There will often be items or materials that you specify on nearly every project, such as specification of ductwork, painting, or block walling; a set of minimum performance requirements applicable to every building, or a series of general clauses unique to your organization and developed from experience over many projects. It wouldn’t make sense to write all these clauses from scratch at the start of every new specification, especially if you’re beginning with a blank page for each project.


The platform can be described as a ‘master specification’ platform, which means that our technical teams have pre-authored hundreds of master sections and systems – to provide repeatable, reusable templates with embedded values and common options, and associated contextual guidance to help you make decisions. This saves you time because you don’t have to write project specification clauses from scratch, it increases your efficiency within the cloud-collaboration platform by making these clauses easy to find and use, and it reduces risk, giving you confidence you’re using up-to-date standards and references. You can adapt these clauses to complete project-specific requirements, and suit how you develop specifications. 


Masters allows you to take this approach further, by creating your own library of systems and sections. You can write your own specification content from scratch and you can semi or fully complete the templates provided by ourselves. These can be saved into the masters and reused on new projects. This gives your teams an extra productivity boost and ensures they are using the best practices you define in the masters.


This information is taken from an article by Paul Swaddle - Making the most of Masters


Some key points:

  • The platform allows you to organize your masters into folders.
  • Folders are like projects and are set up in the same way, including allowing permissions to be set.
  • A folder can contain as many preliminaries and work section specifications as you like.
  • Prelims and specifications can be from any of the content sets your organization has access to.
  • You can author full preliminary and work section documents to be reused in their entirety - therefore a whole document can be copied from a master into a new project.
  • You can also author 'chapters' of specifications which can be added as a block of content e.g. all your partitions. Your teams can use these groups of content and benefit from any existing shared relationships within them without creating unnecessary duplication of content. For information on copying please see How to copy part of the specification into another specification or the clipboard
  • Like in projects you can set up masters by parking unwanted content, adding placeholders and add additions rows etc to enhance the standard content. This will all copy through into the project from the master.
  • Manage the information in the masters with Update notifications, spec check and publishing functions.
  • The mechanism for re-using masters information in live projects is to copy either the whole specification or a selection from your master specification.




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