How to Easily Data Mine Revit, Autodesk BIM Collaborate Pro, and Autodesk Construction Cloud for Your Benefits

MIKE BARTYZEL: Hello, everyone. Welcome to our presentation, How to Data Mine Revit, ABC and ACC for Your Benefits. My name is Mike Bartyzel. I'm a global BIM leader at Buro Happold.

I also lead the network of regional BIM leaders at Buro Happold. And a few other things that I do as well is being CIBSE Digital Engineering Student Group member, also a vice chair of Society of Digital Engineering, and helping out a little bit with London Revit User Group, and a few other things like making the BIM strategy and implementation at my company. I am also a key relationship manager for Autodesk at Buro Happold. And Jose.

JOSE FANDOS: Hi there. My name is Jose Fandos. I'm the founder and head of product at Kinship. I'm also part of the CIBSE BIM Steering Committee. I was one of the initial people in the product data templates from CIBSE. And you can also find me often speaking and attending the London Revit User Group.

MIKE BARTYZEL: That's true. Jose has been tremendous help. And we rely on him all the time. So let me tell you a little bit about Buro Happold, who we are. We are a quite large engineering company.

We have a little bit over 2,500 people and 31 office locations, quite a few of them in the USA. And we're covering all major engineering disciplines. And we try to collaborate in one space.

So some of our projects-- some of them, you've probably heard of. Museum of the Future or the Jewel at the Shanghai Airport, or Academy Museum of Motion Picture. You can find more details, obviously, online for those.

And a few more projects that we work with or worked in the past-- our kaleidoscope of the few that we've done in the past. We also are quite famous for the awards that we're getting of the BIM and Digital Awards. So you can see some of them.

The Building Performance Consultancy of the Year-- five times in a row. That doesn't happen often. So that was great to see. But why we're here-- it's not just about us. It's about our clients and the planet, and what we can do to help, and at the same time reduce some risks and get us or our companies a higher profit share.

So 31 offices, as I've mentioned, over 450 active projects, and over 2,000 models in a cloud that we currently have. And we do 10.5 million synchronizations in Revit every year-- at least that. So over to you, Jose.

JOSE FANDOS: Hi, everyone. I'm going to quickly introduce Kinship and where it is for you. So if you can go to the next slide, Kinship. Kinship is a solution for teams working in Revit.

It breaks down in three main areas, which is the content management, project tracking, and analytics. In terms of content management, it allows teams to manage library of content. And that includes component family, system families, views, sheets, groups, and so on and so forth.

You can have those in the library itself. But also, we have specialized ways of grouping them, like collections or lists. So you can set particular pieces or items for teams that are working on specialized projects or on different markets.

With project tracking, the emphasis here is about being able to find any content with ease, be that in the library or in other projects. But on top of that, it does keep track of any content that's being used on live projects. It does highlight any possible issues from file size to corrupt families, to being able to tell who and when they've been working on a project.

And with analytics, we put all the information that we gather from the project tracking and giving some insight as to things that can be used or improved in different projects. Now in the next slide, what makes Kinship special? Well first and foremost is ease of use.

One of the things that we wanted to make sure when we started developing Kinship is to simplify what is already a complex environment within Revit. And we put our heart on making that the most important part of Kinship. There are other tools out there that offer a similar solution. But we find that if anything, Kinship makes the exchange and the work easy to use.

Then, instant-- definitely one of the most important things for us is to be able to offer a solution that allows people to find the right content instantly if that can be. And that's one of the areas that we have made sure Kinship focuses on. It is intelligent in the sense that it knows-- because it's running in Revit, it knows the projects that you've been working on, the project that you're working on at the moment, content that you've used in the past, and so on and so forth, and uses all that information to offer you the content that's more likely to help you when you do a search. So it takes that into account.

Finally, integrated-- there are a number of solutions out there that offer parts of what Kinship does offer. And some of them might offer those solutions under additional licenses or under different environments. We think that one of the advantages of Kinship is the integration of all these under simple licensing terms and all together with the same type of interface and ease of use that makes the whole project nice and easy to-- the whole process nice and easy to use.

Now, some of our customers include Buro Happold, which is why I'm here at their behest. And you can see here some of our other customers. With that, Mike, I'll get it back to you.

MIKE BARTYZEL: Thank you very much, Jose. So you can see how spread-out Kinship is. It's getting really popular now. And moving on, obviously, what you guys are here for, which is talking about ABC and ACC, and how we can actually use those products to our benefits, and how we can mine data from them.

So I thought it'd be quite good to have a look at naming, because that sometimes can be quite confusing, and the evolution of the ACC or Autodesk Construction Cloud in time. So you can see that the launch of the products was around 2012. And last year, it migrated to the one name, or to the Construction Cloud ACC offering. And that's what it is going forward. That was the unification under one banner.

Then obviously, all these products are still continuing to have access to the old names or old products even though they are unified together under one roof. And hopefully, going forward as well. So there was one change in 2021, where you probably all used to name BIM 360. Forget BIM 360.

It is no longer. What we have now is ABC, which is Autodesk BIM Collaborate. And we have another product, which is Autodesk Docs. So they look at similar things. We'll have a look at that in a second.

So there you go. So you can see, this is the Autodesk BIM Collaborate Pro, and Collaborate as well. Obviously, Collaborate Pro includes cloud working with Revit, and Civil 3D and Plant 3D, where the rest diverged a little bit. But the important bit is that Autodesk Docs is still being offered across all of those different products.

And again, maybe to showcase what you use each for-- so BIM Collaborate ABC is over here. And these are the workflows that we would normally use. But have a look-- the unified data across all the platforms. So that's the beauty of it.

And similar with dashboarding, that's what we will be talking about-- how we're using it, the data connector, the reports and dashboards that we get out of it to get the insights that we need. But you still might be a bit confused about all this naming and what does what, and so on. And that's why I always say, you need new innovations to move that big, big ship, which is the built environment that we currently have.

So let's do it. And let's do it in the right way, because that's the best way, right? Rather than simple but wrong, we always try to maybe sometimes go a complex way. But it is the right way.

And you get the right results. So don't be hasty with things. Sometimes, it takes a bit longer to get the result that you want.

So the one constant across all these products, like I've mentioned, is data. And data is everywhere. And we have full access.

Everybody has full access to it, not just Buro Happold, not just Jose at Kinship. We have access to that data all the time. And yes, you might use one of the functionalities of the ABC, which is the comparison of drawings or models. And it's more visually rather than through data.

I always prefer using data, because that gives you the proper insights that you can act on. Visual-- yes, it's also good. And it's very quick and could be used, and should be used, by any means. But let's look at some of the tools that we have developed ourselves or that we've purchased and that helped us get on with our journey.

So I will talk about the BIM Radar, Power BI, CQFlexMon, software that we bought about a year ago, Kinship, obviously. Jose will talk about it a little bit more. He's already told you a little bit. So there will be a bit more. And some of the internal scripting tools that we are also using.

But before we get there, I think that's important for you to understand what we call the Buro Happold BIM stages. And so stage 0 is for the projects that we're not using them whatsoever on those projects. There are still quite a few. This could be where we're just creating reports, that we're doing other things that we don't need to use the BIM methodology.

Stage 1 would be those projects that we would use it internally ourselves, and where we would demodel. We'll use data on it as well, but not necessarily share that with anybody externally. But stage 2 is the opposite.

This is where everybody else comes in. The data is deliverable already. And we're using everything. Everything's model-based.

And obviously, CDE collaboration is happening between different teams. And finally, stage 3 are the projects where the data is contractually-- we're obliged to deliver data contractually. It's network-based integration. So these would be very much the ABC projects, where we need to deliver data on them.

And you can see a little bit more breakdown here on the right, where we actually go into details, what we need to do to achieve each BIM stage at Buro Happold. I've told you all about this, because the BIM Radar is actually using those terms. So I wanted to make sure that you understand what each term means.

And so this is our unique tool that we've created. It's using data from four different sources. So it's from Deltek, which is our internal financial project data that we gather over-- that we've gathered over the years. Kinship, obviously, which is Revit integration and the data all behind our models. The BIM trackers that we also look at all the projects for different offices and what they do what people do in them.

And Autodesk Construction Cloud-- so ABC and ACC, and Autodesk Docs, and so on and so on. So all different modules that come with it. And we mine that data. And we just present it in those dashboards that are very much like Power BI look like. But you can click on them and review them.

So the beauty of that is that we can allocate the BIM stages to the Project BIM Leads-- so we call them PBOs. And each project BIM lead is responsible for BIM advancement on that project and making sure that all these requirements that you've seen in the previous slide-- in this slide on the right-hand side-- that these are met. And there's obviously more data here.

But we'll will go into different details in a second. So what BIM Radar does-- it's a unique way of presenting very quickly the data about the projects even before the projects get completely going. And sometimes, it's too late to intervene. And so we're measuring five top risk points.

So one of them will be models by banding, right? So we will do the RAG, which is the red and the green. And so you can quickly see all our projects in different banding and how well we're doing. So you would normally concentrate more on the red banding, so not that many projects or not many models in there, fortunately. But we're tracking parameters like model size, family size, because that makes a lot of difference, and how many crashes the projects have, and family naming.

Sometimes it's important if we need to follow the guidelines for project EIR or whatever the client wants, and contractually as well. And the warning score as well-- so how many warnings we have in our models. It encourages consistency and higher quality, because this is refreshed every day.

And you can see the data daily. And like I said, you can see it's grouped in those different bandings. And some other benefits that we have is that it provides the business intelligence. You can interrogate the data.

As you can see, you can see not just in the graphs, but the detailed analysis of that. And it offers historical insights for lessons learned. And this is just reducing risk on our projects.

One or a few more analyses-- it all pays off very quickly if you do it. We had an instance where it took us about two weeks to fix one or two problems on a project. And this tool paid off for itself very quickly, even though it was internally developed. Obviously, it does take time to do it.

But it's worth doing it. And it's very easy to build on in the future. So I encourage you to do a similar thing, I guess.

So moving on to other ideas that we had, which is Autodesk Construction Cloud, Power BI dashboards. So the beauty of that is that you can actually download the data yourself. And you can use different ways of visualizing it. We've chosen Power BI, but there are many other tools that you can use.

And Autodesk is also very good. It's providing you the first templates that you can use. So by all means, go and experiment if you haven't already. So this just shows you some of the ideas that we had, what we looked at.

You will see what software is being used the most, which projects have the biggest number of members, or how many teams are collaborating between themselves in Buro Happold. And yeah, and how many other companies are invited to collaborate with us. Obviously, which of our projects are active, which ones are not anymore, and also which projects are being backed up, or maybe they need a quick backing-up.

This is all included. What's more, what I really like about that is-- it will show you here, as you can see-- how many people can be using Docs for free. So we don't have to pay for those licenses, because that is a bonus of having that hub there.

OK? One more thing on those dashboards is obviously, we haven't started just now. It was some time ago where we prioritized the usage of certain modules within ACC or ABC. And you can see that there were BIM 306 Docs or Autodesk Docs, how they are called nowadays, and how we prioritize those.

And you can see, we also looked at ROI mechanism. We need to pay for the licenses. You have to pay for the licenses.

So that a bit of a insight for you, what we've looked at to justify why we need those many licenses. And this example here the bottom-- that's the usage of RFI-- so our issues management. And you can see how quickly it jumped for some of our offices.

So we can tell who's using it more than the others. And that's the data from today. OK? And a few more uses of dashboarding. But before we go there, I just wanted to tell you a little bit about what we're doing now, obviously in BIM.

Late 20th century and 21st century, CAD before that. Before that, we were working with the boards, on the boards and drawings, and delivering those on paper. And before that, we had art, and still obviously now that hasn't disappeared.

And before that, we had cave paintings. Some still do it even now, I would say. But in 37,000 years, have we changed that much?

I don't think so. And just to let you know that humankind only developed two ways of organizing the information. And that's put a sticker on it or put it in a box.

And I guess we still do exactly the same. So these are some of our reporting and dashboards that we share with our clients and internally as well, obviously. We take advantage of all those tools.

You can probably very quickly spot the functionality of ACC or ABC in here. That's built-in. And you can take full advantage of that, color coding the changes that have happened in the models between the models, and so on.

But many others-- we do data validation. We can do level of information needs. That's all done through the ACC and ABC, and many others, as you can see here.

And that's usually for our external clients when they ask for all the data, or like I've mentioned before, when they're contractually obliged to deliver that data for them. So lots of uses. That's just giving you a few ideas, but I'm sure you can come up with your own.

And you can talk to me afterwards as well if you want to know a little bit more details about that. And that's just one more usage that we have done, how we're using the cloud data for clash detection analysis. Now we're working as well on a tool the trends that usage life.

So we can see if we're actually making more clashes in our models, or hopefully not. But all those classes are coming down on our projects. And we're keeping on top of that.

Yeah, just example. But there can be more of those usages. And Jose, that's over to you again.

JOSE FANDOS: Thanks, Mike. Well here, just mentioning or reinforcing on what you've spoken about, the information that you are making use of to put together in boards, or to put forward to customers, what to use internally. And here is some of the data that Kinship is helping Buro Happold with.

You mentioned things like crashes, the size of families, the size of projects, corrupt elements, warnings. All that information is being picked up by Kinship live through the use of Revit. And that information is not only being made available in of easy-to-use way through Kinship, but it also is made available via SQL views and an API that we are developing.

And it's already in the hands of our customers. And that is how Buro Happold is making use of some of that data and then bringing in together data from other sources into those external tools. And yeah, that's it. Back to you, Mike.

MIKE BARTYZEL: Thank you, Jose. So let's move on to another usage that's also quite important to us. So that's license reporting.

So we went and bought this CQFlexMon software. It's available. You can look it up and find it.

It's not that expensive. But for the data it gives us, it's absolutely amazing. And you know, quite recently Autodesk introduced the Flex licenses. So these are token-based licenses that you buy a certain number of tokens.

And every software that you use within 24 hours-- it will cost you a certain amount of tokens. So that's instead of the normal long-term licenses, or yearly licenses, or three yearly licenses. And sometimes, we have people that come in for a short-term-- in the summer, that are interns and other people that not necessarily need to use the software every day.

And it's not economical to pay for the full license for them and transfer it to another person. Then you need to have a big IT team to transfer those licenses and remember who is left and who has them and so on. So we're using this software to analyze it for us.

And you can see roughly, we have, in Buro Happold, 65% of technical staff would use the Autodesk software at least 4 days a week. And that means that they're actually better off with the normal long-term licenses and that we pay for. But those two other categories are people that may be use the software once or twice a week, or maybe only once a week-- then they are definitely better off using Flex, because it will come much cheaper for them.

What's more, this software is giving us insights of what software we're using more often, or maybe sometimes as well, who keeps the software open for longer. Because that happens. You probably see the big spike there.

That's auto that Autodesk Civil 3D. And we don't have that many Civil 3D users, as you can see in that pie chart. Revit is definitely a much bigger part of that pie in the usage.

And so that gives us insights. It really does, and helps us save money. And that's what it is about it. Like I said from the very beginning, you will see that that data helps you, not just on the projects, but even with the licensing, that you can make savings and use it as efficiently as you can for your own benefit.

So just to really summarize a few things that we do and the benefits that we have from the ACC-- so definitely centralized access. Everybody has got the same location of the data. Everybody can get to it quite easily from anywhere in the world.

It provides a basis of Integrated Project Delivery, IPD. This is where we can work with others on a cloud easily and very efficiently. No more sharing the models over and over. Everybody's got it.

We can even work live on the projects, if necessary. And it's also easier. For me, it's much easier with the security settings.

The access firewalls-- all of that is gone, because it's so easy with the permissions that you have at your disposal as administrator of the hubs and licenses. And data-- the whole presentation was about data, pretty much. And we're still finding new ways to find even more efficient workflows for everyone.

And so I only think it's going to get better. And in our studies, for every use case that we have on ACC on all the licenses that we use and all the people that currently use them, we see the five-fold return on our investment. So it's definitely something that you should maybe look into.

So that's it for me. Thank you very much for being with us. I hope you've enjoyed the presentation. And over to you. Thank you very much.