IMAGINiT and the hidden cost of clicking Print

In 2014, the architecture firm Perkins and Will had a problem with printing. Its digital practice managers wanted less time lost to repetitive software chores. They chose a modest experiment: a one-year trial of IMAGINiT Clarity, starting with PDF printing on seven large projects. According to the customer case study, the time recovered equaled another full-time person on each project. In 2015, the firm rolled Clarity out across the business.

There is something delicious about this. An industry capable of modeling an entire building in three dimensions still had an opportunity hiding behind the Print button. The sophisticated part of the work had acquired sophisticated tools. The tedious part had acquired a chair and a person to sit in it.

01 / The invoice hidden in the Print button

This is the territory occupied by IMAGINiT Technologies, a division of Rand Worldwide. Its business concerns what happens after someone buys the design software: getting it configured, getting people comfortable with it, connecting it to other systems, and finding the routine jobs that a machine could handle.

The distinction matters because a software license purchases a capability. A working process also needs standards, judgment and habits. A firm can own excellent tools and still depend on somebody remembering to export the right file, name it correctly and send it to the next person. That little chain of obligations is where delays can accumulate.

“we took a tedious task off our employees’ plates”

Matt Petermann, Perkins and Will
Customer account of the Clarity pilot

IMAGINiT’s Clarity automates jobs such as exports, backups and report generation, while exposing model-health information. In a September 2026 company blog, IMAGINiT reported more than five million cumulative hours saved. That is a vendor-reported task-savings figure, rather than a measurement of dollars deposited in customers’ accounts. The interesting question is where the recovered time goes.

02 / A reseller with a workshop attached

IMAGINiT sits in the engineering technology market between the software publisher and the organization trying to put the software to work. Its Autodesk offerings include AutoCAD, Revit, Civil 3D and Inventor. Consulting, migration, custom programming, technical support and instruction surround those products. The customer might be an architect coordinating a building, a manufacturer managing product data, or a civil engineer preparing infrastructure drawings.

Its partner roster extends to Leica Geosystems for scanning, Bluebeam for document workflows, and Eptura for facilities technology. The expertise is in the connections: understanding how a captured space becomes usable design information, or how engineering records need to travel into the rest of a business.

An Autodesk Platinum Partner badge alone does not settle a purchasing decision. Hagerman and Symetri also sell services, training and engineering technology. IMAGINiT’s particular proposition is the combination of that service bench with proprietary products. A customer can buy help with the process and software built to change the process from the same organization.

The economics follow that combination. Software sales sit alongside subscriptions to its own products and paid professional work. An installation may lead to instruction; a recurring nuisance may become a custom development project. For buyers, the attraction is continuity. The adviser who learns the problem can also help implement the answer.

03 / The sketch that had to be drawn twice

At Advanced Drainage Systems, the trouble appeared in a handoff. The manufacturer’s earlier online drawing tool let customers sketch drainage systems, but engineers had to redo drawings for final quotes and fabrication. IMAGINiT helped connect an online configuration tool to Inventor automation in the cloud. The resulting package included drawings, a bill of materials and a model. Autodesk’s customer story reports a 15% reduction in internal engineering time.

The infrastructure choice was part of the answer. Running Inventor on an individual server would have limited job volume; cloud processing offered room to scale. What failed first was the usefulness of the handoff: the sketch did not carry enough finished information forward. Improving the drawing interface alone would have left the engineers with the same queue.

The lesson travels beyond drainage. Look for information that becomes somebody else’s typing exercise. A pleasant interface can conceal a very unpleasant back office. Follow a record until it becomes a deliverable, and the actual automation opportunity often becomes easier to see.

04 / Four days before a bigger decision

Olsson Associates approached adoption from another direction. In a published reality-capture example, the engineering firm rented scanning equipment and Leica software licenses from IMAGINiT, then trained on an active public utility project. One day of site scanning was followed by three days learning the software at its office. The firm subsequently decided to buy its own scanner.

“We were learning and at the same time creating a billable deliverable,” said survey practice leader Steve Van Voltenberg. The trial gave the team an experience of the entire workflow, including what happened after the equipment came back from the field.

A scanner is a conspicuous purchase. The less conspicuous purchase is the ability to turn its output into something a client can use. Testing both together makes the decision more concrete. A demonstration becomes especially useful when it has to survive the buyer’s own project conditions.

ProductivityNOW addresses the continuing version of this problem. Its learning platform offers role-based paths, assessments and short modules, with options for an organization’s own content. Training can be attached to the task people are actually doing. Remembering a lesson three months after a class is a rather demanding business model for human memory.

05 / The meter is running

Clarity Cloud’s public Standard plan lists $50 per project per month, plus $8 per CPU hour of cloud task processing. Enterprise configurations are tailored, and hybrid or on-premise processing has a fixed annual fee option. The base project charge is therefore one part of the cloud bill.

Consider a deliberately simple illustration: one project using ten CPU hours in a month would produce a $130 charge under the listed cloud rates. That arithmetic excludes setup, other software, taxes and any separately scoped services. CPU time is also different from the time an employee spends waiting or working.

A sensible evaluation records how often a task occurs, how long it takes, how much checking it needs, and whether automating it improves the deliverable. Then compare the subscription, processing and implementation effort with that baseline. A workflow that already runs well, or repeats only occasionally, offers less room for a paid intervention.

The Perkins and Will pilot suggests a useful discipline: keep the first experiment bounded and let measured results justify expansion. The same discipline works when the answer is to stop. A modest trial ought to be allowed to deliver a modest conclusion.

06 / A chatbot still needs a decent workflow

IMAGINiT’s recent releases extend this practical territory. ACCelerate, announced in October 2025, targets construction-cloud administration: batch user changes, reassignment of responsibilities and governance checks. Clarity 2027, released in May 2026, adds an MCP connector for launching tasks through AI chatbots, execution of batch and Python scripts, and firm-defined model metrics inside Revit.

In its September 2026 Autodesk University announcement, the company described an upcoming Outlook integration with Autodesk Forma. Its direction is toward connecting work already scattered across applications. The new interface may be conversational; the underlying questions remain familiar. Does the system have the right access? Is the input consistent? Who handles an exception?

Those questions also define a good fit. IMAGINiT’s approach is most persuasive where compatible systems, recurring tasks and a responsible internal owner meet. It becomes harder to justify when the bottleneck is an unresolved design decision, unreliable data or work that changes completely each time. Automating an ambiguous instruction makes the ambiguity travel faster.

The Print button remains a useful place to start. It makes a grand technology discussion embarrassingly specific. Somebody has to produce the files. Somebody has to trust them. Somewhere between those two people lies a piece of work that might no longer need a person clicking through it.