Civil 3D Templates: Restructuring for Collaboration and Maximum Efficiency

MICHAEL PAVLOVEC: Well, welcome, everyone, to Autodesk University and our case study, Civil 3D Templates-- Restructuring for Collaboration and Maximum Efficiency. It's class number CES502192. So keep that number handy to access not only this class, the thousands of other classes, to download our class handout, and recordings of the presentation.

So just before we get started, let's just do a quick show of hands. How many of you in the audience are new to Civil 3D, or even interested in developing your templates? OK, that's good. How many of you are seasoned Civil 3D experts looking for a deeper understanding and how you could take advantage of Civil 3D's new functionality? All right, great. Well, we have something for each and every one of you.

Your presenters today will be myself, Michael Pavlovec, and my co-presenter, Randy Brook. Now myself, I've been in the engineering industry for about 30 plus years the majority of which has been spent in the transportation sector. I always tell people my projects involve the three R's, roads, rails, and runway. Now, I've been around since the beginning of CAD and some of the modeling software when it first started showing up on our desks.

In other words, I've been involved in the development of standards and creating templates since day one. A big part of my career in the last number of years is Dynamo and Python. And it plays a very large part in my daily workflows. I'm always looking to automate something by taking advantage of the Civil 3D API.

My co-presenter, Randy Brook, also 35 years of experience in all forms of surveying, design, even some construction inspection on a wide variety of projects. He's worked with AutoCAD, [INAUDIBLE] desktop, most recently Civil 3D. And he is what I call one of our experts when it comes to the development of our template content and the restructuring of our templates.

Now, he likes to be known as a grumpy old man. But we'll get him laughing and smiling today. So although this is a case study reflecting on our journey at GHD to restructure templates, we do have some learning objectives for each one of you. We want you to be able to define your template requirements and leverage Autodesk's best practice workflows to create them. We want you to understand how to restructure your templates to utilize the brand new Civil 3D functionality, using property sets, reference templates, corridor templates.

We want you to be able to implement procedures to manage in development that template content. And lastly, and perhaps most importantly, automation. We want you to be able to use Dynamo to automate the application of metadata, generate some of your IFC files, extract quantities. Again, there's going to be something for everyone.

So when we talk about our journey, each journey has a beginning. So let's start there. And that's with our existing templates. So at GHD, we have over 10,000 employees in over 200 offices worldwide. Some of our business languages include English, French, and Spanish. We have metric and imperial variations. But we also need templates to cover each one of our disciplines.

We're a full service engineering firm. And we need our template offerings to service each one of those service lines. And of course, as everyone knows, over the last three years and the pandemic's new working environment, we really required to rethink in how we shared some of that content with our designers and engineers.

So when we talk about our existing templates and our starting point, the point at which we look to restructure, we had a fully functional set of 2D and 3D Civil 3D templates. They included templates to cover some of our roads and corridors, land development, water resources, environmental, land management. They were all based on the national CAD standards, or NCS. Again, we had metric and imperial variants. And we also had templates that were regionally based.

We had templates for the Americas, Europe, and the Middle East, and of course, Australia and New Zealand. When we shifted into this pandemic and are working at home needs, things seem to change overnight. We shifted away from our traditional design teams and instead, migrated into more of a digital collaboration group. It no longer mattered where our team partners were situated, whether they were in the cubicle beside us or in the office on the other side of the globe.

We now had access and resources around the globe. That, of course, led us to think about a cloud-based sharing platform and drove the need for greater consistency and flexibility in our templates. The graphic in the top right is one of my favorites, never ever think outside the box. Well, that's not true with templates. We always tell our staff, always think outside the box.

And to start that journey, we started by talking with other stakeholders, and really ascertain what our template requirements were. Again, we started with a fully functional set of templates. But what we found was that we needed a new workflow, new flexibility, so that we could serve some of our largest BIM projects or multidisciplinary projects with teams both internally at GHD and external, yet clear and concise, easy to consume templates for our day-to-day modeling activities.

So how do you create a template that can be used by everyone? Well, as we discovered, you can't. So we started with our workshops. We pulled in our champions from around the globe, roads and rail experts, land development experts, water resources. We wanted to make sure everyone had a voice. And one of the first things that they shared was that these needed to be living documents with the ability to update and distribute that content, so that at the request of a special project or a need, we had the ability to make those modifications and distribute that extra flexibility to our designers and engineer.

We needed well-defined and very consistent workflows. We all know consistency equals efficiency. And as we talk a little bit later on about Dynamo and automation, we use that programming to access some of our standardized consistent workflows and data mining those drawings. So if we're able to search out those same elements in each of our drawings, that's going to drive efficiency.

Concise templates, we needed to make sure while working from home that we had an easy to consume variation of our templates to offer. And through COVID with VPN connections, varying internet speeds, we didn't want to distribute a single large template, bloated if you will. We wanted to give people very concise information that they could consume. And it all had to work in a common data environment, like BIM 360, easy to access, easy to upload, and accessible by all, not only internally, but our external partners as well.

And lastly, we needed flexibility in our standards. Now again, we use the national CAD standards as a basis, NCS. But we also wanted to think about adding additional flexibility, consistency to start then flexibility to really drive efficiency. What else did our template requirements need? Well, some of our workshops, of course, started with ISO 19650 and its compliance. We needed to make sure that our new templates could generate enough controls, checks, and more importantly, records of some of the different steps we went through taking our model through various stages of LOD, level of detail.

Working in the cloud, we wanted to make sure our central storage system would maintain our 3D models. Access through the cloud was key. That in turn opened up for collaboration opportunities, model coordination between our Civil 3D groups around the globe, external and internal, and of course, automation. We're going to talk a lot about automation over the next hour and leveraging things like property sets to make sure we have consistency while we're producing those models.

And lastly, and perhaps most importantly, reference templates, relatively new functionality in Civil 3D. It allows us to offer layers of standardization and functionality at your fingertips. And think LEGO, as I like to say. The other day my daughter was playing with a new LEGO set. And as I watched her open the box, she carefully took out the instructions and looked over the easy to follow steps with fantastic graphics. They were even bag sorted to match each of those steps.

Well, I remembered back to my days of playing with LEGO. And I started by dumping out a large box of pieces on the floor and then spent hours sorting through the pieces to find the pieces I needed. Talk about inefficient. That's what reference templates are all about, giving you the pieces you need on the projects that you need them on.

Also, when setting up and restructuring your templates, we want to take you back to Autodesk's best practices. Why recreate the wheel if they've already done that for us? We have a fantastic wealth of knowledge accessible right through Civil 3D. We'll watch a short video in a moment. We also wanted to pre-define objects, so object layers worked with our NCS standards. And in developing and restructuring our templates, we went through and checked all the commands.

We wanted to make sure that everything was accounted for. As we all know, with each new version of Civil 3D, there's a few new commands added. So each year when we're looking to migrate our templates to the next current version, we always go through the list of commands to make sure that we've included all of them.

And lastly, descriptions, descriptions, descriptions. We'll talk more in a minute about the importance. But when creating elements in Civil 3D, always add a description. It's metadata. And we can use Dynamo to data mine and isolate that metadata. And we'll talk about some of the powers in that in a moment.

So let's have a look at some of those best management practices and where to access them. So in Civil 3D, go up to your help menu and select the Help button, expand the 2023 help button. And you'll see the table of contents down the left hand side. So if you select the best practice guide, you can see all the wonderful topics that they have there. We'll talk a lot about the templates and styles today.

Also down under the project management section, and something that doesn't get talked about enough, is the projects folder structure. Again, think standardization, consistency, which allows for easy data mining using Dynamo. When setting up your project's folder structure, make sure it has all the standard folders that you need. Autodesk offers these with the inclusion of Civil 3D. And then depending on the complexity of your project, ensure to add enough folder structure to control some of the incoming data as it passes through different levels of detail, LOD, and of course, some of the outgoing models as they get published into BIM 360 or consumed inside of Navisworks.

So you want to make sure that your folder structure can accommodate some of the smaller straightforward projects and of course, some of the larger multidisciplinary BIM projects. So now let's talk a little about reference templates. Now, first offered back in 2017 Civil 3D, reference templates offered us a fantastic way to layer that data. Again, thinking LEGO and giving us only the pieces we need.

Our new structure looked at our primary templates, which consisted of our standard 2D template, some of our standard offerings. We had our base Civil 3D template. It included things like our predefined objects. We had a primary template to control some of our survey applications, processing, creation of existing conditions models. And we had variations that were unit-based and even some with language variants.

The power really came with the reference template. And our reference templates included things like our corridor template. We'll get into more details about that new function in a moment. But we also had quarter templates for roads and for rail. We had a Civil design reference template. We also had a reference template to control all of our layers, blocks, text, and styles, and some based on regional requirements, or even client requirements.

And of course, we had a number of property set templates, one to assist with our quantity takeoffs, one to include that rich metadata in our federated models. And what did that workflow look like? Well, starting at the top with our BIM manager, and as they're preparing the BIM execution plan, we wanted the BIM manager to go through our template offerings and select the templates that they were going to need based on the project requirements.

That would allow the BIM manager to add those layers of functionality, project-based, client-based, regionally. Flexibility is key. And that's what reference templates help us achieve. So when we talk about a template structure, this is just an example of a few of our templates. But again, we have our primary 2D templates. They're essentially blank templates. But they have references to some of our design templates, metric or imperial.

We'll have our primary base templates. And these are the ones that really get the Civil 3D modeler started, predefined point groups, surfaces, sites, our description keys, things of that nature. Again, we talked a little about our primary survey template. And these are essentially a stand alone template that someone can get in and start working.

Reference templates, again, start to provide that layer of functionality on top of that. We had a CAD reference template, which brings all the goodies such as some of our specific Civil layers, blocks, and line types, and for a number of different specialties. So we'll have a reference template for a land development group, one for electrical design group, structural, things of that nature.

Of course, we'll have our design templates, which really bring in all the Civil 3D settings and styles for objects, and of course, some variants of our property sets. And again, we're going to be talking a lot about property sets today. And when referenced, these templates together with the different layers of functionality give you the tools to model efficiency.

So what does that look like graphically? Well, a standard template structure-- and this is just an example image-- really creates your reference templates to suit a specific project's design requirements. So we have our BIM manager as we're producing the plan select some of the different templates they need. The yellow boxes signify the template reference points.

So you can add that reference template functionality and create your new project template. We'll show you a bit how that works with a video. And that allows you to create the different drawings while referencing in some of the elements that project may need. You can add them. You can unreferenced them. That's the functionality.

And when we take a step back and look at a higher level, we look at it in two parts. First, again, the BIM manager and really setting up the project's template structure, primary templates, layers of reference templates. That gets then handed down to our design managers, so they can take that structure for that project and start to create our corridors, our models. And if needed, they can add in additional reference templates for some of our quantity take offs and some of our planned production needs.

It's a fantastic way to organize your projects and again, giving people just the information they need when they need it. So in summarizing restructuring your templates, look out for the best practices. Again, help menu, best practice guide, it's all there. Look for ways to create that single source of truth. Create your templates. Get them on the cloud. Make sure they're easily accessible.

And when you're talking about project templates, global templates, client templates, remember, there's a reference for that. Create reference templates to give that different functionality. Use DWTs for your reference templates. And here's a question for you. The variable AEC reference template auto update, should it be set to 0 or 1? We'll look to our class handout for the answer. That's your homework assignment as you're listening through today's session.

So next, we're going to show you a little about some of those templates and how they look. So here on the screen, we have a number of different templates. And essentially, what we want to do is go up on the Manage tab. And if you look to the right, you'll see the Reference button. When you select that, it's going to open up our attach reference template menu.

And here is where you're going to be able to attach, reference, even order some of the different reference templates. So if we go back to our reference template and look at some of the elements that are in it, again, on Manage tab, the set reference template dialog, that's going to open up our dialogue box with all the different elements that are included in this reference template. That's where you control it.

So let's go back to our link drawing. And we'll have a look at how those controls interact with one another. So we can look at some of the general items, some of the styles, some of the notes. And in the column on the far right, you can see the reference template that brings that into your current drawing. That's how you can see the linkage.

There's settings there for you description key sets, shows your external data references. It's all there. And again, columns will show you which template you're accessing. Jumping back to the point groups, you can see we have an assortment of point groups that were brought forward, different site settings, even some of our pressure network functionality. It all gets brought in through some of the reference templates that we can attach. Absolutely fantastic functionality. Read up on it. It is incredibly powerful.

And also when talking about reference templates, we can't forget about the newest functionality when we're talking about our reference templates. So we've all created our corridors. If you go to your Corridor button and activate your corridor [AUDIO OUT] menu, we'll have our standard elements that we're all used to seeing, corridor name. We can give it a description, spur number one. We have our default corridor layer. It's going to be alignment and profile baseline type.

We of course, have some of the alignments that are pre-selected. We'll pick an assembly and a target surface. But then brand new near the bottom is that selection box for the corridor templates. When we pick it, it'll allow us to browse to some of the corridor templates that we have access to. You can pick a DWT or DWG file. We recommend a DWT. And when picking that, it's going to bring in that template's functionality into your drawing.

It's going to pull up lists, surfaces, corridors, slope patterns, et cetera. You're going to be able to select which elements in that reference template you want to use in that project. So that's where the power comes in. You're not giving someone a singular template, where they have to spend time sorting through menu after menu finding that functionality. Based on a specific project's need or even a client's need, you can have a reference template with just a few items in it.

And that way they know what to use and when to use it, very, very powerful. So now that we've talked a little about structure of our new templates, let's talk a little more about property sets, or as I like to call it metadata for Civil 3D. So when talking about property sets, think about how metadata could change your workflow, how it would enrich your models. Well, think about buying a new car. That window sticker represents a particular car's metadata.

Does it have the options you need? Or do you need to bring in more options? Does it have the uses covered based on your needs? And of course, looking at its costs. Some basic examples on what metadata is. So when we look at metadata in the real world, let's look at another video.

Here in this drawing, we're using metadata to control some of our labels. So if we go to our defined property set menu, you can see we have a number of predefined properties sets, one for general labels. And when we look at that, you can see the definition of when those labels are attached to objects and how they're controlled.

And by selecting the line layer property set, you can see how we've made that attachment. So once we're able to look down into our pipe classes, you can also see that through property sets we can determine the class of pipe. And here you can see on the screen, if we select one of our pipes and if we go to some of that pipes extended data, you can see some of the information and how we're able to easily update it.

We can click on the pipe class, very quickly change it. We can type the material type and change it, here switching to concrete. And you can see in real time that label automatically updates in both plan and profile, again, consistency and ease of use.

Now if we look at just a very basic line segment, let's look at a very straightforward label, just saying line label. So we can go into that extended data. We can change that line label to something custom, something predefined. It's easy to change labels of those objects.

But where the real power comes in is when we're able to use property sets that link back to our descriptions. Remember, descriptions, descriptions, descriptions. So we can add a label that draws the layer's description and assigns that label to the object. And if we want to change that label, we simply have to select that element, or in this case, the line, and move it to a different layer. If we switch it to the curb layer, the label automatically updates to back of curb.

That's some of the functionality property sets can bring and how simple and easy it is to change some of those labels. It's a fantastic way to introduce some of that power at your fingertips.

So let's talk a little more about how it can change your workflow. Let's take a common roadway element, like curb and gutter. What metadata would you like to add? Well, think about some of the important differences in the different curb typings. You have barrier curbs, or mountable curbs. At entrances, we need a drop curb. You have straight curb or circular. And remember, a contractor needs different equipment to construct a straight versus a circular curb.

You can have a wide gutter, standard, or even no gutter. Does it have any accessibility standards? Do you need tactile plates at the crosswalks, pedestrian push button pole? Again, adding some of that metadata as client standards will help you add that rich data to your drawings.

So if we look at another example, say a pipe network, and again, thinking about what metadata would you add to those pipe networks? Well, we showed you in the video example how we can change the class of pipe. You can also change the material, different coatings. If you're in an acid rain environment, maybe you need a polymer coated pipe or an aluminized pipe, different durability requirements, and of course, client standards. Is there a specific type of pipe which place [AUDIO OUT]. You can use presets to get some of that metadata attached to those objects.

And keep in mind, you can create property sets to encompass that object's complete lifecycle not just during design. And again, thinking in a BIM environment with your level of detail. But you can take that through design into construction having property sets for some of the metadata that you can add for as-built information, maybe a change in station offset or elevation, or even a change in pipe diameter.

And of course, during that asset's full life cycle, during its maintenance period, when was that entity installed? When was it last repaired? When was the pipe last cleaned out? That's all metadata. And you can have property sets to control that data.

Now that we have our metadata added, let's talk about some of the fantastic uses. And some of the things we did with our templates was to look at areas where we could gain the greatest efficiency. How can we speed up some of those picks and clicks? Well, we now use Dynamo to generate quantities. We use it to update the metadata. You can export an object's metadata, use a spreadsheet to update that metadata, load it back in, and attach it to that object.

You can use it to export your critical path schedule. So if you have a property set-- and let's talk about that curb and gutter example-- you can introduce a property set for your production rates, maybe 200 meters a day for straight, 80 meters a day for circular, even input a five day cure time if that's what's required. You can then use Dynamo to export those curb and gutter elements out of your drawing and generate a critical path schedule. That's some of the power.

And if you're talking about estimates, you can create pay items, property sets for pay items, so that you can attach costs, unit pricing, to the various types of curb, 75 meters for a wide gutter barrier curb, maybe 35 meters for a standard drop curb. You can then use Dynamo to export, again, those curb elements and generate an estimate. That's the power.

As we move one step beyond, our federated models end up in Navisworks. So by adding property sets to our 3D solids, it's going to give our Navisworks model all the information that our designers and engineers need to endorse it, our contractors need to build it, and our owners need to make sure they're maintaining that infrastructure properly. Import all this information into Navisworks, so it's all viewable in that model.

So if we look at one of our Navisworks models, here we have a model. We're going to use a section plane just to kind of peel back some of the views. And we have some red ducts that are electrical, some orange ducts that are communication, green are large vaults, and so on. But what I wanted to show you was how we can look at a Navisworks model, once we have our Civil 3D completed and imported with all of our rich metadata and property sets, how we're able to turn over that model with that metadata attach to allow our owners to endorse that model.

They're able to follow through slice by slice, follow each piece of infrastructure as it moves around some of the existing utilities, through vaults. They're able to track each element and attached to each one of those elements is that metadata. What's the size? What's the class? What's the depth? Whatever metadata you wish to add, you can create a property set to attach that data. It all follows that object into Navisworks. That's the power.

So as we start looking at the slicing and we start looking at our model, you can see how we're able to very easily track each object where it comes from, where it goes to, and at any time view that specific element's metadata. Again, it's that rich metadata that makes our models powerful. That's really the key in using property sets in this way.

So we've talked a little more about the structure. Let's talk about the procedures we need to make sure that we're not only managing the content, but migrating it annually with each new release of Civil 3D. Well, once we started to create our new templates, we quickly realized this was more than just one person's job. So we looked to separate the assignment of responsibility in these various templates. And we came up with the following structure.

So we have our CAD managers that look after our primary templates. They'll look after things like our annual migration to each new version of the Civil 3D. When new functionality is added to Civil 3D, they'll look at adding a new content. So we can offer our designers and engineers templates that allow them to use that functionality consistently.

Of course, we look to make sure that we recruit champions to assist with that development, spreading out the efforts to create some of that. And we like to hold monthly workshops to make sure that our template development teams are talking, sharing lessons learned on some of our successful projects, and maybe more importantly, some of the lessons learned where some of our templates fell a little short the functionality we needed. All that gets addressed in real time.

And when we're talking about cloud-based storage and real time syncing, again, living documents, think functionality. The second level is our BIM managers. They're going to be responsible for things like our metadata standards. What metadata needs to get attached to which objects at the different stages of our level of detail, LOD?

They'll look at things like ISO 19650 compliance that we mentioned earlier, making sure that we have the right tracking as our model goes through to its final stages. We'll include things like our code set styles to make sure we have consistency across our models.

And lastly, it's the BIM manager's responsibility to make sure that they assemble the project's template structure, again, thinking LEGO. They're going to generate instructions from your BIM execution plan. They're going to grab the primary templates and all the reference templates that that project needs. Lastly is our design managers. And they're going to be the ones responsible for the discipline-specific reference template content.

So we'll have a design manager from our electrical group make sure that our electrical reference template is well developed. We'll have someone from our structural group look at our structural template, roads with our corridor template, rail, et cetera. You've got to make sure you have the right people looking at the right templates.

They manage the functionality for each one of their project's components to make sure that we can accommodate each project or client's needs. So let's go back to the figure we started to talk about reference templates in that structure. So when we take a step back and look at this, we really want to think about assigning responsibility to some of these different templates, our primary templates, our reference templates, and then are different discipline-specific templates.

So assign responsibility. Document what's in those templates and share that material. And of course, mentor. So as we're using the templates, make sure their creators are active in supporting those design groups. All right, now let's get into Dynamo and some of the custom Python nodes you can create.

Now, first offered in Civil 3D 2020, Dynamo has been a big part of our workflow ever since. So while we leverage the power of the API, Dynamo allows us to create graphs by selecting nodes. You join the nodes together to automate your workflows. And you can use Python to create custom nodes.

Dynamo is a visual programming application, or as I like to call it, it's programming for all of us non-programmers. And it is an absolute game changer when it comes to modeling in Civil 3D. So let's talk about some of the examples. Well, when first talking about Dynamo, I like to talk about rule-based design and coding to automate some of those processes.

So the first things we started to add into our templates was some of that rule-based design. So let's take a corridor drawing as an example. We'll have an alignment. We'll have an original ground terrain model. We can use Dynamo to read the alignment and understand the difference between our tangents and our horizontal curves.

We can then data mine the horizontal curves to know which ones exceed the minimum requirements in our design criteria file and which ones are less than. In other words, we can find out which curves along our roadway need an advance sharp curve sign. Dynamo can help do that. We can also use Dynamo to extract all of our structures and pipes to solids, to read some of the property set values, and apply those to the solids.

We can then export some of that data to IFC and import the IFCs into Navisworks to validate all that information. So when talking about some of the different aspects of that metadata and using Dynamo, I have some examples on the screen I wanted to talk quickly about each. In the top left, we have one of our single lane roundabouts, a straightforward design, but one that very heavily leveraged our new templates and some of our new property sets and Dynamo routines to drive the efficiency of this project right through the roof.

We used Dynamo to generate some of our quantity takeoffs. So again, thinking back to some of our curb and gutter examples we talked about earlier, we have a central island with a curb and gutter. We have our splitter islands surrounded by curb and gutter. We can use Dynamo to export that to generate our quantities, our costs, and our schedule to build.

In the lower left, we have a stormwater pond. We were able to use Dynamo to place some of the vegetation along the banks based on some of the survey data points, feature lines. It was a fantastic way to add realism to some of our models. And of course, we showed a brief video about some of our underground infrastructure projects. And we of course, use Dynamo to control the application of some of our metadata to some of those objects.

So let's look at another video. So under the Manage tab, let's head over to the far right side of the screen. And let's select the Dynamo player. That's going to open our Dynamo menu on top of Civil 3D. And I wanted to share this straightforward graph that comes with Civil 3D out of the box that really got us thinking about the powers of property sets. So this basic graph, again, out of the box Civil 3D, load it up, play with it, push the boundaries of it.

It allows us to select a drawing that we wish to data mine. It's then going to look for a couple of blocks. Here we've input a concrete tie and an OCS center block. So Dynamo is going to help us data mining this drawing, extract those blocks, and generate those block references. It will also allow us to attach our property set definitions to those block references. And lastly, it's going to get the objects, the property sets connected together, and then update them with the manufacturer's name, here simply ABC, a very straightforward graph that we then used as a springboard to start to create more and more property set updating graphs.

A fantastic way to start to automate some of your new processes based on the new templates that you've created, the new structure. So let's look at automation as a whole. Leveraging consistency, that's really what it's about. So think from the top. We restructured our templates. We standardized a lot of our offerings, which allowed us to really understand our workflows, compartmentalize it, if you will. We could then automate select components of that, exporting quantities, generating costs, or our construction schedules.

We could then deploy those automation tools enterprise wide. Because once we are offering our templates to our global workforce, we could then use those automation tools on each and every one of our models. Consistency is key. It's all about the consistency.

And that takes us to the last portion of this talk, which is the efficiency and what it all means. So once you have new templates, you've restructured them, you're updating them annually, you're offering them to your designers and engineers for easy consumption, let's look at our realized efficiency. So starting back in 2007, we adopted Civil 3D. And it was the foundational level training and the implementation of the parametric modeling software that really got us started.

We're talking about Civil 3D. But that of course, includes Revit, Navisworks, and some of the other applications. Well, fast forward to 2017 and Civil 3D's introduction of reference templates. And that's when our journey really started. That's when we started to look at a better way to restructure our templates and offer them in little, easy to consume bits and bites. We changed the way we provided consistency through those restructured templates.

We have our corporate and client templates. We have a slew of reference templates. We even have our custom requirements and additional set of reference templates for those. 2020 was another big milestone step because we were able to then leverage Dynamo, which meant automation. We started to eliminate the randomness in our projects from team to team. We developed standardized workflows to drive consistency.

We tried to leverage our new templates and the consistency they offered and pair it with Dynamo, data mining, grabbing some of those elements, and really standardizing how we did things. That includes our project setup, documentation. It all comes down to the standardization. And since 2020 and up to the current date, we continue to use property sets. We have more and more reference templates that deal specifically with property sets each and every day. It's an unparalleled efficiency gain.

We develop our property sets to enhance the consistency, so we can leverage automation in our projects. Again, we're data mining some of those common elements. So by creating property set information, code set styles, even our layers, and again, descriptions, descriptions, descriptions, we can then search out those common elements. We use it for design documentation, quantities, and of course, estimating, and scheduling.

So what do all these gains mean? Well, if we take a step back and look at it a high level, we saw an immediate gain of 40% when we started to implement our parametric workflows. It was an incredible gain off the hop. When we looked at the reference templates, we saw a further 10% gain. We are giving people what they needed when they needed it. And it was an incredible power to give people a set of reference templates to suit their project's need, of course, based on the execution plan.

Automation, 20% plus, depends on what you're automating and how many tasks you're trying to automate. It's an incredibly powerful tool. So look to Dynamo and look at Python and how you can leverage the API. And lastly, property sets, we're seeing incredible gains in property sets. And numbers are still coming in. Again, we're using them to generate quantity reports, using them to attach and update metadata in our models, using them to generate some of our schedules. It's an incredibly powerful tool.

So in summary, we wanted to make sure that you could define your template requirements to attain consistency in your workflows. So look at your operations and see which reference templates you think your teams are going to need. Look at some of your successful projects. What you've done to create those successful models is already there as far as styles, line types, layers. Bring those forward and migrate them into some of your reference templates. Utilize the new functionality in Civil 3D, reference templates, corridor templates, for road, for rail, and of course, property sets.

Look at how some of these customized templates can help drive the efficiency of your design groups. Look at your workflows. Look at the elements that your designers and engineers are spending time on. Those are the ones to target for automation first. Next, set up a team to manage your new template content. Cloud-based sharing is going to take what used to server-based operations to the next level.

It's going to make sure that on your larger BIM megaprojects your internal teams are going to collaborate seamlessly with your external partners. And of course, once you have this consistency in a new offering, it's going to allow you to use Dynamo to take that efficiency to the next level. And again, Python and some of the custom programming to create some of the specific nodes you need will take things to the next level.

So with that, we're going to move to our live Q&A session and answer some of the questions that you have. Thank you.