Navigating the Future of the Lighting Specification Process

Navigating the Future of the Lighting Specification Process

By Tom Butters

Those who remember the introduction of pulse-start metal halides recall how slow the lighting industry was to innovate for over a century. That has totally changed since the invention of white-light-producing LEDs, improvements in SSL technology, demonetization of LED products, and now, the democratization of said products. It should come as no surprise that there are people and organizations working on advancing the lighting specification channel.

Over the past several months, designing lighting (dl) contacted principals from three firms. All of these are innovators looking to improve the specification process to the benefit of all. They shared how their ideas first sparked, how their platforms work and their goals.

What was the genesis of your idea?

Julie Johnson, CEO/Founder of LiteSwap - “As a lighting designer with over 20 years of experience and 700+ projects, I was finding it hard to balance the time it took to fully research lighting and lighting control products, do the lighting design (design charettes, renderings, calculations, specification, schedules, construction documents, mock-ups) while being efficient, meeting owner expectations, meeting construction budget and staying profitable. This struggle really started to compound when LEDs took off. Instead of looking at different housings and lamps, it was the “Wild West." The quality and quantity of light was all over the place, and many of the key players in the industry were just throwing products out there to see what would stick. Instead of finding solutions in the market for these problems, I saw more entities trying to take advantage of the problems to profit.”

Lars Christiansen, Co-Founder and CEO of LightAZ – “The fast-paced progress of LED technology challenged the entire value chain, making current manual information/ data handling processes unsustainable. This created a strong need for aggregating data and streamlining the specification process, so the specifying community had an opportunity to efficiently search and specify across the new products. You can argue that, with LEDs, the lighting industry went from being an analog industry to a digital one, certainly on the product side; however, our goal was to transform and streamline the specification process into the digital era by implementing technology to remove or reduce processes without interfering with the integrity of the design. So, the idea was to build a free resource for the lighting industry that would provide the specifiers with an accessible search ability, a go-to hub to easily find, specify and build lighting schedules faster and easier than before.”

Paul Boken, Contributor at Sourcery – “The founders at Sourcery believe that if you build people a community that empowers everyone to create and share, you will change how an industry communicates. We have learned a lot about the power of community from social and content platforms. These powerful communication tools organize and share ideas that create movements that can change society. The power lies in their ability to connect individuals with common interests around common desired outcomes in a common platform. How can we extract the qualities of these social content platforms (leaving the bad karma behind) and apply the same principals to other processes such as supply chain that struggle with communication and sharing of information efficiently? Tools like Sourcery are part of the next industrial revolution, a revolution that is centered around technology that will create workflows that are 10 times more productive than our current way of collaboration. Platforms that build a community and create habits for better communication will be the ones that “stick” and make the difference.”

When did your project start?

Lars Christiansen, LightAZ – “The idea started more than 10 years ago; however, development started later, and we officially created the company in 2018.”

Paul Boken, Sourcery – “In early 2020, when the COVID lockdown began, a few colleagues started to “meet” virtually for drinks over Zoom on Thursday evenings. We would use this time to chat and think about the future of the hybrid workplace and how we would adapt to what seemed like an inevitable evolution towards more remote and less in-person connections to our clients and to our collaborators. We dreaded the idea that this shift would make an already broken and unstructured process 10 times more broken and unstructured. In the current process, people lacked purpose and clear roles. This was destined to get worse with added disruption. It was the friction and sloppiness in this process that we hated the most about our jobs.

We soon realized that reforming the process alone was not enough. We did not have the tools at our fingertips to efficiently share information and collaborate over the complex process of staying informed on what tools (lighting products) we had in our inventory, and then selecting those products and getting them to site and coordinated/installed properly. All we had to work with was Word, Excel and email - that was it. Something new needed to be created.”

Julie Johnson, LiteSwap – “Back in 2015, I decided to take a deep dive into all these problems and attack it from many angles. Of course, what I found is that the standard design process and procurement model has flaws that a lot of players were getting rich from and did not want to change. I had a lot of pushback, and companies and people were trying to steal my ideas instead of helping bring them to market.”

Please describe how your platform works.

Paul Boken, Sourcery – “Sourcery is a social content platform for the lighting community. It has been compared to a Spotify or YouTube for lighting fixtures. The main difference is the content is structured and can be added to a robust project schedule manager that includes change management and tight security/privacy policies. Our platform can both inspire designers with new products as well as give them a place to collect those products and build and share those collections in collaboration with their supply chain and their peers. This content sharing dynamic is also carried over into the process of taking those products and putting them into sharable project schedules that can also be shared with clients, team members, supply chains and constructors. It is fully transparent and open, yet as closed and as exclusive as the specifier wants. It is a phenomenal new way of working, engaging, and refreshing our current users. Our users feel like they are empowered members of a structured process (that is also fun). The cloud of COVID is thinning out, and we are ready for the future of collaboration.”

Julie Johnson, LiteSwap – “Due to the market and my work with users, this is always evolving. We have one portion of the platform prototyped, one mock-up and another under development. Let’s just say that the entire process, from concept to maintenance, will be connected and will reduce a lot of inefficiencies and tech debt. Tech debt is all of the debt associated with the process to design, build and maintain. It quickly adds up. Using fragmented systems that do not integrate leads to errors, low productivity and high cost. According to a McKinsey report, “CIOs reported that 10 to 20 percent of the technology budget dedicated to new products is diverted to resolving issues related to tech debt. More troubling still, CIOs estimated that tech debt amounts to 20 to 40 percent of the value of their entire technology estate before depreciation. For larger organizations, this translates into hundreds of millions of dollars of unpaid debt. And things are not improving. 60 percent of the CIOs we surveyed felt their organization’s tech debt had risen perceptibly over the past three years.” (Source: Tech debt: Reclaiming tech equity | McKinsey)

Lars Christiansen, LightAZ – “LightAZ.com is a search engine and specification platform for the professional lighting industry that provides the user with all the specification steps in one platform. Users have access to unparalleled search options with over 100 parameters that narrow and reduce search time significantly, and all luminaires have icons for manufacturers’ spec sheets and product pages. The integrated SKU configurator enables specifiers to build SKUs quickly and eliminate selecting parameters that are not available. Lighting schedules can be created, shared, or downloaded from the platform, facilitating collaboration. Specifiers can also browse an inspirational gallery of over 2,000 projects plus new products and stay up-to-date with the latest developments and events in the industry. To ensure that specifiers have the most current information, LightAZ uses advanced proprietary data management technology to ensure that the database is updated daily. The interactive site reflects the changes and trends in the lighting industry. The technology is designed to work on a desktop, tablet, or mobile device, so work can be done and shared in a timely manner. We’re dedicated to investing in the technology behind the platform to bring product information to the professional lighting market.”

What exactly does it do to benefit your customers/clients?

Julie Johnson, LiteSwap – “The overall platform will make it easier and faster to specify products and improve design processes, help with the bid process and remove headaches that lighting reps and contractors feel, while helping owners maintain their buildings for years to come.”

Lars Christiansen, LightAZ – “LightAZ is an indispensable productivity tool and go-to hub for lighting professionals. What we provide is TIME. We enable the users to save time through:

• Faster and more comprehensive searches with built-in logic.

• Easy comparison among all manufacturers – 3 name spec built SKU w/ integrated SKU configurator, allowing the user to share anything from anywhere with anyone with one click.

• Built-in communication to the rep/agent.

• All your product information in one place with access from PC or any mobile device.”

Paul Boken, Sourcery – “Sourcery is designed for two types of users: designers and suppliers. On one side, it empowers agents and manufactures to share their content with customers in a simple, curated and structured way. It eliminates thousands of websites. It is an open social platform that empowers and rewards users who develop the content and share it. On the other side, it empowers designers to build valuable curated collections of lighting fixtures “content” in collaboration with the supply chain. This content can take the form of ultra-specific collections of fixtures such as “Net Zero Manufactured,” “Sustainable Manufactured,” “Locally Made” and “Adjustable Downlights Good for Art.” Designers now have a tool to build core collections of products over time, allowing them to track issues and lessons learned, pricing, delivery, and performance characteristics. We call this organizational memory. All of this content can be dragged and dropped into the easiest collaborative luminaire schedule generator ever designed, with a full suite of project management tools. Over time designers can start to use project data to build ultra-predictable project results, designed to hit budgets, energy targets and project delivery with high accuracy.”

What is the financial model? How does it generate income?

Lars Christiansen, LightAZ – “LightAZ is completely free for specifiers to use. A sign in account is needed to fully take advantage of all the features - save projects, share results and select favorites. Manufacturers can choose from 3 affordable monthly or annual membership packages with varying degrees of analytics, functionality, and targeted advertising options. LightAZ also accommodates targeted advertising opportunities for manufacturers. Because the platform is an advanced search engine, advertisers can select targeted placements. For example, a manufacturer could place an advertisement for a downlight on the search page for the downlight category, deriving additional value from the search intent of the user.”

Paul Boken, Sourcery – “Sourcery is built on a ‘freemium’ subscription seat-based model. This means that many features are free and will always be free. As a general rule, if you are consuming, collecting, curating, and commenting on content (products and schedules), it is free. If you are creating and sharing content to a small group (5 or less), we also offer many free features. A paid subscription comes into play when you are creating/sharing a large amount of content to a large group, for example, generating many project schedules, creating many collections of projects and sharing to large client bases. We have separate pricing models for designers/agents and manufacturers.”

Julie Johnson, LiteSwap – “We employ an SaaS model with recurring revenue. Contributors will get a huge discount and, in some cases, have free access. Lighting manufacturers will have more of a listing type model with analytics that no one else can provide due to the nature of the platform.”

Who is your desired customer base?

Paul Boken, Sourcery – “Anyone who wants to specify and/or supply products to a construction site.”

Julie Johnson, LiteSwap – “Who isn’t? The lighting portion of the design/build/maintain process impacts everyone in the industry: architects, designers, distributors, engineers, contractors, lighting reps, manufacturers and building owners.”

Lars Christiansen, LightAZ – “LightAZ is for all lighting specifiers: architects, interior designers, lighting designers, electrical engineers, agents, distributors, contractors – with primary focus on the professional lighting industry. LightAZ also supports the next generation of lighting and design professionals and actively works with university programs to provide lighting design, architecture, and interior design students with free access to the platform as an educational tool for their projects and future.”

How does your product/platform differ from your competitors?

Julie Johnson, LiteSwap – “For one thing, the owner and designer of the platform is a lighting designer (me). So far, most people in the market are lighting rep-led or manufacturer-led. There needs to be a true objective solution that can help everyone without bias. The platform is more dynamic, robust and inclusive. If I wanted to just release a one-hit wonder, I could have launched a long time ago with something simple, but I really want this solution to remove other tech debt and really stream-line from end-to-end. We have one patent so far, and more will come as we continue to develop.”

Lars Christiansen, LightAZ – “What separates us is the breadth, depth, functionalities, and smooth user experience of LightAZ’s platform. This is possible because of LightAZ’s advanced proprietary data management technology and search engine. No other platform has a built-in SKU configurator for each product. LightAZ’s data team implement and update all spec sheets and links. We provide access to unprecedented analytics new to the lighting industry. Daily updates ensure that users can rely on the platform for the most up-to-date product information. Previous manufacturer directories or interactive line cards are static listings and don’t enable users to browse products with the same ease. Data must also be submitted and managed by the manufacturer, which is typically neglected, resulting in out-of-date listings. Manufacturers can also benefit from targeted advertising and visibility on a specialized platform.”

Paul Boken, Sourcery – “As far as we know, there are no construction supply chain tools that are part Spotify/Youtube-inspired social content platforms that control and share structured information with Slack/Asana-like communication and project architecture. We are equally open, as we are secure and private. Our nearest competitors are robust search engines and closed cloud-based project schedule creators. We are taking a huge step into a new way of working and excited as hell about it!”

What has been the most rewarding aspect of this venture thus far?

Lars Christiansen, LightAZ – “Starting to see the use of what you have built – getting emails and endorsements from specifiers and manufacturers is very special and motivates us to keep developing more.”

Paul Boken, Sourcery – “We are a curious bunch! The process of learning to master another industry (software) and build a useful tool that every user loves has been amazing!”

Julie Johnson, LiteSwap – “Some of the great people I meet that believe in the mission of providing such a wonderful tool! I also get a little nerdy when learning about software development and opportunities to push the boundaries to future tech.”

What was the most frustrating aspect of getting this off the ground?

Paul Boken, Sourcery – “Sourcery is not a software company that is entering the lighting world; we are a software company that was built by lighting designers, agents, distributors and manufacturers. So, learning to build and run a software company was a challenge! We feel that modern cloud technology and remote workflows have “democratized” the software business. We are no longer a slave to workflows pushed on us by outsiders - we can build it ourselves!”

Julie Johnson, LiteSwap – “Getting funding and manufacturer data. I have plenty of interest from specifiers and end users. Apparently, in my neck of the woods, investors don’t find this industry sexy enough to invest, or they just do not understand how much these problems cost the industry as a whole. The problems I am solving cost the industry billions!”

Lars Christiansen, LightAZ – “Building a platform of this magnitude with very diverse and fragmented data, you will hit road bumps which sometime change the schedule, and you have to readjust processes. But, overall, it’s been an extraordinary journey so far.”

Do you have anything you would like to add that we have not covered?

Julie Johnson, LiteSwap – “Now is the perfect time for investors and industry partners to get involved to support a woman-owned business in a male-dominated industry. LiteSwap has several products mapped out for launch, and we are really excited to help elevate the industry into the future using the best technology.”

Lars Christiansen, LightAZ – “When you build a project using LightAZ, the system tracks the spec changes and alerts the specifier before sending the project if any of the luminaires’ selected parameters have changed or if the product has been discontinued since you last looked at the project.”

Paul Boken, Sourcery – “Try us and become a ‘Sourcerer’.”

What does success look like going forward?

Lars Christiansen, LightAZ – “Big doesn’t always beat small, but fast always beat slow. Start small and think big.”

Paul Boken, Sourcery – “When was the last time that you went to your favorite musician’s website to consume their content? In the future, will you go to manufacturers’ or agents’ websites to consume product information and updates? The answers are: never (1), and you won’t (2)! We will look to content platforms like other more "mature" mediums of content sharing for product information. Once we are all in one space, sharing information in the same format structure, we will reach the peak of efficiency and accuracy in the construction supply chain.”

Julie Johnson, LiteSwap – “Success is being the most dynamic, unbiased platform for the industry that solves big problems! I have a few quotes that I love: “Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value,” – Albert Einstein. “When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor,” – Elon Musk. “In the right light, at the right time, everything is extraordinary,” – Aaron Rose.”

Three separate and ostensibly different software programs from three passionate groups, all trying to improve the lighting specification process, a process that most in the industry across North America would agree requires some fixing, if not a total overhaul. The hours that can be saved using any of these programs is astounding. Success for these projects equals success for the industry as a whole. It is good that the lighting specification process is finally catching up to our cutting-edge industry.