Speckle Systems · Featured Developer Series

Featured Developer: Mohamed Manseur

Originally published October 13, 2023 by Senda Ben Abdallah, Speckle Systems

This page summarizes a case study Speckle Systems published about my work — their original blog post has since been taken down during a site redesign, so I'm keeping a record of it here. It is a paraphrase in my own words, not a reproduction of their article; the archived original is linked at the bottom of this page.

In 2023, Speckle Systems profiled my work as part of their Featured Developer series, which highlights how community members use the open-source Speckle platform to solve real problems in AEC data workflows. At the time I was Chief Architect and BIM Coordinator at China State Construction (CSCEC) in Algeria.

From geometry to information

I joined CSCEC in 2017, working alongside design and structural engineering teams that were still using older, purely geometry-based CAD tools. Within about a year, it became clear that geometry alone wasn't enough — the teams needed models that carried real information, not just shapes. That realization is what pushed CSCEC to invest in formal BIM workflow training, and it's what moved my own toolset from AutoCAD toward Revit, Navisworks, and BIM 360.

Around that time I started building interactive Power BI dashboards to communicate modeling status to stakeholders outside the modeling team — replacing paper-based room reports with interactive, per-room datasheets.

Automating the tedious parts

A lot of my daily work was repetitive and manual: mapping model elements, linking reference images to layer names, that kind of thing. On a complex model, a task like that could eat up two full working days using paid plugins like Synoptic Design. That frustration is what sent me looking for a more interactive, more automatable 3D viewer — which is how I found Speckle.

"It took too much time, sometimes two days if I was working with a complex model. This was a big problem for me." — from the original Speckle Systems interview

Consolidating the toolchain

Speckle's viewer became my go-to for model performance checks across design and engineering disciplines, cutting down coordination errors between teams. Instead of juggling five or six separate applications, our workflows converged on one connected platform. We also used SketchUp-to-Revit mapping through Speckle — a task that used to take a CSCEC designer two weeks dropped to about two days.

Why open source mattered

"The biggest difference with Speckle is that it's open source: it's free, and you can add to it. To me, open source is ten times better than something that is closed and only has specific clients with independent visions. Open source means everybody can use it and add to it." — from the original Speckle Systems interview

That philosophy is also what led me to write about combining Speckle-extracted data with Power BI and Synoptic Design for surface-area and pricing analysis — one of a few articles I've since published on LinkedIn about practical BIM data workflows.

A later mention: Beyond the Speckleverse

My Power BI + Speckle dashboard work was referenced again in 2024, in Speckle's "Beyond the Speckleverse: Business Intelligence Deep Dive" post — a roundup of community Business Intelligence use cases published ahead of one of their hackathons, alongside examples like Reduzer's carbon calculator and Gaiup's real-time LCA tool. That post pointed readers back to the Featured Developer piece above for the full story.

Speckle Power BI BIM 360 Revit Navisworks Open Source

Original sources (archived)

→ Featured Developer: Mohamed Manseur (Oct 2023, via Wayback Machine) → Beyond the Speckleverse: Business Intelligence Deep Dive (2024, via Wayback Machine)