Easy BIM Asset Management with Content Catalog

MARK PRITCHARD: Welcome to this Autodesk University class, Easy BIM Asset Management with Content Catalog. My name is Mark Pritchard. And I'll be your presenter for the session.

Before we get into it, we just have to go over a few formalities first. The learning objectives for this session after attending, you will be able to discover the potential savings gained from choosing the right digital asset management solution, learn how to define an appropriate process for sourcing and approving the assets, learn how to solve inefficiencies by designing a robust library hierarchy that's easy to navigate, and create consistent and collaborative efforts within a global structure, spanning an entire international practice.

A little disclaimer before we get started, this session today, I'm going to be talking specifically about Content Catalog or formally known as UNIFI. And for those who may not know, it was acquired by Autodesk in 2023. For those that do use it, a lot of what I'm going to talk to you about today will be familiar to you.

This is our journey of overcoming the challenges of asset management. We believe it has been successful. And, therefore, I'd like to share that story with you today. While this approach may not be universally applicable, I hope it inspires you and your firm.

A little bit about me. I've lived in four different continents over my time. So I do have a little bit of an accent. I do apologize. In 2007, I moved to London, where I joined the HOK office as a BIM coordinator, working on a variety of projects and project disciplines. In 2014 relocated to the New York office, where I took on my current role and now work closely with other design technology managers from other HOK offices worldwide.

During this time, I've worked on a number of big projects and a number of different disciplines, including a small airport in the Northeast suburbs of New York City. And fun fact, I used to be a competitive swimmer. And I estimate I've swum over 62,000 miles during my career, which is the equivalent of driving from New York to Los Angeles 22 times.

I love traveling. I love playing sports and watching sports. I'm a bit of an amateur baker. And I love some good food. And I do like to dress up and have a little bit of fun every now and then. HOK was founded in 1955 by George Hellmuth, Gyo Obata, and George Kassabaum.

We have over 1,800 people working across 27 different offices, spanning three different continents. We're a global design firm. Our services include architecture and interiors, engineering, as well as landscape architecture, urban design, planning, and visual communications.

Our work spans nearly every market sector discipline across the world, including commercial, residential, health care, entertainment, retail, hospitality, education, sports, government, corporate, S&T, and aviation and transport and even product design. We have a small firm-wide team of directors and specialists who set the overall strategy for design technology, established standards, as well as research and develop new technology solutions.

We interface with local design technology managers who are responsible for implementing our standards and procedures on a regional projects. Our annual summit was organized to create an environment for us all to exchange information about BIM and was a good chance for us to all meet face to face and have a little bit of fun. This is just a selection of some notable HOK projects, many of which I've actually worked on myself.

HOK has been a long-time implementer of BIM. This timeline is a brief overview of HOK's history with BIM and with Content Catalog. Initially, like many others, we used Autodesk Architectural Desktop. In 2004, we began researching Revit and conducted our first pilot project with it in 2006.

By 2008, we had officially transitioned to Revit, marking the occasion with our own HOK BIM Day. And in 2010, we introduced BIM certification to all of our projects. A few years later, we explored other content management tools like Kiwi Codes' Family Browser and CTC BIM List, which later became HIVE. While somewhat successful, these tools had their limitations.

In 2016, we adopted UNIFI for its library management and content creation services. After a pilot project, we fully utilized its services and migrated all of our assets by 2019. Following the blip, we beta tested UNIFI Version 4 in 2022. Autodesk acquired UNIFI in early 2023, launching Content Catalog at AU 2023.

Despite successes, we faced several challenges along the way. Like many firms, we had a centralized digital library. And please forgive my crude sketches here. But imagine it has a diamond mine with a vast repository of valuable BIM assets.

This digital library was synchronized through a distributed file system to our 27 regional offices worldwide. However, our staff still relied on the firm-wide team to maintain these network folders. The manual versioning and updating of assets was time consuming and tedious.

Our biggest challenge was managing assets that were scattered across multiple locations across the firm. As well as our digital library and each local office having its own library, they were also project specific assets stored in project folders. Personal storage, the staff holding assets on their desktops and their personal drives-- and, of course, there's also the internet.

Utilizing these resources became problematic. When staff couldn't find what they needed locally, they would browse past projects, contact the local design technology manager to build it for them, or search the internet. This process was time consuming and often led to non-native Revit components, causing model crashes and project delays.

To address this, we've set up collection folders and began collating assets from local offices and project libraries. Centralizing these assets streamlined the consolidation process. However, staff-created assets saved on personal drives posed a challenge, especially when the employee left the firm. We'll discuss asset creation in more detail a little bit later on as it's a crucial part to the story.

Once we began gathering all of the assets, we realized that we lacked good quality content, whether it was modeled by our staff or by other vendors. For example, the families were overmodeled or were just linework. And they either had too many parameters or not enough parameters. They were inefficient and cumbersome.

And many of them had 3D other elements-- other software elements-- I'm sorry-- embedded within them, like AutoCAD or SketchUp. There were inconsistent in quality and didn't comply with our standards. And many multiple offices creating their own assets led to a lot of redundancy.

We conducted an exercise across major projects and found numerous duplications of the same family in various forms. I mentioned at the start that we'd previously used other content management systems like Kiwi Codes' Family Browser and CTC BIM list, which were both very cost effective but relied on our digital library and didn't index all the other locations that I've just mentioned.

We preferred UNIFI for its comprehensive indexing. And despite initial cost concerns, these were resolved by 2016. We also evaluated Kinship and Avail as management tools but did not explore their asset creation services at the time. All these tools have evolved since we first evaluated them. And many of them now offer features comparable to those of Content Catalog. I'll come back to this slide a little bit later on when we talk about asset creation.

Our firm-wide design technology team had evaluated all the available options and decided to go ahead with UNIFI. Why? It's a cloud-hosted platform allows users to access content from anywhere in the world. It has a robust search engine, which ensures efficient and effective content retrieval. The automated Revit management handles version management and upgrading seamlessly. And at the time of selection, UNIFI offered both creation and management services.

I'm not going to delve into the specifics of collections and saved searches, as these were covered in a previous session. But think of your BIM assets as LEGO blocks. Having the right pieces easily accessible is crucial to building something remarkable. You want a neat and structured setup, not a messy and disorganized one.

When starting to build your libraries, remember that you're not starting from scratch. Your team already uses content from various sources, like the mine sites that we just talked about in the previous slide. Simplicity is crucial for an effective content collection. Revit is already complex. Your collections should be easy to use and to manage.

Initially, we started with just two collections, one for details and one for general content. We then expanded by adding user upload collections to avoid the need for thousands of project-specific collections. And then we added some discipline-based collections.

However, the waters got murky pretty quickly. So we simplified the collections by organizing them as follows. Company collections at the top, making it easier for staff to find the right collection for their assets-- regional collections for our Canadian and Asia-Pacific offices-- some discipline connections and a handful of project collections for the larger projects that we still had-- and, finally, admin collections where we don't want general staff poking around-- having firm-wide shared collections and regional collections helps separate content for local jurisdiction reasons.

Separating imperial and metric content into distinct collections also helped reduce the amount of content users had to search through. The fewer total results, the faster designers can find exactly what they were looking for. Following your firm's naming conventions and keeping categorizations straightforward will help establish a logical hierarchy for your collections. You may wish to organize your collections by Revit category, project types, or whatever is most important most important to you. Content Catalog helps by organizing the assets within each collection by Revit category.

We have implemented and continue to maintain regular check-ins with teams to gather feedback on the effectiveness of collections and saved searches. This is achieved through various methods, including surveys, face-to-face meetings and ongoing training sessions. We encourage staff to report any efficiencies and inadequacies they encounter, allowing us to make necessary adjustments to maintain the progress. Questions such as the adequacy of the collections, the need for specific saved searches, and the elimination of unnecessary ones are considered.

As manufacturers improve in creating native Revit content and tools like Twinmotion and Enscape require better assets, we also encourage staff to suggest or request new content for a specific project needs. When we discontinued our digital library and migrated our BIM assets to UNIFI, we initially had just over 8,000 assets.

Now, we have just over 35,000 pieces of content across all of our HOK collections. And it's roughly an 80/20 split between imperial and metric. For those of you who are keen on numbers, you'll notice that the figures in the columns do not add up to the total shown in red.

The chart shows the total number of unique file names across all of our collections. However, some of these assets are hosted within multiple collections, causing duplicate accounts. The red figure represents the tallied count of each individual collection. This exercise has highlighted the need for further cleanup to ensure that assets are correctly organized within their respective collections.

Although we have amassed and continue to gather numerous assets, we face ongoing challenges in changing our staff's old habits. They often revert back to browsing past projects or searching the internet for what they need. I conducted a survey among employees with varying Revit skills to estimate the time spent searching for these assets. This survey was taken about five years after we transitioned to UNIFI. So the figures are approximate.

When we switch to UNIFI, we completely discontinued the file server, making assets only accessible through UNIFI. These estimates assume that staff save project assets correctly using proper file naming conventions and storing them within the right folders. If employees needed to retrieve assets from an archive project, for example, by upgrading them to the current Revit version, these time estimates could be significantly higher.

Like many other companies, we have invested significant time and resources in developing and maintaining our collections to meet our BIM standards. Unfortunately, these standards are often compromised when end users import Revit families from sources outside of the Content Catalog collections. To address this, we developed a process for sourcing and reviewing assets. This flowchart visually represents the steps to follow them when searching for assets.

First, we search the Content Catalog collections to make sure that we don't have the family already. If we do have it, great, load it into the model. If we do not have it, then we can search the manufacturer's website to see if they have any Revit families to download.

For many years, HOK's policy was to discourage downloaded assets for Revit. However, as more manufacturers are making their products available in BIM formats, the quality of the downloaded content, downloadable content I should say, is increasing. And some content may be reasonable to reuse.

However, we still strongly encourage staff to follow HOK's Revit model guidelines to evaluate the assets before loading them into their projects. Therefore, we created a dedicated folder location for teams to download the assets to before being reviewed. If the manufacturer does not have any content and it is a custom item, then we can submit a content request to have it built. If the downloaded item doesn't meet the standards, then we can submit that for an updated content request. Once the family is approved for use, it gets uploaded into the content collection-- sorry, into the collection within Content Catalog.

A good content management system is only as effective as its content. So let's explore the review process. It's crucial to identify the essential requirements that your content must need-- must meet, I'm sorry, such as geometry, parameters, and file size. Each firm has its own specific needs, define what is unacceptable, and determine who will review the content and where it will be stored before and after the review.

With all that in mind, we created a document outlining these requirements, which we now use to review all of our downloaded content. This document includes the priority for sourcing content, including the flowchart we just discussed, outsourcing custom content from our vendor, a list of reputable content providers, and then an approval checklist for externally produced content.

The approval checklist is the important part here. We identified 10 essential requirements that our assets need to meet for families to be considered usable. And these include imported geometry, avoid files that contain DWGs or Rhino files or SketchUp files. These are difficult to manage effectively and usually modeled with too much detail. Items like these are a good case to send to our content creators to rebuild.

Grouped items should be ungrouped and the group purged out, as these are difficult to manage as well and cannot be scheduled. And they also contribute to the overall file size. Arrays can be useful and are sometimes used with formulas. However, they do also contribute to file size.

The American Institute of Architects defines Level of Detail, or LOD, as the level of completeness to which a model element is developed. This image clarifies these basic concepts in a simple manner. Families modeled at LOD 400 and above can negatively impact the overall model health due to the complexity in the size. Therefore, it is recommended that these families be sent to our content creators to simplify and reduce down to an acceptable LOD 300.

As a rule of thumb, we try to keep our Revit families under 1 megabyte, ideally 250 to 500 kilobytes. We know that sometimes this is not always possible. But anything over 1 megabyte should be examined. Purge unused, remove any extraneous material definitions, share parameters and reference planes. And incidentally, this 60-megabyte family had a lot of that stuff embedded within it that we had to purge out.

Masking regions and linework are sometimes added to represent elements in 2D. However, these might not be necessarily for simple geometry. These should be removed when applicable. Most families are typically shown in coarse and medium or fine detail level. Downloaded content should be examined to see how it will display in plan section and elevation, to determine if the visibility settings are correct and adjusted accordingly.

Ensure the family category is set to the same category as similar content. Often families are categorized under generic models when there actually should be furniture or specialty equipment, for example. This difference will impact schedules and visibility in plans.

Make sure that the family units reflect the units of the project that they will be used in. As per our HOK naming conventions in our guidelines, our families should be noted with an I for imperial or an M for metric. Orientate the family with respect to origin reference planes in the same way as other similar content. Maintaining a common orientation will allow you to swap families with other components without rotating the instances in the model.

Set a default 3D view for all families and name it appropriately. Lock it to a suitable axonometric view and set it to shaded with edges. The view should not be cropped. And the crop region should be turned off. No model lines, reference planes, lines dimensions, or text should be visible in the view. And where possible, host elements should be turned off as well as electrical or plumbing connectors.

Content Catalog now actually allows you the ability to upload images and set these as your thumbnail view within your collections. And, finally, develop a naming standard that aligns with your firm's BIM standards. All HOK staff are encouraged to share content that they have procured, downloaded, or created. And, again, as part of the HOK's naming conventions outlined in our guidelines, all our families should have the I or the M at the end of the file name.

Earlier, I discussed the challenges of staff creating their own assets, such as poor modeling and large file sizes. Unlike CTC's Nexus tool or Guardian, which prevent bad or unverified assets from being loaded into the model, Content Catalog is not a preventative tool. Instead, it is a cloud-based system that upholds your firm's standards and helps users quickly find BIM content from a single source.

However, it doesn't stop users from browsing past projects or searching the internet for what they need. So how does this fit into the asset sourcing flowchart? Similar to downloaded assets that need cleaning up or contain imported elements, we encourage our staff to submit a content request to our creators. We've also developed a separate flowchart for this process of submitting content requests.

Simply put, there are five main steps. The user submits a request and then the asset manager triages that request to make sure it has the required information. Is there enough information to build the request from? What exactly does the user want? If there's not enough information included, we go back to the user to get more detail before the request can get sent to the vendor.

Once the request has all the required detail, the vendor then creates a draft version. When the draft version is ready, the asset manager, the design technology manager, and the user review the draft and comment back on any deficiencies for the vendor to correct. Once the user is happy with the family, the asset manager or the design technology manager can then approve the request and it gets uploaded into the collections.

Asset creation is a highly valued service for our project teams, particularly those on a tight budget. By outsourcing the development of custom families and centralizing these assets for all HOK teams, we eliminate redundant efforts and avoid charging the creation of Revit families to individual projects. This strategy empowers greater creative freedom, enhances design flexibility, maintains project momentum, and ensures BIM content is not repeatedly generated.

We analyze the cost implications of outsourcing asset creation versus internal development and identified four key factors of cost effective asset production, use a skill level and time, the expertise of users and the time taken to build the assets, quality and consistency. Often assets do not meet the firm's BIM standards or ignore the earlier review points that we talked about, resulting in overly complex and inefficient families. And repeated creation of identical families due to poor coordination among project teams or offices led to duplication.

Without proper oversight, these issues had significant financial waste. Our firm-wide team has experience with project-specific outsourcing, where projects request and bear the cost of asset creation. However, after discovering a 12-fold cost reduction potential through global outsourcing, management quickly approved this approach.

Upon recently reviewing our current collections, we observed a significant reduction in poor quality assets as staff no longer needed to create the assets themselves. Reflecting on the figures for content requests submitted over the past six years, particularly new content requests versus updates to existing content, we began to question, is Content Catalog actually being utilized effectively if staff are only finding 5% of our existing content are substandard? Or do we actually have high-quality assets already in the library because they're created by our content creators? We don't actually have the answer for this. But it's something for us to think about.

Content Catalog boasts an advanced search engine with adjustable filters for precise searches and saved searches for instant results based on preset criteria. But it also supports various file types, including RVT files, drafting views, and sheets. And this has been invaluable for us for our detailed template library on our intranet hub, organizing details as individual drafting views, full sheets, or container files with multiple sheets. Users can choose how to download and insert the details into their projects.

Recently, our interior's technical director revamped our Revit template for interiors, including preconfigured sheets of details and room layouts. This allows users to quickly select furnished layouts or casework families with the correct details, reducing repetitive drawing and ensuring consistency. All of the drafting views and sheets are managed through the Content Catalog platform. And all of the families were built by our content creators.

The success of this template has led to other market sectors to request similar templates to be built. Given that designers are inherently visual, I like to think of our content management system as a department store with various aisles or collections for the user to browse or go shopping.

We are now exploring alternative strategies to help staff efficiently locate the desired assets. Initially, we use Revit container files. And now we're investigating different visual techniques to improve how staff interact and utilize these assets. A few of the softwares that we are looking at include Speckle, Enscape, Twinmotion, and Unreal Engine.

For those who may not know Content Catalog was officially launched in August of 2024, only a couple of weeks before the recording of this video. As a result, we are still transitioning from UNIFI and are currently using a hybrid approach of both UNIFI and Content Catalog. So let's explore some of the differences between UNIFI and the current version of Content Catalog.

Both platforms offer capabilities like upload, saved searches, insert tagging, and managing system families, drafting views, schedules, and groups. Both support automatic upgrades and auto version selection during search and insert. Content Catalog now features rotatable 3D previews, allowing better family previews without actually needing to have Revit open. Content approval, content requests, and project-based analytics for model health and maintenance are only currently available in UNIFI.

Content Catalog allows customization of search result displays and is integrated within ACC Docs. And, finally, you can add, remove, and set family or shared parameters through the platform API in UNIFI. All of the features listed above that are not available for Content Catalog are actually planned for future releases.

So to summarize, as a single source cloud-based tool, Content Catalog helped us to consolidate our existing content, creating a logical hierarchy for our collections. While keeping it simple and straightforward made management easier, we began with a small scope and expanded our collections and training as more teams started to use them. By using Content Catalog's powerful search engine and saved searches, we could efficiently target specific assets-- by using Content Catalog's powerful search engine and saved searches, we could efficiently target specific asset groups for teams, saving time.

We predetermined criteria for high-quality assets and established a thorough review process to vet them. Setting clearer expectations for your staff, management, and the content creators ensures everyone understands their responsibilities. Regular check-ins with the teams help us to better understand their content needs. When selecting a vendor for content creation, consider turnaround time, quality, and cost implications of outsourcing versus in-house modeling. And building and maintaining a quality content management system is a long process. It's a marathon, not a sprint.

Thank you for listening to my Autodesk University presentation today. If you do have any questions, please feel free to reach out via LinkedIn or via the Autodesk University website. And I'll be happy to help in any way I can. Thank you.