Why Mars Snacking took control of BIM with Revizto Enterprise
Are you prepared for what’s next in AECO?
Most conversations about VDC and BIM coordination are driven by general contractors and designers. The owner's voice is rarely in the room — and even more rarely leading the charge.
Steve Cline and Aaron Lepley are senior engineers leading VDC and digital delivery at Mars Snacking in North America. They weren't hired as VDC leaders. They were hired as project engineers. And their story isn't about a formal digital transformation initiative with a five-year roadmap and executive sponsorship. It's about what happens when two engineers with a visibility problem and a steam line reroute start asking whether there's a better way to do this — and find Revizto at the end of that question.
One steam line, seven floors, no reliable model
Mars operates around 135 manufacturing facilities globally, with approximately 28 in North America. These aren't office buildings. They're production facilities running Snickers, M&M's, and with the recent acquisition of Kellanova, Cheez-Its, Pop-Tarts, and Pringles — answering to the USDA and the FDA every single day. A design mistake at Mars doesn't just cost money today. It costs production time, safety risk, and operational friction for years.
When Cline and Lepley first joined, one of their earliest tasks was to plan the reroute of a 12-inch steam line through a complex mechanical room in a seven-floor facility with multiple expansions and renovations. They walked the plant with clipboards and paper drawing sets. On a good day, they had access to an out-of-date Navisworks model. The questions they were asking — where does this steam line go, what does it clash with, is this even possible — were met with answers like "I think it's somewhere over here" and "I have no idea."
"It's incredible that we're responsible for executing hundreds of millions of dollars of capital projects and it feels like we're shooting from the hip."
Aaron Lepley, Sr. Regional Project Engineer, Mars
They weren't just solving a steam line problem. They were solving a visibility problem. And the tools they had — clipboards, printed drawing sets, PDFs on an iPad connected to OneDrive — weren't solving it.
How Revizto entered the picture
A colleague pointed Cline toward a dusty Meta Quest 2 headset in the bottom drawer of an abandoned desk. On it was a Resolve license. They loaded a model and something shifted — no longer interpreting 2D drawings, they were standing inside the design. The clashes with building steel were visible. The reroute options were clear. They weren't guessing anymore.
That experience sent them to the GBCA construction technology conference in Philadelphia, where they met John McCurdy from Revizto. The demo made the connection explicit: if the whole team could collaborate inside the model — partners, contractors, internal stakeholders — the distortion disappears for everyone.
Revizto became what Cline and Lepley describe as their shared map. Clear, accurate, and aligned. No more "which version are we on." No more reconstructing designs in their heads from flat drawings. The Unified 2D/3D Environment meant that everyone — engineers, operators, contractors, and leadership — was working from the same live, navigable reality rather than their own interpretation of a PDF.
200 issues in 60 minutes, and what came next
The results didn't take long to materialize. Mars ran a 60-minute virtual reality design review and identified 200 issues in an hour. On a project in Henderson, Nevada, a solution had been aligned on in 2D — operators stepped into VR through Revizto, saw what was actually being proposed, and rejected it. Those operators are happy with where that piece of equipment stands today.
Twenty engineers were onboarded into Revizto in two weeks. Senior Mars leadership walked their site visualizing the future state of their facility with augmented reality. Project managers started catching phasing and constructibility concerns before a crane arrived on site. And critically — operations and maintenance teams started influencing design decisions for valve placement, equipment access, and safety before a single wall went up, making their own daily work easier and safer as a result.
The Integrated Issue Management workflows meant that hundreds of issues were identified, collaborated on, and closed prior to dirt moving — not discovered in the field where corrections are significantly more expensive.
The skepticism that greeted Cline and Lepley early on — "you look dumb, and I'm not doing that," "I've never done it that way" — gave way to something different once people stepped into the model. Skepticism became intrigue. Intrigue became understanding. Understanding became ownership. Engineers started requesting VDC on their own projects. Stakeholders started initiating virtual reality design reviews because they had seen the value firsthand.
Why Mars licensed Revizto at the enterprise level
The decision to move to an enterprise license wasn't just about convenience. It was about control.
As an owner, Mars doesn't want to depend on external partners having the right tools and using them correctly. Enterprise licensing means Revizto is available to every person involved in every project — engineers, operators, contractors, and leadership — without project-by-project procurement requests. It means Mars controls the process and the data it generates. And it means every project is delivered using the same tools, the same standards, and the same workflows — building institutional consistency rather than a collection of disconnected project outcomes.
The data lifecycle — the part most VDC conversations miss
For an owner, a coordinated model isn't a project deliverable. It's not something you archive at the end of construction and never open again.
At Mars, validated BIM is the foundation of a data lifecycle. It creates long-term digital representations of their facilities that feed facilities management roadmaps. With those, Mars can accelerate concept design and planning for future expansions and refurbishments — because the data foundation already exists, and it's accurate. The Connected Project Intelligence capabilities in Revizto — the dashboards, the reporting, and the API connections — are what make that vision achievable rather than theoretical.
Mars isn't delivering one project. It's building a portfolio of assets, systems, and factories for decades. The data security and sovereignty that Revizto provides ensures that as that data foundation grows, it remains exactly where it belongs — with Mars.
As Cline put it: "A coordinated model isn't just a project deliverable. It becomes part of a much bigger strategy. The foundation of our data lifecycle."
A different kind of owner's edge
Less than 15% of owners are currently driving the VDC and BIM conversation. For owner organizations still on the sidelines, Cline and Lepley's message is direct: you need to get started.
Most people in the construction industry win a project, execute it, hand it over, and move on. Owners don't. They build their facilities. They operate them, maintain them, refurbish them, and expand them. They live with the consequences of every coordination decision for decades. That's not a disadvantage — it's the reason to invest in visibility earlier, more deliberately, and at an enterprise level.
If you're a design partner: help the owner use the model — don't treat it as a deliverable. If you're a GC: treat the model as a shared language, not just a tool for quantity take-offs. And if you're an owner: use all the information available to you. Don't accept handoff as the finish line.
How Revizto Collaboration Hub enabled Mars Snacking’s success:
- Unified 2D/3D Environment Replacing disconnected PDFs and out-of-date Navisworks models with a single shared environment — giving engineers, operators, contractors, and senior leadership one live, navigable source of truth across every project.
- AR/VR & QR Codes Enabling immersive virtual reality design reviews that identified 200 issues in a single 60-minute session, and allowing senior leadership to walk facilities and visualize future states with augmented reality before construction began.
- Integrated Issue Management Closing hundreds of coordination issues before dirt moved — with operations and maintenance teams influencing valve placement, equipment access, and safety decisions at the design stage rather than discovering problems after handover.
- Connected Project Intelligence Building a long-term data lifecycle that turns validated BIM into the foundation for facilities management, future expansion planning, and predictive maintenance across a global portfolio of manufacturing assets.
Quick Implementation & Adoption Onboarding 20 engineers onto the platform in two weeks — and scaling to an enterprise license that puts Revizto in the hands of every project stakeholder without relying on partners to procure it themselves.
FAQs
Manufacturing facility owners have fundamentally different stakes in BIM coordination than contractors or designers. Where a contractor completes a project and moves on, an owner operates, maintains, and refurbishes the same facility for decades. A misplaced valve or poorly coordinated mechanical room doesn't just create a construction issue — it creates an operational burden that affects safety, maintenance, and production every day until it's corrected. BIM coordination gives owners visibility and alignment before construction begins, ensuring that the people who will live with the facility long after closeout have influenced the decisions that affect them most.
An owner's data lifecycle refers to the ongoing use of validated building information models beyond the construction phase — for facilities management, maintenance planning, future expansion design, and operational intelligence. For owners managing a portfolio of assets over decades, a coordinated model is not a project deliverable to be archived. It is the foundation of a long-term digital representation of the facility that informs every future capital investment. Owners who treat BIM as a data lifecycle asset rather than a construction output gain a permanent advantage in the speed and accuracy of future project delivery.
Virtual reality improves construction design reviews for manufacturing facilities by allowing stakeholders — including operations and maintenance teams who will work in the facility every day — to stand inside the proposed design and evaluate it spatially before construction begins. Issues that are invisible in 2D drawings, such as equipment access constraints, valve placement problems, and clearance issues, become immediately apparent when experienced at full scale. VR design reviews conducted before groundbreaking have identified hundreds of issues on single projects, many of which would have resulted in costly rework or permanent operational compromises if discovered after construction.
Enterprise BIM licensing means that a coordination platform is available to every person involved in a project — engineers, operators, contractors, and leadership — without requiring individual project-by-project procurement. For owner organizations managing multiple simultaneous capital projects, enterprise licensing removes the dependency on external partners to have and use the platform, gives the owner control over the coordination process and the data it generates, and ensures that every project is delivered using the same tools, standards, and workflows. This consistency is what makes it possible to build a long-term data foundation rather than a collection of disconnected project deliverables.
Owner organizations use BIM for long-term facilities management by maintaining validated building information models that accurately reflect the as-built state of their facilities, updated over time to reflect modifications, expansions, and refurbishments. These models serve as the source of truth for maintenance planning, regulatory compliance, operator training, and future project scoping. Organizations that build and maintain validated BIM from the construction phase reduce the time and cost of future project delivery — because the data foundation for concept design, clash detection, and constructibility review already exists — and improve operational outcomes because facility teams have accurate spatial information about the assets they manage every day.
