Demolish bidding data silos & unlock insights: A primer for precon leaders

MARY HOLM: Welcome to our session on demolishing data silos in preconstruction and unlocking insights. It's a primer for preconstruction leaders. Please do not take anything mentioned in this session as a guarantee of future results. Do not make any buying decisions based off of information you hear today, although we do hope you'll be excited about some of the options that we present you with.

I'm Mary Holm. I'm the Senior Engineering Manager for Development here in Preconstruction, focused on the BuildingConnected Pro and Bid Work Pro products.

ALICE ADELMAN: And I'm Alice Adelman I'm an Integration Solutions Engineer here at Autodesk, focusing on working with our customers to build out custom integration workflows and connecting their data between Autodesk applications like building connected and other third-party applications in their tech stack.

MARY HOLM: Here's a little preview of what we'll cover in this session. We're going to start off by talking about why it's important to demolish those data silos in preconstruction, give you a glimpse of BuildingConnected if you're not already familiar with it. And then Alice will take us into demystifying APIs and the BuildingConnected-specific API and real-world use cases.

So to start, demolishing data silos in preconstruction. Connecting data across those preconstruction workflows and systems is critical to increasing efficiency, unlocking insights, and driving your business forward. But during that preconstruction phase, information often remains siloed. It's trapped in binders and spreadsheets. It's on whiteboards. It's in emails. All of that information sharing is delayed, if it happens at all.

This disconnect means partners operate on different versions of reality, using whatever data they happen to have access to regardless of whether it's incomplete, inaccurate, or both. It sets teams up to miss deadlines, make errors, and decreases overall productivity. What we want to do is break down barriers. So for your preconstruction process to run efficiently, it's important keep that data, the people and the projects connected right from the start.

One way to do that is a centralized bid management solution, such as BuildingConnected. Connected BuildingConnected Pro features cover a whole host of solutions for you, from bid forms and bid leveling, to relationship tracking, to NDAs and sealed bids. You can read more about it on this slide or on our website.

BuildingConnected is the largest real-time construction network connecting owners and builders through an easy-to-use platform to streamline the bid and risk management process. The product suite includes both BuildingConnected Pro, which helps builders solicit prices during the bidding phase of construction, and Bid Board Pro, which helps bidders manage their invite flow.

In BuildingConnected Pro, we have the Builders Network. It is the largest network of construction professionals available here in the US, and there's a personalized search to help match you with just the right professional for the job and for the location where you're trying to work. You can filter by many different features.

Our vendor profiles are also available here for you to drill down into. After you've filtered and you found those vendors who are offering that trade, you can quickly see if they're qualified to work on that specific type of project. Not all ceilings are made the same. You can search and track diverse trade partners based on certifications.

Do they have the certificates needed to qualify for certain programs? And you can ensure vendors have the experience performing the trades in the right locations. You can see how many projects they have completed and really drill down into a lot of details. You can also create bid packages. You can send bid invitations in minutes. You have details of the project, design files, and customized forms all at your fingertips, all included in BuildingConnected Pro, ensuring that bids are received in a standard format.

You send out invites and see exactly what's happening with your project all in one place, easily managing each step from project drawings to final bid, and everything in between. That bid history that I said is at your fingertips has all of that historical cost based on region, trade, market sector, all data that you can leverage to create more accurate budgets and estimate better in your future. We're going to come back to how you can get that data and integrate it into other solutions in your bid pipeline and your process later when we get to Alice's section.

You can also do side-by-side bid leveling, choosing the best subcontractor for your project and reducing risk earlier with robust bid comparison capabilities. You can update line items to instantly adjust those totals and comparisons. You can answer and ask yes/no questions. You can plug in missing costs. You can leverage TradeTapp to reduce risk up front, see which subs are qualified. The more bid leveling is used, the easier it is to properly assess expenses. This again, those plugs, that's all data. That's your data, data that can unlock insights for you down the road.

Within BuildingConnected Pro, you can also get unparalleled insights across your company with detailed performance metrics, historical cost tracking. You can view costs based on region, trade, market sector. You can leverage this information to create more accurate budgets and estimate better in the future, gain insights into your vendor relationships, tracking their bidding activity, their frequency, get company-wide metrics, track wins by location, and know which vendors are responsive, which vendors are not. Submit the most proposals, earn the most wins.

Bid Board Pro, the subcontractor side, also has a robust set of features. It allows you to manage your bid invites all in one place. You can keep all of your bids organized and streamlined, whether they come from BuildingConnected Pro, or you forward them in from emails that you receive through other sources. You can manage it all here.

You can also find more GCs bidding on your projects. Sometimes, you want to submit bids to more than one, upping your chances to get in. The software allows you to find those and source those so that you can contribute. Again, company-wide are available in this product as well. A robust set of features to check hit rates, track team performance. Different data than you were looking at in the BuildingConnected Pro side, but just as important to this side of the business.

With the BuildingConnected API, you get access to all of that key bidding and opportunity data we just talked about in BuildingConnected Pro and Bid Board. We hear clients say, we're not big enough, we don't want to get into APIs. We disagree. We think that these APIs benefit everybody, no matter what size your company or trade. You can all benefit immensely by learning how to use them effectively.

APIs make it possible to connect data from different systems. It eliminates those silos. They automate workflows. They save time. They reduce your manual work. Finally, they address business needs by creating flexible and custom integrations to help drive your business. This is all to say that APIs keep the data, the people and the projects connected right from the start. And now I'll turn it over to Alice, who will help demystify all of those APIs for us.

ALICE ADELMAN: Great. Thank you, Mary. Hi, everyone. So now that you've learned a little bit about our built-in connected functionality and some of the features that it offers, now we're going to dive a little bit into BuildingConnected's APIs and talk about what the API capabilities offer, and how you can use the BuildingConnected API to help connect your data, not only within BuildingConnected, but also with other third-party applications in your tech stack.

So first, starting super high-level, our overall strategy at Autodesk Construction Solutions has always been to build a robust ecosystem, with all of the best-of-breed construction technology applications out there, right. So we understand that our customers leverage a variety of different tools, and we want our solutions to be able to work and integrate seamlessly with those tools.

And there's a number of ways that we've worked to allow this. So we've got a number of different ways to integrate here at Autodesk Construction Solutions. We have partner cards, for example, on Build and BIM 360, allowing customers to embed data from other applications into their ACC projects.

But more importantly, we offer APIs, which allow you to enable direct API integrations with our applications. So while partner cards are great for viewing embedded data from other applications, our API integrations actually allow for the copying and transferring of data between our applications and other third party applications in your tech stack, so being able to share key insights, or archiving or centralizing data, or triggering notifications across tools for updates and other solutions.

So what is an API? So an API stands for Application Programming Interface, and it's essentially just a way for two programs to communicate with each other without having to give up core code or proprietary technology. So when two systems-- it can be websites, applications, or even smartphones-- communicate through an API, we say they are integrated.

And in an integration, you have two sides. So in this case, one side, you have Autodesk Construction Cloud, which is the server that contains all of our core code and databases and proprietary technology. And this is also the side that provides the APIs for all of our applications within Autodesk Platform Services, so Autodesk Build, Autodesk Docs, Autodesk Takeoff, and BuildingConnected.

And it's helpful to remember that the API is simply another program running on our server, sitting and waiting for others to ask it for data. And the other side of the integration is the client. And this is a separate program or application created within Autodesk Platform Services, and it knows what data is available through the API and can manipulate it.

And this would be typically at the request of a user or an automated workflow built by an integration platform like Autodesk Construction Cloud Connect, which we'll double-click on in a bit. So when one site pulls data from the other, the site providing the data, in this case, Autodesk Construction Cloud is acting as the server. And the site fetching the data, in this case, your custom app or integration workflow built on Autodesk Platform Services, is the client.

So here is an example of a request call. So on the right, you have your Autodesk Construction Cloud Connect custom workflow, and it is making a call to extract or get opportunity data from the BuildingConnected API. So it's sending a request to this endpoint, this opportunity endpoint. That request is going to the resource server where it is pulling from the BuildingConnected API.

And then once it has the data, we are pushing that data in a JSON response format, which is essentially just a data tree, and pushing it into your third-party applications so that you can access your opportunity or vendor contact, or project data, for example, from BuildingConnected in your other third-party application without either side having to share any core code or proprietary technology. So in this way, integrations allow you to have a safe way to communicate with other platforms.

And our APIs all exist within Autodesk Platform Services, which I've been mentioning. And Autodesk Platform Services is a platform for developers to build solutions in the cloud, and allows you to build out custom workflows to meet your specific needs or your business requirements. So the way these custom solutions tie into the platform is through our growing ecosystem of web services and Application Programming Interfaces, or APIs.

And these services accelerate app development, leading you to extend the use of your Autodesk tools like BuildingConnected into other third-party applications. So in this way, our APIs and services can be combined with those other third-party software systems you already have, allowing you to connect your data and break down those silos.

So when it comes to our APIs, our mission is to enable our partners to be able to easily and seamlessly tie into our system, to not just better enable data to be shared, but also to share the right data at the right time across the right applications. So in doing so, we've made APIs available across our entire Autodesk Construction Cloud portfolio, as you can see here.

So we have APIs for Autodesk build being able to integrate with project files, forms, assets, asset data, issue data, RFI data, and photos. We also have APIs for our cost objects as well, so being able to integrate with budgets, expenses, and change orders, and bringing that into ERP or accounting tools. We also have APIs for Autodesk Docs allowing you to push and pull project files, being able to export project files out of Docs, uploading that into a cloud storage tool, for example, or vice versa.

Autodesk Takeoff, being able to export takeoff packages and quantities from your sheets and models in Autodesk Takeoff. Bringing that into estimating tools or project management tools like Smartsheet for reporting purposes. And finally, one which we'll double-click on a lot today is the BuildingConnected API, so being able to integrate big data, project data, and vendor contact data, and bringing that into a variety of tools.

So double-clicking on the BuildingConnected API specifically, so how can you use the API and what data can you share? So here are some of the most common data modules we integrate with and some examples of workflows you can build out with the API. And we'll definitely dig further into all of these later on in the presentation, but just to give a high-level overview of what data can be shared and what can be achieved.

So you can use the API to sync things like bid package data, project cost data, and vendor contact data, bringing that into data warehouses or data lakes to be shared with external sources. You can automatically sync data objects, like opportunities and vendors, to generate that same type of data in other systems, so that you're working off of the same set of data across multiple applications. And you can also create automated workflows like opportunity creation workflows, or invite notifications to notify the correct project team members of certain actions that have taken place in your application.

Autodesk Construction Cloud is another step we've taken to drive data quality and data sharing for our customers across the construction lifecycle. So going a step further with enabling API integrations, we not only offer access to our APIs to customers to build so that your customers can build out API calls and integrations, but we also have our own integration platform, ACC Connect.

So ACC Connect is our integration platform-as-a-service tool powered by Workato that allows you to easily build out integration workflows to integrate and transfer your data between Autodesk applications and other critical software systems in your tech stack. So you can synchronize data, and here are some examples here, cloud storage tools, PM and ERPs, business intelligence solutions, CRMs, e-signature, and many more.

And what's unique about ACC Connect is that rather than some of our partner-built integrations, or our partner cards, or native integrations, ACC Connect is a platform that allows you to build highly customized and bespoke workflows to sync data in a way that fits your needs or your processes.

And it does this by leveraging triggers between systems to watch for certain actions being completed or certain data points getting updated, and then those triggers will set off your different action steps in the order and sequence that you want, and also your scheduled cadence that you want, and in this way, help keep all of your different applications up to date in the way that you need them to be up to date.

So you can see here on the left is a little screenshot of a workflow that is syncing your BuildingConnected contact data into a table in Snowflake. So you can see that it's a very easy drag-and-drop interface that allows you to drag and drop the different action steps in the order and in the sequence that you want, in that way building out the integration to match your processes and your requirements.

So here are just a few common use cases and some of the most common things that our customers are using ACC Connect, and examples of third-party applications that they're integrating with. So document management is a really big use case for us, so being able to synchronize like project files, for example, with cloud storage tools.

Project Management reporting and analytics is also another big use case for us, so being able to synchronize data points with tools like Smartsheet, Excel Online and Google Sheets. We also have the ability to extract data out of our tools and bring it into a data lake or a data warehouse so that tools like Power BI and Tableau can run dashboards on top of those database tables to build out company-wide reporting dashboards.

And then Trello and Asana, which are more task-based, horizontal software applications, we can synchronize data points like issues or RFIs from ACC with those tools as well. Finally, accounting is another big use case for us, being able to extract data, bringing it into your ERPs or accounting tools to enable automatic billing or invoice, or being able to extract data for cost modeling or budget planning as well.

So now we're going to dive into a little bit of some real-world example use cases and some of the most common workflows that we see our customers using our BuildingConnected APIs for. And just to really hone in on one point, the BuildingConnected API-- I know we talked about this a little bit before, but just wanted to double-click on the fact that the API is available on Autodesk Platform Services, our cloud-based developer platform for Autodesk.

So on the BuildingConnected page, you will find a community and resources available to help, along with tutorials, newsletters, and APS Tuesdays, which is a free weekly webinar for anyone interested in powering digital transformations or insightful dashboarding, or enterprise integrations and automations and more. And on the BuildingConnected API cover page, you'll find documentation specific to our API, including a reference guide, a developer's guide, and a step-by-step tutorial.

All right, so first up, one example of a big use case for us leveraging data in external systems. So many of our customers use on-prem or legacy products that don't offer direct integration capabilities but are still built on databases. So we have the ability to integrate with those databases and then push that data into those legacy tools.

So through the BuildingConnected API, all bid package and project cost data are available. And using our API web services, you can extract that bid data and cost data and bring that into a centralized data lake or database to then be used by tools like partnering estimating tools or dashboard visualization applications.

So here is kind of a little example of one of those workflows. So with ACC Kinect's integration with BuildingConnected, you can perform ongoing data retrieval for extract, transform, and load or ETL processes. So you can store all of your BuildingConnected data in your own data warehouse.

And the workflow can then regularly retrieve your company's BuildingConnected project, bid package, invite qualification data, and vendor contact data, and periodically check for updates of this data. And that data can then be exported into databases to then be used in external systems like CRMs or ERPs, estimating tools, or various data analytics tools.

Another common BuildingConnected use case is connecting your opportunity data with your CRM. So bid board is, as Mary previously mentioned, the largest generator of new invite data in North America. And with the Bid Board API capabilities, you can pipe your opportunity data into leading CRM solutions to manage your opportunities in your CRMs without having to perform duplicate entry.

So in this example of a workflow, with the built-in connected API and with ACC connect, you can create a workflow to retrieve and use Bid Board opportunity data to manage your opportunities in your own CRM application. So as a BuildingConnected invite team, Bid Board enables you to centralize all opportunity creation, and opportunities are created automatically when your company is invited to bid on a job. And you can import invites from other sources to consolidate all invites in a single platform.

And then meanwhile, ACC Connect's integration with the BuildingConnected API supports the ability to export that opportunity and bid data, and regularly import it into your CRM system. So in this way, you can use Bid Board as your primary invite management service while simultaneously operating a CRM tool like Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics without doing manual work to keep your CRM updated.

Another common use case is being able to access reliable contact data. So with the BuildingConnected API, you can access and export all invite and opportunity data, which includes relevant contact info for client trade partners. And this info can then be copied and transferred into external solutions to maintain accurate vendor contact data in all of your third-party applications.

So in this example here, ACC Connect's integration with BuildingConnected supports the ability to regularly check for new vendor information in BuildingConnected, and automatically copy that data into tools like CRMs, ERPs, and accounting tools to keep your vendor and company lists aligned automatically. And this helps alleviate not only double entry, but as well, duplicate entries due to user error in manual entry.

So for example, you may have users that are adding your company data in one system with a comma, Inc. at the end, and in another system without the comma, Inc. at the end, which can cause a mismatch in mapping data. Or it can cause duplicate entries on those companies in one system or another. So being able to copy your company data from one system to another automatically ensures that type of mismatch happens less often.

And with that, we will close the presentation. Thank you very much, everyone, for your time, and we hope you enjoyed learning a little bit about BuildingConnected as well as BuildingConnected's API and integration capabilities.