Ditch Pen and Paper and Digitize Your Estimation Process with Digital Twins

STEPHANIE LIN: Hi, everyone. Welcome to our presentation brought to you jointly by Matterport and Southland industries. We are here to present "Ditch Your Pen and Paper and Digitize Your Estimation Process with Digital Twins." We're really excited about the content that we're about to bring you. So thank you so much for joining along. And let's go ahead and get started.

So my name is Stephanie Lin. I lead our global strategy, business strategy team at Matterport. And I'm so lucky today to be joined here with the amazing John Trammell. John, would you like to give a few words about yourself?

JOHN TRAMMELL: Yeah. Thank you. I appreciate the introduction, Stephanie. Before I do that, I just wanted to say that I think this is our second or third project to collaborate on. And I just want our listeners to know that Matterport is a first class organization. And working with you and your team have been no different. Same, very much enjoyed working with you on the last three.

My name is John Trammell I am the Director of Design and Fabrication Technologies for the Southland company.

STEPHANIE LIN: Amazing. Thank you. And very much likewise, you have been the absolute consummate partner and everything, especially over the last couple of weeks as we've been preparing for this.

So thank you again for joining us today. Today, we'll be covering four main learning objectives, which include digitizing your estimation process with digital twins, which can help you reduce your site visits and errors; adopting new technology for better communication, increasing your everyday project efficiency; enhancing proposals and jumpstarting your designs in Revit and other workflows by using the power of digital twins; and ultimately, making sure that you and your company can achieve all your project KPIs by leveraging and integrating with the Autodesk and Matterport workflows.

So for those of you who might not be familiar, Matterport is the world's largest digital twin platform to access, understand, and utilize properties from anywhere you want. So as you're seeing on the screen here, whether you're working on multiple job sites or you might just need to remotely travel and visit a space again without hopping on a flight or another car ride, it's a great way to be able to leverage existing technology now, which is being able to capture a space and truly replicate having a site visit in real time at the same time as communicating all the way from your desk or your home office or even your couch.

By the technology, you can actually extract out incredible, powerful 3D data to help you create your SIM files, your CAD files and be able to integrate seamlessly with your existing Autodesk tech stack that you've already invested in and we want to help make a little bit more efficient to connect all your processes together.

JOHN TRAMMELL: Yeah. And Stephanie, I think we're going to have some really good examples to show our listeners today of everything that you just outlined.

STEPHANIE LIN: Awesome well thank you so much, John. And actually, this is perfect timing because I would love if you could also give a quick introduction to Southland.

JOHN TRAMMELL: Yeah, so I'm going to eliminate a little bit of the confusion. I think you're going to hear the word "the Brandt companies." And you're also going to hear "Southland Industries" a lot. And so the reason for that is that I was a homegrown product of the Brandt companies have been working there for 20 years. But last year in April of 2022, we were acquired by Southland Industries.

And so that makes Southland the largest MEP building systems expert in the country. Both companies, both organizations have been up and running for over 70 years. And so combined, we have over 144 years of experience in the industry. We design-- do building upgrading and maintaining energy-efficient building systems for our customers. So we are an all-in-one firm. We do engineering prefabrication, installation, and maintenance.

We have over 5,900 employees combined now. We have 22 offices across seven divisions. That's East Coast, West Coast, and all of Central America, here. Over 700,000-- this is impressive. We have over 700,000 square feet of fabrication shops. So that includes sheet metal, piping, plumbing, and electrical fabrication shops.

STEPHANIE LIN: That is a lot of space to manage on top of what you're probably helping out with all your projects and your customers out there.

JOHN TRAMMELL: Yes, ma'am.

STEPHANIE LIN: So today, we're here to talk about the topic of estimation. So what better way to start than to actually dive in a little bit into the traditional way of estimation. Every construction project stakeholder, whether you're an architect, an engineer, contractor, or owner-- we're all affected by the estimation process.

Similarly, every stakeholder, they are also knowingly or unknowingly contributes to that same estimation process. If an estimate is accurate and a bill is well received, a bid is well received, then your project can move forward, meaning meaningful work can come out of it.

And hopefully, all of us can take home a paycheck thanks to the project moving forward. With that being said, estimation really has been quite a fine art that few are lucky enough to learn well. And that's why we're so lucky to have an expert like John here join us today to be able to talk more about the process and help us learn a bit more. We're here to really shine a light on this hidden and often overlooked critical process.

So currently, detailed line item data that is needed for a good project estimation is-- it's about 30% to 40% of project costs that will involve the need to have a detailed line item modifier. What does that mean? It means you need more details. You need to describe what you're actually pricing out.

This means that line item notes are super important because, in the end, estimates absolutely must be defensible and verifiable. So in order to provide that level of analysis, your data must be collected in incredible detail, analyze in incredible detail, and ultimately, also stored for future estimates as well.

Because that is how you can help move a project forward that is similar in the future for anything else. Which leads me to, actually, this next slide. So John, maybe you can take it away and talk a little bit more about the traditional way of estimating.

JOHN TRAMMELL: Yeah, so with the traditional way of estimating, there's different variations of estimating, just like there's different variations of projects. And so since we're talking about the traditional way of estimating, I think we should talk about the traditional project, what we would call the planning spec. So a planning spec is the owner has the design already.

They've either outsourced that to a third-party engineering company or an engineering consultant company. And they have the design of the building. And then, they bring that out to the streets for people, like the Brandt Companies and Southland to bid on. And so when that happens, an RFP comes out, so a request for proposal.

And they'll give us this design package document. So that's a lot of your front-end documents, which include job-specific requirements from the GC, parking, the lay-down area, all the logistics of where it's at, the job tax and the status.

With that, they'll also provide some drawings. So you'll have an architectural background, structural backgrounds, all of your electrical. This is just really schematic. Sometimes, consultant engineers, over the years, they've really gotten to the 3D modeling and try to make it kind of coordination ready. So we get some pretty good drawings, but not all the time.

And so those controllers contain equipment, locations, and like I said, basic routing and sizing of your lines. You get schedules that define equipment sizes, quantities, and other requirements. And then, you get the specifications. And the specifications, the devil's in the detail.

That's where it tells you what type of material you're going to use. And you have to be very careful here that you're following the specifications. And I'm not sure if you've seen spec books, but they're pretty thick.

So once you gather all your design documents, and then you get into your estimation documents. And then, the process for us-- and again, this is going to be different for about every organization. But for us, it's your take off, our recap, and proposal.

And our take off is really what you want to do. You have your drawings. And we're going to use PVF, which is pipe, valves, and fittings, for our example, Stephanie. And we're going to explain that in the next slides coming up.

And then, you want to flip to it here. So here, what you're going to do-- this is typically handled through an estimating software, like Autodesk Takeoff, Trimble Accubid. We personally use FastDesk at our company. But you complete a construction takeoff to calculate the direct cost and gain a better understanding of a construction project's direct costs, which are related to materials, labor, and supplies.

And if you go-- not to-- if we went back there, Stephanie-- so most people are familiar with-- you have an on-screen takeoff, you bring your drawings in. And either you have you seen people in the office with clickers as they're actually counting fittings and they're actually trying to quantify as they're taking off each line that was provided to them on these documents.

STEPHANIE LIN: Absolutely. And I even remember helping out. Because oftentimes, these drawings can be just so complicated or even if you're walking in a site, there's just so much area to cover, as well. It's quite complicated. And exactly as you highlighted here, the labor, the hours that all add up to not just what you're calculating for, but how much is going into it.

JOHN TRAMMELL: So then, this is what we call our recap file. And again, every organization is going to be different. But this is where we capture our indirect costs. And so calculate indirect cost to include the overall construction cost of the estimate, talking about insurance costs, salaries, rental equipment if we're actually going to do some of the BIM work that you and I are going to highlight later on in this presentation, and other costs related to business operations.

And so this is where you would-- this is where all that information would live. And usually, you have an export out of the software that you did the digitized takeoff and that you can import into your own recap.

STEPHANIE LIN: So I'm curious, John, through this whole process, how long did it take you to master this and everything?

JOHN TRAMMELL: I think we've had a version of our recap ever since I've been part of the business. I think that as technology grows and so do our processes, and our processes improve. Right now, we kind of have two recap files, one for our IPG group, which is kind of like our industrial and our existing buildings, and then another one tailored to our new construction needs. So it's ever evolving.

STEPHANIE LIN: That's amazing. And you've been at the company for a long time too. So that just tells you what type of a fine art it really is.

JOHN TRAMMELL: Yes, ma'am. For sure. And then, last, this is pretty simple. This is just a Word document, right? This is your proposal. This is your official document to define the price and the defined scope of work. And this is where we submit our organization's bid for official proposal. And again, like I mentioned, this is where we're going to define our scope of work.

And we're going to provide our inclusions, what we're going to include with this proposal, what we're going to exclude, and then what we need clarifications on. And it's very important that we make sure that we highlight this to the owner, things that we're concerned about and things that are not going to be included in our proposal.

STEPHANIE LIN: Absolutely. Thank you so much for taking us through such a detailed breakdown of the key steps that go into the estimation process. And what we like to always highlight via the slide is, across the board, again, whether you're an architect, engineer, or contractor-- if you're in the industry, we all face similar challenges in today's macro environment.

So incredibly detailed and impressive scanning technology has been around for a while. And we must leverage it. This is where technology is going. And this is how you can get that crazy detail. But ultimately, some of the challenges that we're facing is that 95% of all data that is captured goes unused. And of that data that's being captured, 52% of rework is still being caused by poor project data and communication, which ultimately contributes to 24% of a project costs, whether it's direct or indirect, relating to rework.

These can be very expensive and very time consuming issues that everybody will have to deal with during the project timeline. But ultimately, if you can adopt digital twins, which we'll go through in more detail in the coming slides, we've seen proven time and time again the outcomes that you see in green on the right side, which is a 53% reduction in cost savings on your travel to your site visits, 30% less time to complete your projects.

Think about it. The faster you can complete a project, the faster you can get onto the next project and keep the business rolling and rolling and rolling. And ultimately, what is very prevalent now, regardless of what industry you're in, is improving your sustainability footprint, a 24% increase in that by a combination of different ways of reducing that travel time, reducing those air emissions. And I think we have a great slide in the future to talk about this as well, to shed a bit more color to this example.

JOHN TRAMMELL: For sure.

STEPHANIE LIN: So we just talked a little bit-- we talked a little bit about digital twins. We talked about the traditional way of estimation. Let's jump into the new way of how to do things. And documenting as-built conditions with digital twins-- ultimately, you're getting these four huge KPIs, which you can reduce errors.

You can reduce your project costs. You can reduce the number of site visits. And ultimately, because you're reducing all that, you're reducing the amount of time you're spending on the project.

But what exactly is a digital twin? So what you're seeing on the right side on the top-right corner here is just a quick snapshot of what a Matterport digital twin is. You can see, it's an incredibly immersive real 3D walkthrough of a space. And it just simulates the way you would approach a site in the exact way as if you were able-- one of the lucky ones to travel to a job site.

So you can capture this at any stage of the building life cycle. You can use it whether you're an architect, an engineer, or construction. It's really about, again, saving time and reducing cost. You'll hear this as a constant theme throughout today's session, but having that kind of 3D technology at your fingertips regardless of where you're dialing in from. For engineering, you're able to remove a lot of the guesswork.

You can actually jumpstart your workflows because you might not always have to work for that architect now to send them their finalized drawings. And for construction, it's a great way to just communicate what's going on in job site, bring all your stakeholders along. You don't necessarily need to flood the place or stop construction of any type of trade because now, they can view what's going on remotely, as well.

JOHN TRAMMELL: Yeah. Stephanie, we refer to that, just bringing the jobsite conditions to the comfort of your own cubicle. And that's exactly what it does. It really highlights any of the risks that we see on the job site. And it eliminates our exposure and the amount of people that we have on a job site. And it's a pretty low-entry-cost point for us to do that. So it's pretty low risk for us to send somebody out there with a Matterport camera, capture jobsite conditions, and bring that back to the office.

STEPHANIE LIN: Amazing. And those are the kind of things we hear time and time again from people who've been just starting to use Matterport and who've been adopting it for a long time, such as Brandt and Southland Industries. And again, we're just so happy that we can share some real-life experiences today with this audience.

So I've been actually throwing out the term "digital twin" quite a bit over the last five minutes. But I think this is a helpful diagram to go through. Fully recognize, there are a lot of different definitions of the term "digital twin" out there. It is a fairly new term. Every industry has a slightly different understanding of it. But ultimately, at Matterport, we like to drive focus and provide what all the different definitions ultimately need is that digital representation of something physical in real life.

So in our case, and for particularly with AEC, it's that physical building, to be able to recreate as you saw on the little video in the previous slide that real-world condition of what that built space looks like and to be able to have it from that digital twin, you can pull out assets, whether it's BIM files, 3D point clouds, et cetera.

Or you can even take it a bit forward, which a lot of different industries, particularly in the manufacturing space are doing, is starting to connect it with your IoT technology and how you're tracking information at a real-time schedule.

So to create a digital twin, it's really about-- it comes back to reality capture. Now, this, I know, is a term that people in this audience are quite familiar with, "reality capture," capturing what is the actual condition on site. So it's important. It really breaks down to three simple steps. You capture and document. When you capture a space, you're actually documenting the space.

And then, once you have the space, now what? That's always the question. Now, what else can I do? You can collaborate it because it's so easy, again, via a simple URL link. As John said, bring it to your cubicle. Or if your cubicle is your couch, even better. You're the lucky few, right?

And then, integrate it. Integrate it with your existing technology. All the things that you're already working with, it's not replacing them. It's really helping you to get there faster to make sure that everything is talking well together, as well.

JOHN TRAMMELL: Yeah. And Stephanie, I would like to mention here, I would like to challenge the listeners to really just push the boundaries of what's possible. What we're doing with Matterport and reality capture today, we would have never thought possible.

When we first were interested in Matterport, it was just the bare essentials. Let's just get in there. Let's get a room. We are doing some pretty impressive things that we never thought possible when we first purchased our camera.

STEPHANIE LIN: I love it. I always like to think about Matterport as if you remember those old-school LEGO kits where there were no instructions. You just got the little green pad and thousands of pieces of little LEGOs. It's kind of where you want to take it.

Great. So we just talked about the first step is capturing. And capturing, ultimately, there's a lot of different ways to capture out there, especially when we're talking about reality capture. But the important thing to always remember is there's no right or wrong. But you've got to make sure you're choosing the right tool for the right job. Here, you're seeing on the screen the portfolio of cameras that Matterport does support.

It ranges from your mobile camera, whether it's Android or Apple, to the ever popular and ubiquitous 360 cameras, which are on almost every construction job site now, all the way through our proprietary approach and Pro3 cameras. And of course, the lack of ELK. There is always a reason to get very high-end laser scanning and LiDAR scanning.

But what we found is 95% of the time, you don't necessarily need all that detail. If you remember back to a previous slide, we talked about 95% of data that's captured isn't actually being used. So how do you start making that process a little bit more efficient?

JOHN TRAMMELL: And Stephanie, here, I think what you mentioned two slides ago is just Matterport doesn't necessarily have to replace all your current workflows. It's a nice complementary piece for the workflows that you have in place. And I know we're trying to be as manufacturer agnostic as possible. But we have a saying that we Matterport everything that we high-end laser scan. But we don't high end laser scan everything that we Matterport.

So why we're actually out there, and it's taking-- when we're doing our high-end laser scanning and it's taking us 10, 12 minutes per scan, do you know how many Matterport captures I can do in that time span? So that's why we always want to make sure that we're Matterporting everything that we're doing high-end laser scanning for it.

STEPHANIE LIN: I love that. I'm going to steal that snippet from you for future--

JOHN TRAMMELL: That's fine. I'll trademark it later. But I'd like to point out some of the fundamental differences, really, between the Matterport Pro2 and the Matterport Pro3. This was a game changer for us. And we were actually part of the beta testing and kind of got our hands on one of the Matterport Pro3s and was just blown away. The Matterport Pro2, it uses an infrared.

So without getting too technical with it, when you have your remote controller and you're trying to change the TV, it's kind of the same thing. It has an infrared sensor. And it's trying to change the channel on the TV. Well, when you get too far away from that TV, it doesn't really work too well, does it? So you kind of have your limitations with the Matterport Pro2, one of those being direct sunlight.

It just doesn't work very well. So again, we were always having to work around that. So we'd have to go either late at night and do outside scanning. Or we'd go really early in the morning. But for your smaller indoor spaces, the Matterport Pro2 camera, it's awesome. But you're limited. I think you even have it here how many feet-- yeah, how many feet does it say? 15ft per space.

But the Matterport Pro3 uses a LiDAR sensor. And that's a sensor that's just sending out what they call bursts. And it can send out a million pulses is what they would call that. And it it's actually trying to measure how long it sends that pulse out and how long it takes to come back to that sensor. One of the advantages of the Pro3 is that it can work outside.

We've been on the roof scanning at high noon in the state of Texas. And it works it works just perfect. And it covers more distance. So the LiDAR can get you more distance. So when you're trying to fill that gap in, you should probably consider the Matterport Pro3.

STEPHANIE LIN: I love it. Thank you so much, John. That is really the big game changer with the Pro3 is you can scan in any lighting condition. And ultimately, you can use the same device, whether you're scanning inside or outside, but still get that same amazing 4K imagery quality that was coming from the original IR Pro2 camera, as well.

JOHN TRAMMELL: And the last thing I'd say about that, it's data in and data out, right? And so Matterport offers a lot of things to get out data. And you'll notice the difference between a LiDAR point cloud and just a point cloud that was generated from IR.

And you really talk about the point density of that. You can really start to see a real change in the quality of the E57 that you're exporting out with a Matterport Pro3 over your Matterport Pro2.

STEPHANIE LIN: Absolutely. I'd love to highlight a bit about what you were talking about earlier about the speed, why you capture every project with the Matterport camera, but not necessarily the high-end one. And in this slide here, you're seeing, in actual real time, the rotation of the Pro3 camera.

So you can see that with basically-- I haven't even finished my sentence. We've already finished one scan rotation. So you start to multiply this across a 50,000 to 80,000 square foot warehouse, you can start to imagine how much faster, how much more ground you can cover, as well, with that.

So John also just alluded to data in, data out, the different tools that Matterport can provide of helping you capitalize on what you've captured on site. So here, what we have-- this is by no means an exhaustive list. But what I often like to refer to as like the AEC productivity suite. Here, we have the EP7 file that John was just talking about in XYZ.

So whether you are an expert at manipulating point clouds and working with them or you just actually want a little bit of a jumpstart, that XYZ file is actually an AI-created version that helps plump out the noise and makes it very easy to trace over if you're looking to create your own BIM files or CAD files from a 3D scan.

Additionally, again, we're always thinking about how do we make our customer's existing workflows a little bit smoother? We know a lot of you do take the point cloud and then start to trace over and create your own files. So what we've done is, now, we have a wonderful offering where you can get LOD 200 BIM files directly ordered from Matterport. They are, as I mentioned, LOD 200 quality.

They're not going to be your end file. But it's a great jumpstart to make sure that your teams can get a file and always at the same quality level as possible and jumpstart them so that they can actually focus on the design or the troubleshooting of project management. With that, also, so that was more of the production side of it. When it comes to project management side, it's really important.

It comes back to, again, the collaboration, the communication, understanding what is going on with the project. So Matterport has a series of integrations with the Autodesk Construction Cloud suite of products there we started originally with the BIM 360 card that's now available in ACC insights as a partner card.

So within your actual BIM 360 or ACC insights dashboard, you can import a little iframe, where you can actually spin around within your exact same view that you're already coordinating everything else, spin around the same model to understand that visual site context. That's really that aha moment of like, once you see a Matterport digital twin, you understand what's going on on site.

Again, if you are in Revit, which I know many of us here are, it can be a pain in the butt to download a file, convert it, and then open it, and start tracing it all over in Recap-- or sorry, in Revit. So there's actually a free plugin, as you can see in the image on the right side, where you can just directly import into your Matterport files into Revit.

And finally, this year, we were lucky to, and we're super excited, to continue our partnership with Autodesk. And in March, we announced a deeper integration, where you can now, within your Matterport walkthrough, actually, your digital twin, create an RFI or create an issue so that everything is all connected. So you can mark it up in Matterport. And it'll automatically be synced and ported over to ACC as well within Autodesk Build or Autodesk Docs.

JOHN TRAMMELL: And Stephanie, I'd just like to point out to the listeners that usually when you put things on here, it's things that are happening in the future. But we use all of these that you just highlighted daily. These things are actual working products that are ready to go. The users could actually sign up and do this stuff today if they wanted to.

STEPHANIE LIN: Absolutely. And again, that's what we're hoping and whenever we do develop things here is, what is the next thing? What else will make it easy? Because if you're already doing it, we want to help that process out. And so we just talked a lot about collaboration. It's really about creating that faster and cost effective as the modeling. It's important.

You need to have a correct drawing of what's going on inside in order to progress in your project. That goes back to the rework we were talking about earlier and trying to prevent that, improving your communication across the board, leveraging that ACC integration with your RFIs or issues and being able to actually link to the true site context.

You don't have to keep referring to, oh, I think I remember. It was in sheet B105, which was the electrical drawing. What part of the drawing-- or who remembers what doorway 657 is, what page it was? So it just reduces that time to understand what exactly is the problem at hand. And ultimately, it's virtual access for your detailed bids with less site visits. You can continue to return back to the site.

You don't have to wait for access permission. You don't have to wait for the right super with the right keys to show up. It's there, on hand to pull up on your phone, on your laptop, on your desktop, wherever. And as we mentioned earlier, there's a lot of different integrations with Autodesk. We are so lucky to have Autodesk as such an amazing partner because they actually make it really easy to integrate with them and provide solutions.

And here, you're just seeing all the different varieties of ways, whether it's AutoCAD, Revit, Doctor Build, or even BIM 360. The idea is meeting people, meeting companies where you are working today. So that was just a quick, maybe not-so-quick overview of the different tools and how things can work. But now, let's dive a bit more into estimating workflows and how these tools have been helping that process and help streamline it a bit more from that traditional way that you highlighted earlier, John.

JOHN TRAMMELL: So one of those ways, I think that we talked about traditional ways of estimating earlier. Now, we're going to take it to conceptual estimating methods. And so what happens when the design package is incomplete, when you don't have all the information that you need?

So you really have two options. One is a square foot method, which is the very fast method. But you need to have a recent similar project. And you need to know how you performed historically on that project to actually gauge how you're going to do on this one. But it's difficult to make post-bid revisions.

So that brings you to conceptual estimating. And this is the engineering for estimating. It's more time. But it's more thorough, and no need to have a recent or similar job. And it allows you to have postbid revisions to it. And what you're seeing on the screen here is, I want you to see that we're in a hospital. And we weren't able to actually gain access.

And so the general contractor and the owner of the building told us that we were our point of connections and the route that we had to take was clearly 200 feet away from where we actually found that it was the best route for us to go. And being able to go in there with a Matterport camera and pop a few ceiling grids, it really allowed us to find the proper routing and to actually provide some accurate cost to this.

And we were able to go back to the owner and tell him, Mr. Owner, there's no way and there's no reason for us to have to demo all of the ductwork and piping in the route that you told us, which you could clearly see here, it was going to cost a lot of money to go in there using the route that they told us and where they thought they were, just based off of old drawings. And so again, conceptual estimating can mean a lot of things.

But the power of bringing back jobsite conditions to the estimators-- look, there's no way you're getting steam lines through there, absolutely no way. And so again, just providing the visibility to the estimators is just one way of conceptual estimating.

STEPHANIE LIN: That's amazing. The ability and the value that you created for the company by saving your client's money, that's just-- and that's what wins people more business.

JOHN TRAMMELL: Yes, ma'am. That's how you build strategic clients. That's how you build sticky clients. When you're able to save them time and money, they want to hire us. And they want us to-- we want them to be repeat customers of ours. And so look, here's another way, Stephanie.

This is really goals of the conceptual estimating is to produce clear package of schematic design-level documents that clearly communicate the scope both internally and to our client. And look, this looks just like a picture. But every picture that you see here was actually taken from a Matterport capture.

And what we do is, we go set up in front of all of the boilerplate IDs for every piece of equipment. And we're able to send this out for pricing. So we can send this to our electrical vendor for pricing. And then, even on the right-hand side, you could see that this little section here was actually put on a sheet that we created inside of Revit.

And we provide the scope through tags and annotations. So that we clearly define what the scope is and what our expectations are for that equipment.

STEPHANIE LIN: Amazing. And the detail that you're able to zoom into-- again, reducing those site visits. If you happen to forget something on site, you can always go back into that model.

JOHN TRAMMELL: Just like you were talking earlier about the whole estimating process, our workflow, just even for Matterport alone, has changed over the years. And we go and we take pictures. And we go back and add an extra level of clarity. And we add that through Mattertags. And we Mattertag as much equipment as possible.

STEPHANIE LIN: Love it. It's such a great way. I always kind of refer to Mattertags as digital wayfinding. You're literally marking it digitally. And it helps you understand that space so much easier.

JOHN TRAMMELL: And in Matterport, the changes that they've made in the Mattertags 2.0 from what it used to be, now, you can embed those pictures directly in the space. You can actually use search features. You can tag them. You can put little icons on them. The possibilities are endless with it.

And so just to keep moving forward, again, these are just pictures that were taken directly from the Matterport space and sent to our cooling tower vendor just so we can actually send them the space, they can go in there, we can make them a collaborator if they want. You could go in there.

And with even not being a collaborator, you could go add and pull all the dimensions that you want. Now, you won't be able to save them. But just again, having the clarity and even having your vendors who are pricing, this eliminates all questions.

STEPHANIE LIN: I love it. And when you say you're pulling it from the Matterport, you mean you're literally going through that digital walkthrough again and pulling the shots from there?

JOHN TRAMMELL: Yes, ma'am. So our estimating department has the Matterport space in their cubicle. And they will sit there and take screenshots and send it to the vendors for pricing. And we can even send the Matterport link so that they can view the space themselves.

STEPHANIE LIN: Fantastic.

JOHN TRAMMELL: And we talked about being agnostic earlier with software. Matterport is really trade agnostic, as well. So you just seen from-- all of these pictures are from the same space. We leverage pictures for our electrical vendors, for our cooling tower vendors, even down to the concrete coring company, just to let them know what they're up against.

We're going to be replacing the cooling tower. The condenser lines are going to be running through this building. You can see how thick the wall is. They can measure that. And again, pictures taken directly from the Matterport so that our vendors have a clear vision of what our ask is.

STEPHANIE LIN: That's incredible. I love the fact that this is all literally the same jobsite.

JOHN TRAMMELL: It is. It is the same jobsite.

STEPHANIE LIN: And so we talked a lot about capturing the jobsite. And we teased out a little bit. Now, what do you do? How do you work with it once you're back in the office? So I'd love to take this next section to kind of dive into that a little bit more.

JOHN TRAMMELL: So we talked about a traditional plain inspec project earlier. But this is really our home run swing. And this is where you get into design build projects. And what you see here is just an empty warehouse. This is where they hire us to come in. And the owner has a vision. And we have over 30 engineers-- and this is on-staff PEs at Brandt Engineering. We have more than that across the company at Southland in total.

But this is basically a core and shell building that they're going to start outfitting everything and start the design process on it. And so this is just the dollhouse view. And you could see outside and jump outside. I just wanted to let the listeners have a good visual of what we're up against here, basically a core and shell building.

And so we mentioned it earlier. What we would do is we collect the data. So collection plus consumption, that equals your digital twin. So right now, just using the Matterport Pro3 to collect the data-- and if you want to if you want to skip to the next slide, Stephanie, you can. So what we've done here is we've exported out the E57 file.

Now, look, this is Workflow Design with Revit. So there is an additional step here. You mentioned earlier that you can use the add in and go bring in the E57 directly from your Matterport account. You can link the two up. But we export out the E57 file. We bring that into Recap.

And that gives you the ability to clean up a little bit of the overspray if you want to. You could really control the quality of the point cloud. So that's personally our method. We'll bring this E57 into Recap. And then, we'll bring the RCP inside of Revit that you see here. So all you see is that project, that core and shell project brought in as a recap file.

STEPHANIE LIN: Love it.

JOHN TRAMMELL: Then the, next step is, you'll start to see some of the walls. We try to make them-- we try to make them stick out a little bit. So we've sectioned down the point cloud. And now, we're starting to build the interior and exterior walls. And this is part of that conversion for you.

Then, the next slide is, the point cloud's completely gone. And you can see how we've completely rebuilt, even down to the roll-up doors-- now, we've converted this digital twin and just taken it to the next level. Now, we're starting to start trying to fill in the gaps, here.

Again, this is the facility with the roof cut off of it and sectioned off. And we're ready to start taking in any existing layout drawings and build off of those, as well. So just the point cloud back in there and cut down.

But the next slide, Stephanie, is we've cut the roof off. We're looking at it from a plane view. And now, you could start seeing on the far right of the screen, this is where we get to work. And we start actually filling in the gaps and filling in the voids.

And then, on the next slide, you're going to see this is the completed project. So we go from a core and shell to the owner's vision. And now, we're ready to hand this over to our engineering department. We have a good foundation to get started and be confident in what we're modeling.

And then, this is where the MEP system. This is where we start-- we have a whole set of documents, here. But what we just pulled was just a single drawing. This is just your domestic cold water. And this is-- you could see how we went from a Matterport scan all the way to a fabrication shop drawing that could be sent out to one of our fabrication shops, fabricated, and delivered on site.

STEPHANIE LIN: That's amazing. John, so also, just curious, before the entry of reality capture and being laser scanned the sites and get these detailed point clouds, how would you approach a process like this?

JOHN TRAMMELL: So really, before reality capture, I think the old reality capture was a pencil, a pad, and a tape measure. And you would literally send a team out there just to pull and to verify and to document and create isometrics and hand detail things out and bring that back-- that in a combination of a bunch of pictures. And that was your old reality capture method.

STEPHANIE LIN: Yeah, absolutely. And the way to think about it was like every chunk of time, there's a vast improvement of how much faster you can do a process. So that was the original way that reality capture came in. But with really high-end scanners, it was wonderful because you could get this data off quickly, but it was slow to capture.

And then, now, with the newer technology that we were highlighting earlier in the slide, particularly with that Pro3 camera, you're just starting to speed that process up even faster, even faster.

JOHN TRAMMELL: Yes, for sure. And look, let's just be real. There's still obstacles. I mean, there's still some hurdles to get over. But reality capture today is so much improved just what it was five years ago. And it's only going to continue to get better.

STEPHANIE LIN: I hope so, yeah. This is what we're banking on. But with all that technology, we've talked a lot about estimation. But as we mentioned, you're getting a lot of data in. So what else can you do with that data? What else can you do beyond that estimation process?

This is something that I think a lot of us in the audience-- whether you're familiar with Matterport, you've played with Matterport or with other types of reality capture out there-- are kind of curious like what else can you do? I think we often get siloed in. If I'm an architect, if I'm an engineer, I'm a contractor, I only do this type of work. But there's actually a lot of cross-functional workflows.