Autodesk Tandem Implementation for a Wastewater Facility

BRIAN MELTON: All right. Hopefully, everybody is in the right place. We've assembled a story here, Jose and myself, that sort of speaks to Autodesk Tandem implementation on a wastewater facility.

A little bit about myself, Brian Melton. I'm the technology innovation lead for our engineering team within Black and Veatch. If you've not heard of Black and Veatch before, we're about 12,000 employees globally. We are over 100 years old. And we work on projects that we like to call invisible but invaluable. Jose, I'll turn it over to you.

JOSE LEON JR.: Yeah. Hi, everybody. Thank you for joining us today. My name is Jose Leon. I'm the director of operations and maintenance for Johnson County Wastewater. We were founded in 1945. We serve over 500,000 residents and approximately 17 communities here in Johnson County, Kansas.

BRIAN MELTON: Thanks, Jose. So we've assembled a few learning objectives here we hope you'll appreciate. One is just giving sort of a basic overview of Tandem if you haven't had an experience with that system yet. We also wanted to outline some opportunities about how we documented use case of what we actually did with Tandem and prioritize those and then sprinkled a few breadcrumbs in along the way about some things we learned as we're doing some research and exploration there.

For a more detailed perspective here, in a second, I'm going to toss it over to Jose who's going to describe j.c.w in a little bit more detail. We're also going to talk about some specifics of the project data set that we are leveraging within Tandem.

We'll have a very brief discussion about this scary word called digital twins. Then we'll talk about what we did to prioritize some use cases, and we'll end with some specifics about Autodesk Tandem and that platform itself. So Jose, I'll turn it over to you.

JOSE LEON JR.: Thanks, Brian. So who is Johnson County Wastewater? Well-- next slide. First of all, Johnson County, the county is southwest of Kansas City, Missouri. We're a southwest suburb. Again, we serve over 500,000 residents, 17 cities.

We have six wastewater treatment facilities, which are spread out throughout the county. And as you can see, our county has grown south and west, just like its distance or location away from Kansas City. That vertical line there, the edge there that you see, the yellow line, it is the state line between Kansas and Missouri. And you could probably read that on the map.

So we are-- in Kansas, we have 32 pump stations, and we are growing. Johnson County is one of the fastest growing counties in the nation and the fastest growing in Kansas. We have over $3 billion worth of assets. I think that's an important number for people to understand. And linear assets, which are really our sanitary sewer lines, we have over 2,300 miles of linear assets.

And as far as our employees, we have 238 employees, approximately, in Johnson County Wastewater and over-- or about 165 of those are operations and maintenance employees. Next slide. And again, founded in 1945, we were once a consolidated sewer district of Johnson County.

But as we have grown, we are now just Johnson County Wastewater. And we are one of many departments within Johnson County, the organization here in Johnson County, Kansas. Daily flow is averaged around 60 to 65 MGD. And MGD, for those of us newer to the water sector, is millions gallons a day.

That's MGD, so about 60 million gallons a day is how much we're receiving at our treatment facilities. One of the things that we're really proud of is this 35-- 3,596 compliance points. And as you can see, in 2022, we achieved above, well above 99% compliance in 2022.

And NACWA, which stands for National Association of Clean Water Agencies, they provide peak performance awards to high-performing utilities. We received six of those-- three platinum, one gold, and two silver. And you can count on one hand how many failures, if you will, or compliance issues we had at our facilities. So we're really proud of these numbers and proud of our staff here at Johnson County Wastewater.

The thing that really sets us apart from many organizations I think, not just locally, but nationally, is our values. We are-- we strive to be a world-class utility. Creativity, humor, respect, integrity, and service is really the foundation of our everyday efforts to serve the public here in Johnson County, Kansas.

But the one thing I want to really point out to you and hit on here is the creativity. These are all defined here at the county. Part of the definition for creativity is continuous improvement. And one of the things that we really take pride in here at Johnson County Wastewater is finding ways to continuously stay ahead of the curve, push the ball forward, and think about the future of our work.

And with that comes innovation. So here are just a couple of things that we're working on, some of our initiatives here at Johnson County Wastewater. We utilize some data analytics to help support our 30-year integrated plan. We are looking at piloting a couple AI inspection technologies here in our CCTV work that we do for sewer inspection.

We're having the conversation today about spatial twins and data visualization. And then having that presence, utilizing technology that's available today that wasn't available 10, 20 years ago, using the technology we have today to be able to understand and visualize some of the things we need to see so that we can improve collaboration between all of our teams here in Johnson County Wastewater and, you know, anybody in the private sector, such as our engineering teams. And we also have GIS mapping for our asset management that we're really proud of.

So this is some information out of Black and Veatch's 2023 water report. And what we've done is we've kind of exclamation pointed some of the things that, here at Johnson County Wastewater, that we could really relate to and stress on a larger scale. We have an aging workforce.

We want to make sure that we are addressing our workforce challenges by constant recruitment, retention of our employees. We're trying to address that. And I think our conversation today hits specifically on these discussions because, well, every single one of these-- climate adaption, resilience, managing operational cost, data collection and management. You know, how can we utilize technology today and into the future to address every single one of these major concerns that we have as a utility?

One of the things that I like for us to think about all the time when it comes to recruitment and retention is, are we making our industry, the water industry, attractive enough for young professionals, young students, to even be interested in getting into the profession? So that is one thing that's really been on my mind as we have these discussions.

And again, here's some more. Cybersecurity is definitely a big objective for us. With technology always comes the concern of cybersecurity. We want to make sure that whenever we are onboarding any security or talking about onboarding any technology, rather, that we understand the cybersecurity issues or concerns in and around that.

A lot of the platforms out there, a lot of the usage out there is up in the cloud. And nobody really knows where that really is exactly and who can get to it. So we want to make sure that we're doing our due diligence in all these areas to address our needs. But going back to that operations planning and control, that asset monitoring measurement and analysis, these are things that we do every single day.

And what we want to try and do is find ways to work smarter and not harder. The days of utilizing paper and pen to do your daily tasks and checks and things like that around our facilities, those have either come to an end or are coming to an end really quickly because technology, as we all know, is just filling these needs for us more and more and more.

So today, we're going to talk about two projects. One is the Tomahawk Creek Wastewater Facility. And the second is the Myron K. Nelson Wastewater Facility. And you can see approximately where these are located in the county. And the first project we'll talk about is the Tomahawk Creek Facility.

So Tomahawk Creek was originally constructed in 1955, and then it was reconstructed in 2018. It had several years of construction associated with it. It was a nice, big project for the county. I think two years ago now, it's been officially-- the startup was officially complete. And the communities that it serves are Leawood, Prairie Village, Overland Park, and Olanthe, which are some of the larger communities that we have here in Johnson County.

It gets about 19 million gallons a day, with a peak of about 172 million gallons a day. And this was tested and has been tested in our time here with the new plant that you can see here in the picture, with a significant range. We don't get these long daily rains anymore.

We get these one-hour, two-hour just downpours of rain now, it seems like. At this facility, we have approximately 3,000 assets, which is a significant amount of tracking and understanding of all of our equipment that we have to maintain. We have to make sure that it's operating properly.

There's just so many things that come with that amount of assets. And then, also at this plant, it has some of the less tenured or newer, less experienced staff because as this plant was built out, we onboarded several new staff members and have had quite a bit of turnover. So we wanted to make sure that we were doing something to keep people, recruit and keep people here at this facility.

So part of the design here, and I'm going to let Brian speak up on any of this as well. But part of our design here at the wastewater treatment facility was the creation of a Revit model that you can kind of see here on your screen. Our engineering team produced this model through its own design.

And credit to Brian-- he really reached out and then thought, hey, we could probably use this model to do some asset management work for you guys in operations. Generally speaking, these models are not new to engineers or engineering teams. But when it comes to operations and maintenance teams, where you're kind of, more your blue-collar workers, they don't really get in and around these models, these BIM models, and have too much fun with it after they're designed and created. So Brian, is there anything you wanted to add to this slide?

BRIAN MELTON: Yeah, Jose, I might just speak about some of the technical pieces here. Folks might be interested in understanding the tools that were used. So what you're looking at, all of the data was essentially created in Revit. That includes the process plant piping in addition to the structures.

Civil3D was used for the surface and buried utilities. We did use Plant3D for P&IDs on this particular project. And this was one of the first projects where we actually deployed the Autodesk cloud at scale with BIM 360. Especially since we were collaborating with HDR on this project, that made for a very effective way for both entities to sort of work together more collectively and be able to communicate a little bit more effectively.

We were using Unifi for content management. And then this was, again, some early projects where we deployed some newer VR technology, system called IrisVR. If you've been following the news, Autodesk actually acquired that company about a year and a half to two years ago. So it is an Autodesk solution now. But we're still using IrisVR and the Prospect app today. And this project ended up having about 60-plus Revit files across the two organizations that built some of this and somewhere around 1,600 actual drawings that were produced.

JOSE LEON JR.: And I guess-- and I guess the only other thing I'll add is we talked about the 3,000 assets that are here at the Tomahawk facility. And you can see that-- you can see, just on this photo alone, how many different facilities we have at Tomahawk. And

There are just facilities within a facility, really, that just amount to the number of assets that we have. And then there's the Nelson Complex, Wastewater Treatment Facility. Nelson is our oldest treatment facility. It was originally constructed around 1947.

It was the first serving utility-- or, sorry, wastewater treatment facility for Johnson County because as we said earlier, the county, the way it's sprawled away from Kansas City urban core was to the south and west and to the suburbs. So this is north and east in our county. Its reconstruction will be completed in 2030.

It's going through a very similar design process with the same team that we had on Tomahawk Facility. Right now-- we're in construction right now, and it's about a seven-year construction window, so a long, long project with a lot in it.

This project is going to serve approximately about 130,000 customers. The flow rates are going to be a little bit more than Tomahawk, probably up in your 15 to 20 MGD. And the number of assets is more than 4,500 assets. So it's bigger facility, bigger footprint, larger number of assets at this facility.

And then very similar, and Brian, you can feel free to speak up, but a very similar design process, using similar products here that you can see on the left. Again, larger footprints, much more facilities associated with this project. The one thing that is very unique on this project that you can't really see from this picture, this model here, is that the grade, it slopes significantly on this site.

And that's hard to see here, but basically, the lower left-hand side of the photo is at the top of the hill, really, and it goes downhill to the right side of the photo pretty significantly, actually.

BRIAN MELTON: Yeah, Jose, I might jump in and just add a few details. So most of this was executed with the same tools as Tomahawk Creek. I'll note a couple exceptions. You might have noticed the number of files went down. Through those projects, we've changed our philosophy on how information was separated.

So previously, we might have come from an area where there were discipline-specific Revit files. Now we generally are more open to collaborative and more comfortable with the technology and the cloud solutions that we generally have a single file per structure now. And multiple people work in that at the same time.

So you'll have structural, mechanical, electrical all working in the same Revit file. So that's why the number of files went down even though we were managing more drawings on this particular project. Two other things I'll note-- innovation continues as projects happen over time.

So there was pretty good distance between these years. So we had changed our philosophy. And this project actually had the P&IDs developed in Revit, with some customizations that we have put forward. And you'll also see a note at the bottom about a platform called BV OneClick, which I'll speak to in a minute. But that's a sort of new innovation that we had on our side to help free up some data and manage projects a little bit more effectively. So we'll talk about that a little as well.

JOSE LEON JR.: Thanks, Brian.

BRIAN MELTON: Yeah, thanks, Jose, that was great. So--

JOSE LEON JR.: Hand it back off to Brian.

BRIAN MELTON: So this section has got a scary word called Digital Twins. That's a pretty big word. We just wanted to break that down a little bit. You know, I think one of the things-- why are we even talking about tandem today? Looking to the future, you know, what's going to be different as things change?

But also, with Johnson County Wastewater, Jose is coming into a lot of really rich spatial modeling data from the Tomahawk Creek Facility that's operating right now and the Nelson Project that's under design and will be in construction here shortly. So that is a wealth of information, and we were just sitting back saying, hey, how do we really apply this effectively to do something that adds value to the operations staff? Because it's been a conversation for a while, but it seems like it's been difficult to achieve. That sort of gets us into digital twins a little bit so we wanted to break that down a little bit.

This is sort of a comical way of showing what I think about when I hear the word digital twin. There are pretty vast differences, the way people think about that word right now. And I don't think that's going to get cleaned up any time soon. So I put this slide in here really just to speak to the fact that maybe we need to be open-minded when we hear the word digital twin because those are usually built for a purpose right now, and the purpose for those twins are drastically different. So again, a comical way to sort of introduce that open-mindedness we need to have.

A little bit more context around that-- a digital twin may have a 3D model, or it may not, right? It may have some flavor of AI associated with it. It might be pulling an IoT data. Also, it might only think it applies to operations activities and not part of the other life cycle. So again, just the thought around being open-minded and either shrinking or expanding your thought process around that term when you hear it and then having a conversation with somebody to really understand what's the purpose of that digital solution that they put in place and what value is that bringing.

So we have a definition we put in here. It could be very similar to the one that you have or some that you've seen previously. But what we're currently classifying this as is a virtual representation that serves as a real-time digital counterpart of physical assets, systems, or processes. We've also included a little bit of a recipe down here to say, well, when do you think we really lean the needle over into a digital twin versus something else?

So I think, first off, you might want to have a digital model. Doesn't necessarily have to be a 3D model. It could be an analytical model or a computational model. We'll talk about that here in a minute. Usually have an evolving set of data or events that you're wanting to track and have better insights into. And you usually want to have some means of dynamically updating that so it's more effective in gathering that information and sort of self-sufficient in the way it supplies information to the user.

And then lastly, it's hopefully driving some meaningful insights and recommendations and freeing up access to information that you found challenging before. So just a little recipe of key things that we think should be considered when you're talking about a digital twin. That is a big word. Again, we tried to put a framework around that to break down that into some pieces that we see happening in the industry.

So we see a lot of work, and we're helping in some of these areas, in addition, of computational data. So that's more of, like, having a process simulation, where it's usually trying to indicate operational decisions or recommending actions to operators based on a process simulation that's behind the scenes.

So there's a lot of good effort going on around that, and exploration, and continued innovation there. Analytical data-- so usually see this in the form of Power BI dashboards. So it's aggregating large, diverse data sets and then being able to see current information and insights easier, but also getting to the point where there's additional logic behind there to start making some recommendations or aggregating multiple data points to get other data points.

Like, what's the likelihood of failure for a piece of equipment based on age, and runtime, and other things that would factor into that? And then you've got the one that we're focusing a little bit more on today, which is spatial twins or the value of spatially aggregated data. I do see a point in the future where these things probably converge. And you might even see twins today that make up facets of these, either one or in complete whole.

But I do see a future where these things are probably going to come together a little bit more because there's a lot of synergy across the same type of data that's being leveraged in these particular areas. So I just wanted to mention that, that we started thinking about this in a framework just so we can identify these different, distinct types of twins and where some of these might start to add some value.

This slide I wanted to show mainly because we put a lot of work into it, and it's pretty cool, and we like it. But it also-- when you say the word digital twin, a lot of people's minds go right to, that applies to operations. And I would necessarily say, maybe open your mind a little bit more and consider, what would the value of a digital twin provide to earlier stages of that life cycle?

When you look at digital transformation within a global engineering company, we start to put apps together now that help us do things better. So this is what we sort of refer to as a design twin, where we want simplified access to data. We want real-time insights on what's happening on the project.

Assets are being added. Assets are being deleted. Data needs to be entered, and data needs to be validated as we're moving through the project. And we ultimately want more confidence and better insights to make better decisions and deliver better products at the end of it. So these types of systems are starting to help us do that. And combined with the movement to the Cloud, API access, and the technology that we're all sort of seeing in the industry, these things become a lot easier to manage.

So this is just a little visual of what that looks like, where before, this was very disconnected workflows. But what you're seeing is an engineer resource would now come in here and see real-time valve list and real-time equipment list. There's synchronization between the schematic design and the spatial design. And you'll see the color coding that's a way to visualize information different than we have had the ability to do before.

The conversation, how do make tomorrow better than today? Well, I like looking at a spreadsheet just as much as everybody else. But I sure like it when I can interact visually with a lot of information also. Sometimes you want to look at a spreadsheet. Sometimes you want to look at a pie chart. Sometimes you might want to see graphic and data aggregated spatially. So this is all just to say, let's think about digital twins across the whole life cycle of a project and not just one specific life cycle because I think there's value to be had in many stages that that project can move through.

This brings us to what we call what's the value of spatially aggregated data. So one of the things we want to break down, you've got a model. Now what, right? Previously, the largest problem and most challenging effort was, how do I open the model? I want to use BIM during operations.

She couldn't open the model. It's too difficult. Staff wasn't trained on it. The software-- you didn't own the software. It was so complex. A lot of barriers in that process there. So with the movement of the cloud, certainly it freed up access to that data.

And then with things like Tandem hitting the market, it makes that barrier almost nonexistent. You can now launch a complicated model through a web browser, no real special performance needed on the PC, and no-- lots of training for users in that context. So that kind of leads you to, now you're sitting in front of that model. Now what do you do?

What do you want that model to do, and how would you actually apply it? And this is where we started working really closely with Jose and his team that helped assemble some pretty diverse backgrounds and perspectives. And we defined a framework about how we started prioritizing and identifying areas within operations and maintenance where spatially aggregated data could add some value. Jose, I don't know if you wanted to say something about this. But feel free to jump in.

JOSE LEON JR.: Yeah, no. Thanks, Brian. So the only things that I would really add is the model-- we didn't really state this, and perhaps we should have. But if you can think of our wastewater facilities, Tomahawk and Nelson, there are hundreds of pumps pushing water through the treatment facility, you know?

And so we're trying to find a way to track and manage that information of how we are maintaining this equipment. And pumps is just one example of one type of asset that we're tracking, right? So bringing us to this slide, where-- how do we think through this? How do we think through how to utilize a model for Johnson County Wastewater?

So what we did is we assembled a team. And our team was made up, as Brian said, of people from all over Johnson County Wastewater, engineering, O&M-- operations, maintenance. Asset management folks were there. Some safety folks were there. So we wanted to make sure that they felt included and involved in this discussion because at the end of the day, Jose, he may or may not be using this tool on a daily basis.

I don't envision myself using it on a daily basis. We want to bring in folks that will be and understand, how do they view this model being used here at Johnson County Wastewater? And that's what you see on the graphic to the left here, some of the responses.

BRIAN MELTON: Yeah. And we kind of came into this open-minded. So what you're looking at on screen here are categories that this team came up with in this room. Where would spatially aggregated data and digital twins potentially add value? And then we went through a process where we ranked the importance of these as well.

So that's what you're seeing represented in this graphic is those categories and the ranking that that team went through. Subsequently, we had some really healthy conversations within each of those categories about what specific activities or actions would the model-- where would the model add value, or how would it add value?

So I pulled out a few of these to speak to-- so simple things like safety, where, hey, it'd be great just to visualize safety device locations. Or, hey, it'd be great if we could use the model to isolate systems and processes to visualize all of the assets associated with that system easy.

Also, here on the maintenance side-- pulling in things like warranty end date, runtime. And then simple, simple things like hey, where's the location of that asset? So we were very specific about defining small bits of information. That way, we could come back and apply use cases to these that were very simple, very easy to understand, and we could articulate value and ROI over-- at some point.

So that was a really good activity. That was very collaborative experience that everybody went through. What that sort of summarized into was what we came up with on these-- what we call these one-page use case documents. So you'll see this-- there's a couple of examples listed here. But the first one is, search for physical asset location. That was one of the higher priorities and sort of lower effort ones that we had seen.

But we defined a little bit of the goal. We defined a loose approach around how that might be achieved. We had listed the expected outcomes. Who's impacted? What's some other considerations? And then we went through this sort of understanding of mapping effort and impact to try to help us dig through some of those use cases and understand, where do we start?

The mountain's really tall. We got to start walking so we can all learn together. And that's sort of one of the processes we use to do that.

JOSE LEON JR.: One of the things I might add here, Brian, is part of our effort that we also added onto this probably near the end is understanding the return on investment, right? For us, because we are users of technology and we want to be here moving into the future, sometimes these efforts take a lot of time and a lot of money.

And so we want to be able to explain to our county leadership and/or the public and just to say, hey, look, this is the return we got on this investment. So coming up with ways that we can easily communicate that and calculate it is a really important part of this process.

BRIAN MELTON: That's good. And that's one of the reasons we broke those use cases down to very small pieces-- so we could achieve some soft landings and define metrics around here shortly. I wanted to end, I think, this section with something that Frank here on the asset management side had said where you're looking for those opportunities to add value.

And Frank had mentioned something like, hey, pretty early in the conversation, like hey, we spend a portion of time locating valves for maintenance professionals. You know, they can't find them or they're new to the site. They don't know where they're at. And then there's downtime for both parties. Downtime is cost for people, right?

So Frank's like, hey, this BIM model can just simply show the location of some of our assets. That would save time and add value. And we started that. That's a use case that we identified. So I guess the comment with this slide is, it's a large mountain.

You don't have to climb it all at once. Just break it up into small pieces and start walking. And hopefully, you can achieve some success along the way to keep momentum moving and also generate excitement and interest from others along the way.

So that kind of brings us to the implementation. What did we do in Tandem? So I'm going to touch on some of these aspects here. First off, some of the basics of what is Tandem.

Autodesk has a definition of that. What I have come to refer to Tandem as is a spatial visualization platform. Hopefully Autodesk agrees with that. But one of the biggest things it did was free up the accessibility of BIM data. Traditionally, it was very difficult to get to.

It also created the ability to connect BIM data to other information of activities geared towards operations. So there's a visual presentation layer for ops and maintenance data that we're going to see. I also think it's positioning itself, and other systems like this, to be a handover product of the future. As we think about the constant innovation that's happening and digital transformation occurring within all parts of the project life cycle, new types of data entering, creating new opportunities. And something like Tandem creates this foundation for continued innovation, where we can create a better product and deliver that and sets up clients like JCW and Jose to leverage more information and new information to add value.

So a couple of key things here was a note where your target Tandem user is probably new to BIM. So let's keep that in mind. These are operations and maintenance professionals potentially. They may have never seen a model before or been able to interact with one previously. So the number one thing was, like, it's intimidating. Let's keep it simple.

I think Tandem does a really good job of being able to eliminate noise from Revit. And what I mean by that is, there's a lot of attributes in Revit. Some are there natively. Some their design and construction folks add to help with design don't necessarily apply to operations.

So Tandem does a really good job of being able to remove the noise and surface up attributes and data that the operations team cares about. Also, workflows that minimize clicks-- we'll talk about that here a little bit more. But some of the features within Tandem, where you can set up views and what they call filters to basically click a button and easy isolate something.

And then avoid, at least early on, workflows where you're requiring manually navigating through the model. Over time, that's going to become normal. And five or 10 years from now, everybody may be very efficient at that, like we're all sufficient working through smartphones these days where we didn't used to be.

But yeah, that's still intimidating for some people and want to keep that in mind, that not everybody is at the same maturity level with the use of some of these systems. And then one thing here I noted, which you may not find out until later as you're exploring this more. But being able to normalize data for multiple parties, if I think about being in Jose's shoes, and I'm receiving modeling data now from multiple consultants across multiple projects, you're going to find inconsistencies.

Doesn't mean that those consultants are doing things wrong. It just means they're doing things different because they've come from different backgrounds. So you might receive two high-quality models, one from consultant A and one from consultant B. Both of those have a pump in them.

But they have different attributes about those, maybe different levels of detail. So what Tandem allows you to do is normalize that info. We build a data model for a pump that's specific to JCW. And when we pull that data in here, it doesn't matter if it came from different consultants or different software packages.

When we classify that pump, it now is consistent and normalized and standardizes that for use within operations activities that have been defined on where that applies. So normalizing data, I think, is a big part of where Tandem's going to add some value here and allowing flexibility for consultants and contractors to work most effectively the way they need, but also get Jose and the team more consistent data that they can continue to apply and standardize on moving forward.

If you haven't done anything with Tandem yet, opening up a brand-new application can be pretty intimidating. So I tried to break it down into three key steps here. And some of this might be review if you have used Tandem. First off, just import your data.

Don't be intimidated about that. Pull in the Revit models. Secondarily, I've tried to list these in the order that you might want to flow through them. So first, you want to create a template. A template, essentially, can be specific to a customer like JCW, or it can be specific to a company like Black and Veatch.

And you can apply that template and reuse it across multiple projects that you create. So if we end up creating multiple projects for JCW, we'll apply the same template and not have to rework everything every time. Secondarily, you'll want to latch on to a classification system. What do I mean by that?

That's simply just a list of assets, or it could be using an industry classification like uniformat or masterformat. It's a hierarchy to organize data around. Secondarily, you'll want to add attributes. You don't have to really think about how they apply to the classification system yet.

But you'll just go and add attributes that you know that you want to track across assets. Then you go through a process where you map those attributes to the classification system. So you're building that data model that we talked about that you're going to use over and over again. And what does that mean?

You can apply attributes at the highest level in the classification. So if you classify an object, it inherits all properties that you care about, or you can spread those attributes through lower levels in the classification system. It allows you to be more targeted about the specific properties that you want to track for a specific asset class.

And then once that's done, you can essentially-- if there's data coming from the model that you want to pull through and not manually type in, you can map the attributes in Tandem to attributes coming from the Revit models you imported. So Tandem will then consume that data from the model, so things like tag number, equipment description, asset classification.

Some of those might already be in Revit. You can pull them through and not have to manually type that info. And then lastly in this section, you basically apply that customized template you created to the project where you've imported your data. And then-- we start to move to the next step here where you just go through and classify the elements.

So what does that mean? It means you pick the objects or select the objects, and you apply a classification to them from the system that you created. Essentially, that inherits the data model. Then you can go about adding additional data that didn't come from the model and setting up views and filters. And after you're pretty much done with those things, you're well on your way of leveraging Tandem and then moving on to some other things that you might want to do with it.

So hopefully that was useful. I just wanted to cover some basics. If you haven't touched it before, these are some major things you want to look at and potentially the order that you might want to move through those as well. A couple of noteworthy things here, I'll touch on real quickly.

Plugins-- there's a Revit plugin, an Excel plugin. Currently, the Revit plugin only allows a one-way view. So if you're in Revit, you can click on something like a pump, and you can see data in Tandem if there's extra information in Revit. I know the team is working on a bidirectional flow of information.

So that's something to look forward to in the future. There's also an Excel plugin. This might be in beta, but it allows you to tap into data within Tandem and use normal Excel workflows to manipulate that information if that's something you're interested in. We also have integrations with Autodesk Construction Cloud.

So the Revit data that we're showing was sitting in ACC. We can pull it directly into Tandem. The good thing about that is you can use normal Revit workflows. If that model needs to change, you open Revit. You make the change, and you save and synchronize.

And then Tandem can update from that directly without having to do a lot of rework and getting those changes all the way through the system. You probably noticed some new news around Reekoh. I think Autodesk is in the process of acquiring that particular tool, which is going to open up a lot of opportunity to pull in integrations on IT and OT systems that Reekoh is already mapping with.

So I'd expect to see the amount of data that Tandem can use to exponentially increase with some of the work they're doing with Rico. And then you can see some of the file formats and things that currently works with. I have used the Navisworks plugin as well to pull in some power projects we have in our organization from a different vendors file formats and have had very good success getting that data in there as well. So if you have data not coming from Autodesk design tools, it's still something you could potentially look at and gain some value from.

I'll jump into-- searching for things was the number one thing we wanted to look out for. So there's this heroic search feature that Autodesk has put in here. So use case number one easily achieved. You can just search for a tag number or data, and it easily isolates information you're looking for.

That feature is going to be coming really handy when we start to use this system a little bit more. I think secondarily, there's some dashboard features that have been added. When you think about managing and tracking data to hand over, there's a lot of assets, there's a lot of attributes.

This dashboard's helping us understand the progress and the completeness of that, but also giving us a visual that everybody can sort of tap into to understand that and gain value about where we're at in that process as well. So I think this has been a really good addition to the system.

I wanted to touch on some things to watch out for, some lessons learned. And I'll preface this to say we are using Revit in an industry it wasn't necessarily geared for. So it's not necessarily Tandem's fault why this isn't working. I think we've challenged Autodesk in this space here.

And I've talked to the product team quite a bit about adding some more flexibility in this particular feature. But Tandem has the ability to manage systems. It has a systems module. Unfortunately, it only pulls from something in Revit called system classification. That's a fixed list.

And the way we built process piping in Revit, all of those pipings have to be classified as the same thing, essentially. So Tandem does a good job of importing the data and automatically setting up those systems. Unfortunately for us, every piece of pipe ends up on the same system without having that flexibility, even though within Revit and within the system browser in Revit, we have all of the piping systems broke down and organized very effectively for managing that data and executing the drawings we need.

So looking forward to leveraging that in the future, just not quite flexible enough for how we're using Revit to pull that data over and leverage that particular feature effectively as we'd like. A couple other things to look out for real quickly-- spaces and levels. In an infrastructure project, these are quite a bit different than you're going to see in a commercial building or a hospital situation.

Levels, I'll say, are a mess, not because we want it to be that way, just because there's not much consistency in levels across these types of structures. You have a BMR base, and you have a clarifier. You have an admin building. They're not going to share much in terms of levels, like level one, level two, level three you might find in a commercial building.

So we're trying to understand how to best leverage that in Tandem, or do we need to change the philosophy around how we use some of those within Revit to better get some alignment between those two systems? So that's something to watch out for. In addition, spaces-- spaces is a good way to isolate stuff within Tandem. When we get into some of these non, I guess, more infrastructure type projects, like open basins and clarifiers, we noticed when we imported that into Tandem, we weren't as necessarily as clean as we needed to about where the space objects ended.