The UK required collaborative 3D BIM on centrally procured government projects from 2016; EU law allows member states to require BIM tools on public works; the US has no single national mandate. Mandates aside, around 70% of UK construction professionals use BIM, so your specifiers expect it either way.

Can a configurator generate BIM objects automatically?

Yes, if it is built on a rules engine that knows your product's real constraints. The configurator validates the configuration, then exports that exact product with its geometry and data as a Revit family or IFC object — the same way it can generate a price and a bill of materials. A purely visual configurator cannot, because it has no validated product to export.

Sources

• NBS — National BIM Report 2012
• NBS — National BIM Report 2016
• NBS — A digital evolution: majority using BIM (2020)
• NBS — Digital Construction Survey findings (2021)
• NBS — BIM comes of age in construction (Digital Construction Report 2025)
• NBS — A manufacturer's guide to BIM object creation
• HM Government — Government Construction Strategy 2016–20
• Directive 2014/24/EU on public procurement, Article 22
• buildingSMART — Industry Foundation Classes (IFC)

SBFS builds 3D configurators for building-product manufacturers that export validated configurations as BIM objects, alongside the price, quote and bill of materials. See what we do.