Description
Key Learnings
- How to set up your organizations BIM managers for success.
- How to leverage Autodesk Build to improve communication and information dissemination across organizational boundaries
- Understand what data belongs in Revit vs Inventor vs other systems and how to get it there efficiently
- Improve organizational efficiency using Autodesk Build and Autodesk Platform Services
Speaker
- CWCatherine WalmsleyI am Business Solutions Architect with a passion for my work. During my 20+ year Career I have focused on software implementations, custom software design, lean manufacturing process engineering and strategic planning initiatives. My work spans everything from building design and information management to every day material management and change management planning. As a leader I work extensively with owners, managers and stakeholders to improve communication protocols in order to adapt to the constantly changing demands of todays economy.
CATHERINE WALMSLEY: Hello, and welcome to How to Bridge the Gap Between People and Technology. My name is Catherine Walmsley and I'm the owner of Walmsley Technology Consulting where we do hardware setup, software implementation, and data management. Today my emphasis will be on the construction industry.
I've worked through many challenges during my career. Some were surrounding product design and coordination, cross-departmental collaboration, and efficient shop drawing delivery, as well as robotic manufacturing data generation. Some other industries that I've worked in include business, agriculture, retail, restaurant, entertainment, procurement, logistics, and hospitality. I'm happy to share some of the lessons I've learned with you over the years.
A recent highlight of my career was winning the award for accelerating digital transformation, which was presented by Autodesk at their Excellence Award ceremony at the Accelerate conference in 2022. This award recognized my work for Starline Windows, who are a structural facade trade focused on manufacturing within a highly automated assembly line. Starline works with architects to produce an engineered-to-order product, and delivers pre-construction to occupancy services. This award was achieved in partnership with SolidCAD, a Cansel company. If anyone here today is looking for an excellent Autodesk partner, I can highly recommend SolidCAD as my experience working with them on Starline's behalf was exemplary.
Today we're going to talk about how to bridge the gap between people and technology. How many of you feel like your back is up against the wall, with technology moving faster than you? And feel like the gap is only growing every day. I'm going to focus on people within your organization and how to make technology work for them and you as managers and owners.
I'd like to share with you an interview I did with Daniel Graham about my work with Starline on implementing Autodesk systems across their large organization.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
- Hi, everyone. My name is Daniel Graham here at Autodesk University. With me today is Catherine Walmsley from Starline Window. First of all, I want to congratulate you on winning the Accelerating Transformation Award here at AU.
- Oh, thank you. It's been a wonderful experience.
- Yeah, so can you tell us a little bit about what you and your company do that led to the award that you won?
- So we have been bringing in a lot of robotics to help automate our manufacturing process. Starline has opened a new manufacturing facility in 2016. So throughout that transformation we've been able to really drive, not only change for ourselves, but change for those around us. We've been able to work with a lot of the other industries in our area to be able to help them embrace the transformation of digitalization.
- I would love to hear a little bit more from yourself around how you used a broad range of our portfolio around Inventor, around Manage Capabilities within Fusion, Revit, and a host of other solutions. So can you talk a little bit about how you use those toward that value that you just talked about, toward the automations that you delivered upon?
- Before we started working in Revit and Inventor, we were working with AutoCAD with a third party plugin that was extracting the design information into our ERP system. And that was allowing us to create the machine files that we need. Now that's a wonderful process. But we were finding again that being able to add that context to a 2D AutoCAD file, it's limiting. Versus Revit, where I can really include a whole lot of parameters that have been customized, or notes, and ACC now where I can actually stamp a photo into that model or shop drawing. It's incredible, the amount of contextual information that we're giving to these models.
- Yeah.
- So before we brought all of that in, we looked at different solutions. So we looked at SolidWorks with Solid Drive. We looked at SketchUp and Trimble, we looked at ArchiCAD, we looked at Rhino with grasshopper 3D. And eventually the thing that really drove us to taking on more of the Autodesk platform was that openness. And it was also the fact that the information is documented, and the professionals we needed to make the solution work are available.
- Well, first of all, congratulations of the award that you won. Thank you for pushing us in the directions that you are. And I hope you enjoy the rest of your time here at AU.
- Thank you.
- Thank you.
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CATHERINE WALMSLEY: With that said, let's talk a little bit about strategic planning at your organization. Here are a few questions you should be asking yourself regularly. What's working well at your company? What are the gaps? Where do you either not have visibility on a process, or there just simply isn't one? These questions can be asked and applied to your entire organization. But they can also be employed to dissect a department or a subset of processes.
Once you've identified something you'd like to improve on, it's time to ask the next questions. Within this scope you've defined, are they using current methodology, or is there a legacy system in place, or no system at all? And each individual is simply responsible for either providing an input to someone or summarizing the output of a series of carefully considered options. Do you know what those options are?
As an owner or manager these questions are vital to the health of your organization. Maybe this quote will resonate with some of you today. I think this time we got the numbers, right. We just don't know which ones to use. If you ask me, automation is the key to bridging the gap between people today and the advanced technology that is available to us all. Here's a simplified methodology for employing advanced technology in a way that doesn't have to be difficult.
First, identify and standardize. This is the key to systemization and the key to effectively managing processes in a fast paced environment. Repeatable process, and increasing your scale. Turn up the volume at your company. Volume enables growth, both vertically, and by that I mean financially, as well as horizontally, and by that I mean giving you more depth of personnel within your organization.
Educate your staff and analyze opportunities for continuous improvement to take place. Automate steps whenever possible and drive better outcomes for your business. Automation allows your organization to deliver decision making confidence to each of your staff. Staff who are empowered with the right information to make decisions are able to drive more value back into your organization faster than staff who are handcuffed.
Autodesk has more than a few options for those who are looking. I'd like to focus on some of their core offerings. I always say you have to look at your requirements and go from there. For most of you in the construction industry, that means drawings. Somehow you need to produce a set of drawings that an engineering association will accept in order for projects you're working on to get building permits.
Somewhere along the way you'll have chosen a drawing software, as I assume most of you are not using hand drawings today. Maybe some of you are also using some other solutions like SketchUp or SolidWorks, but considering this is Autodesk University I'd say it's safe to assume that you're either using some form of AutoCAD, Revit, or Inventor. Or maybe a combination of those.
Now that we have that established, let's talk about some of the other needs surrounding this communication. The need to review and mark up drawings, both internally and externally. And speaking of externally that implies that there's a need to publish and distribute your drawings. I hope you're past the days of printing a PDF to email. Sometimes with multiple email attachments of part one of one, two of two, those sorts of things, as a way of distributing your drawings.
Let's make a second assumption and say that most of you are either using a file storage system and emailing links to those who need them. That's a fairly well established process at this point throughout the construction industry. Finally, the need to organize and store a master set of files.
Now let's talk about some of the grease that's needed to keep those wheels turning. Permission control, to ensure your drawings are being viewed by those who intend to view them. Version control, or some sort of file naming structure that allows you to identify at least the date the files were submitted, and who's reviewed them. And finally, some way of determining who's in charge of change requirements, and which proposed changes actually need to be made on your end.
Autodesk has over the years released some solutions to help you do just those things, by the name of Docs, Autodesk Construction Cloud, and Vault professional, which interestingly enough any one of these supporting platforms can be used for any of the drawing software that you've chosen. But I would suggest that some have additional benefits when coupled with a specific drawing software.
For those of you who are not installing anything on site and are simply creating drawings for others to review, Autodesk Docs has you covered. Autodesk Construction Cloud actually includes Docs as part of the subscription, but has additional benefits for those using Revit. There are other options of course, but personally I've always preferred the Autodesk Construction Cloud offering. It has built in Revit management capabilities, which are expanding quickly as Autodesk's team of developers far outpaced most others in terms of sheer numbers and familiarity with the Revit API.
Why not bank at a bank instead of a credit union if you can? ACC has smooth web based viewing for Revit files across multiple devices and allows you to pick and choose who has access to what and when. If you're using Inventor, there's Vault Professional available for you. This offers file control as well as automated file management behaviors. When a file is checked in, their bulk metadata management abilities make it a huge asset to an engineering focused organization, especially if you're delivering machine file data, or any kind of robotic manufacturing processes.
I'm quickly covering what's available here, because as far as the how to bridge between these modeling softwares and supporting file management tools, Autodesk has already built that in for you. To learn more about what Autodesk has built there are a lot of classes being offered at AU that will go into the specifics of these pre-built features. I want to take things to the next level.
Those of you who've been hunting through the multitude of technology solutions available, I'm sure at some point your search for the perfect software stack for your organization you've probably encountered some images similar to these. Or even this one. These images speak to the complexity of organizations that deal with more than just engineered shop drawings. These additional systems like CRMs and ERPs and data warehouses are an endless source of complication for businesses today, trying to navigate an ever changing technology industry.
Some of you may not be using any of these. Some of you may find yourself in the midst of endless spreadsheets and internal schedules. The advantages that these solutions offer are massive, so leaving them off the table is a mistake, if you ask me. This might seem a little overwhelming to you to even consider. So I'll break that stigma down a little bit for you in today's presentation.
First, we need to talk about where are you now. As I said, maybe you're a sophisticated organization that already has several complicated systems in place. Your own mega interstate highway with different people racing along different lanes all at once. Or maybe your tech stack looks a little more like a Jenga tower. Hopefully you have at least a few rows of foundation to stand on, or maybe you're pulling those pieces from a legacy system. Just trying to keep that stack balanced, hopefully your stack isn't too thin, or your staff is probably having a hard time keeping it together.
Wherever you are I'd like you to close your eyes for a moment. Think about the big picture at your organization. And think about those pieces that are your foundation. Which ones do you really depend on? Are there any you'd like to remove?
Now take a deep breath. Think about where you want to go. Think about what an ideal situation would look like. What would it be like if everyone at your organization was able to wind up and nail a bullseye each and every time they throw a dart? What's on that target? Profits, efficiency, confident decision making at each level of your company?
I'd like to suggest a few goals worth targeting for the sake of today's discussion. Quick drawing mock ups, the ability to import or link your drawings into any model as a reference drawing. Facilitating communication between architects, clients, and subtrades involved in the building permit application process. Creating a relatable visual representation of the entire project, or a specific scope of work. Product designs with a multitude of contextual information, accessible while looking at the drawings for review. Or if your organization is quite ambitious, traffic simulations, toolpath simulations, stress factor calculations, and variations of design improvement analyzed using AI.
The information about how to bridge from the complexity of people who aren't always software experts to these lofty goals is what this course is about. When I think of a bull's eye, I think of when a single action translates through each stage of the project life cycle perfectly to result in the final piece moving exactly as planned. So what do you need to bridge the gap?
PEST control. People, education, software, and technology. And in this case control is key. Governance of permissions and access, organizations of reference material and links, evaluation of software, and understanding the capabilities of technology. These are the things you need to be able to bridge between the people at your organization and the advanced technology that's available today.
For any given process that you'd like to improve, whether it's overall profitability in your company, internal efficiency, or ensuring that miscommunications just cannot happen, you'll need to identify the people that matter in that department or the procedures. This means identifying stakeholders of all types, big and small, prioritizing them, and communicating with each of them to gain their buy-in. Sometimes even begrudgingly, if necessary.
So let's talk about the people that matter. Engineers and drafters, architects or developers, sales staff, project managers, accountants, clients, product manufacturers, and subcontractors. Within each of those groups you'll also have technology champions, technology holdouts, process champions, hopefully not too many process holdouts, but it does happen. Key players and supporting roles. I have decades of experience bringing change and new technology to these people. I'm here to share some of that with you today.
When you think about the people that matter in your organization, it's important to ask yourself some key questions. Every organization is different. I've seen some engineers who are brilliant, but also very low tech. I've seen some low level clerks who can run circles in various softwares around their supervisors. Whatever your situation is, we can always start by describing the input and output data for these systems.
How will you record that information? Who has the skills to use the software you need the information tracked in? Who is required to provide information to that person? Who will consume that information? Who is responsible for what's ultimately submitted to a client or architect? These questions help you focus on what is being delivered to the people that matter in your business.
What is the final product delivered to the client? What do the operational managers require to do their job? What do architects and engineers require in order to get building permits approved? And what do your project and construction managers require in order to complete their work?
These questions might seem simple, but in my experience, most organizations are anything but. Finding your stopping point is key to understanding how to bridge and help overcome them. I promise to talk about how, so let's start with the people.
How can you empower people with various technology skills while still controlling who has access to what, when, and what they can do with the information? First steps at most organizations will include some sort of data collection. Most organizations will have forms that are filled out that capture the required information in a low tech format.
This information is either entered directly or re-entered into a centralized platform such as a CRM, or ERP. Typically the goal here is to facilitate sales, technical specifications, scope of work definitions, and option selections that eventually result in the quantity take off which drives a quote price for a job. This process is more often than not being replaced with a self-serve website form that clients can fill out themselves, or a sales rep can fill out on their behalf.
Secondly that information passes through someone with experience at your organization, someone who knows the company and client who can close the sale. Enabling this person's success typically is done by having a strong repository of technical documentation, or a system that holds previous examples of jobs, such as a CRM, or an ERP. Some companies go a little lower tech here, and have a key staff member with years of tribal knowledge and experience.
That requires additional management and approval time, and holds back your staff from moving forward with a reply to an inquiry. So personally, I recommend a central repository of information where data is entered and flags can be established to define when a job may require additional cost consideration, so that key staff members can be notified that their input is required.
Third, once the initial information has been gathered and reviewed by someone with company experience, there is a highly technical resource required. A drafter or junior engineer who has been specifically trained to create a technical output in a very specific manner. Once again, I want to reiterate that I've seen software technicians who are very experienced. They themselves could be project managers, with a high level of overall technical acumen. But I've also seen technical engineers in this role who are simply configuring the options as they're defined by the input data, who don't understand the implications that their actions will have down the road, or how it ties into a building design.
Think back to our discussion about the people in your organization, and determine who are you working with here. And how to prioritize the next steps, which is to review the work that is usually being done by someone with a high level of accreditation, such as an engineering or architectural degree. This final stage represents the legal burden of ensuring that what is being delivered to a client complies with the building standards for their area.
Across each of these steps, you will find people with different levels of both experience and technical expertise. You ask yourself, where do you expect to facilitate lower levels of experience or technical knowledge. Which roles are appropriate to allow complexity? And which roles are you expecting to hire a junior employee for a lower cost?
Typically these roles are split, having some of each of those people in each group. But how many managers do you want to pay? How many chief engineers can you have on staff? In practical terms, there will be several juniors or intermediates working under a single team lead. This means that your juniors are either enabling the team lead to complete many projects efficiently, or the juniors are requiring a high degree of facilitation and supervision in order to complete their tasks.
The key to moving this conversation along is education. How you facilitate growth in education at your company. Well, we're here at AU, so I know you all value education to some level. But I'd say that most organizations can't afford to send their entire staff to this conference. This conference typically is host to industry leaders or people with the initiative and ambition to come to this conference at their own expense.
What about the rest of the people? Where are they getting their education from? Google, peers, mentors in the field, or simply trial and error? Each of these are uncontrolled by the head of the organization, and can be time consuming approaches which can result in errors being made in critical data.
An organization who values education will facilitated more targeted information being provided to employees at key points in time through the creation and documentation of standard operating procedures, work instructions, and in place instructional prompts or helpful hints within the data entry forms or platforms that are being used. For organizations engaging in major change and transition to key processes or operational data, scheduled time for facilitating a dialogue with multiple disciplines across the company, such as a workshop or a group discussion, with documentation that's then published where employees can access not only that, but additional resources to support their learning. Or even pre-approved courses being offered via an industry specific learning portal can be used.
These are excellent techniques to help support your staff's growth. These techniques allow a company to enable their staff to learn while still controlling what they spend their time researching. As some of you may already know, R&D can be a costly endeavor. That said, I'd certainly go so far as to say that an uneducated staff is much more expensive, as they aren't able to self evaluate their work, or provide additional value downstream when they don't understand the context of the information they're responsible for.
Software evaluations. So I have personally evaluated hundreds of different software offerings throughout my career. Everyone wants to know if they're using the right tool for the job, or if there's a better option out there.
Some of the key metrics I use when assessing software include understanding what are the technical capabilities of the target users. What data will be entered into the system? What reports and exports will be required from the system?
Will the data remain as it's recorded, or will translations, calculations, or algorithms be used to transform the data into more meaningful output? Who will be checking the data to ensure accuracy? Who will be responsible for change management as a result of analyzing the data that is being recorded in the system?
How much data and how fast can it be entered, queried, or modified in the system? Which device or devices will be used to enter the information, view reports, or analyze the impact this will have on your business? Can the data be flagged or qualified? How does it look to each different group of users who will be interacting with the system?
Some of the key points I look for that I know will help enable success across any organization, Autodesk actually seems to understand quite well. I have recommended several Autodesk solutions and successfully implemented and onboarded these solutions, and personally seen huge benefits from having done so. Autodesk makes an effort to ensure the user interface and API are well documented, searchable, and available to you. They standardize their software to allow a familiar interface for users, and ensure outputs are available in most common formats.
Because they're so well known it's reasonable to find experts for training or hire without requiring a lot of in-house custom training before a new staff member can start to contribute. They understand the value of auditing activity, and ensure that the pre-built reports are useful. This is thanks to their large base of developers that continue to release features that people have come to expect in a modern era.
I'm not saying they are perfect. Particularly as they buy out other companies software to add to their umbrella, there's often a changeover period. But I'd rather implement one platform that I know can be depended on to stay current and work well with other pieces of the puzzle, then implement a piece of software that may seem advanced for its time at the time that it was purchased, but then stagnates and becomes obsolete over time. This implementing software at a large organization in particular is very time consuming and costly endeavor.
I've had a lot of success engaging with Autodesk on new development requests. I've been down this road with many companies, including Microsoft, and I can say hands down that Autodesk has listened to my use case scenarios, and implemented new feature requests in a way that worked for all of their clients at a much faster rate than any other software development company I've submitted development requests to.
Speaking of submitting new feature requests, the key to making a request in such a way that it's actually actionable by a large organization like Autodesk is in understanding technology, how it's created, and how it's designed. That's the pesky T in the acronym I mentioned earlier. PEST control.
To understand technology you must understand how information is recorded, pulled in or pushed out in a developer's framework, and what can be made accessible to the public. Some systems are closed. They have no public API endpoints, and you simply get what you get, as far as reports and capabilities that are offered by the creators. Autodesk recognizes that public development is key to their customers success. Third party plug-ins became a launching point for unprecedented growth for companies using their software.
Finally, design data you can access and bring into other systems. And a new Industrial Revolution of design configuration and automation was born. Now the concepts of templates and options being built into models is commonly used, but it hasn't been around for very long when you really look at it.
Speaking of revolution, more and more software today is offering the ability for bulk imports using CSV, but these imports are only as good as the last time the data was validated. Being able to update information requires the use of stack resolution protocols, and ultimately everything needs a timeout limit, or as you're attempting to use your system you might reach a point where the data you are housing in that system becomes so massive that it will freeze out other users and processes from being able to access the information, because someone decided to run a report against all data, back to the beginning of time, without having defined any limitations to their request.
This is a level of expertise I've come to expect from Autodesk offerings, and why I'm here today telling you that bringing these solutions into your organization will help enable people who may have stronger technical understanding than you to do things with your data that you've only dreamed of in your wildest Star Trek fantasies. I'd like to delve a little deeper into the how side of the automation discussion.
We've talked about the first three columns here already, so I'm going to focus on the last one. Automate. Automation of work that would in the past have been done by a human or team of humans or even vast departments of people can now be done with the click of a single button that kicks off an intricate workflow using integration to push or pull data from one system to another, scheduling of reports or actions based on a specific time of day, or trigger such as a change in the data that's been recorded. And a scripted action that can actually manipulate or modify supplemental data in your system, so that when someone does pull a report they always have a complete set of information available.
Automation is key to repeatability, scalability, ease of auditing, and real time analytics. It's also the key to driving decision making confidence across large organizations. Does that mean that automation is infallible? No. There are some keys to doing automation well, and I promise delivered how in this presentation. So here we go.
We talked about identification of what is required to happen. In order to really understand effective ways to automate procedures it's important to understand how data is recorded. It all comes down to table, either stored in Excel or a database or a complicated cloud platform, your data is sitting in tables somewhere. Either way somewhere is organized into columns and rows.
Most of the time as end users we don't really notice it. Information is simply presented to us on a screen or in a report, and we learn that if you want to find X information, you need to look at the bottom left page, or wherever it might be. What you don't see is that the final output, either on a screen or on paper, is a set of variables pulled together from another table stored within the system.
If you generate a project report it's going to give you some pieces of information, including start dates, maybe a BOM and some costs. As an organization you have two choices. Either the start date is entered into the system that does the reporting, or you need to pull it from another system where the data has already been recorded. What happens if you have a CRM where your sales staff has meticulously recorded the start dates for your jobs that they've already sold? And later a material management system requires that start date in order to create a list for purchase? Do you have system give A report of all the project start dates, and system B give a report of all the BOM requirements, and have your purchasing staff cross-referencing both reports to define which materials need to be ordered.
Or do you enter the date twice into each system, so that the report can be pulled from the material management software alone? What if something changes in system A that system B does not reflect? That's where an integration can save you a lot of money and headache.
The purpose of software integration is to share data and enhance functionality across multiple systems. This can be an overwhelming endeavor on its own. Does all data need to be in two places at once? Is there a point where the data is no longer required in one system? Is there a point when it's cheaper to have a user enter the data into the system it's required in rather than automating an integration? All of these questions are answered in our PEST control analysis.
Who are you're working with? What really matters? How challenging is the system to use, where the reports are being generated? How will you audit the accuracy of the information being presented, which is driving key decisions across your organization?
The how isn't really all that difficult in this example. Define when the data is being entered, and when it's needed to be reported. Define where the easiest place to enter the information is, and the easiest place to report on it. Define who will be on each side of that process, and what their device and technical capabilities are. Finally, schedule and script the report to be available or sent to the end user at each time that it's required, in order to facilitate the moving forward with their job.
Do this for all of the pieces of information required, and finally have a set of contextual information given to the report-- giving the report some meaning. Statuses that can tell the final user what state of data entry the information they're looking at is, is the job secured, is it pending, is it completed or back ordered? Once you have compiled the information, schedule the push to the next stage and have a set of parameters that define whether the information needs to be submitted for additional review before it becomes actionable.
This is how you enable your people to spend their time removing roadblocks from your company's success rather than spending their time recording information that has already been established as standard operating procedure. For more information, feel free to reach out to me via LinkedIn or email. Thank you so much for listening to this presentation. I'll now take some questions on Q&A.
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