Making the Change to AutoCAD Civil 3D and HoleBASE SI for Geotechnical BIM

GARY MORIN: Hi, everybody. I'm Gary Morin. I'm from kinetics and my role today is on the computer. I'm just going to take the backseat while Tom does all the work. So this class is really talking quite detailed about the changes that Tom and McMillen Jacobs went through when they moved from their legacy system gINT over to HoleBASE and integration into AutoCAD Civil.

So before we really start, there's not many people here. So we want to keep it informal, ask questions and whatever. But just so I have an understanding of the type of class people who we got in the room kind of quick show a hand, have you heard of Bentley gINT? OK. That's what it is right around.

Who has not heard of Bentley gINT? Put their hands up. OK. How many of the guys here, in that case, actually work or receive geotechnical data? Borehole logs. People who work with borehole logs. Can you show your hands? OK. People who draw and work with geology. Show your hands.

So there's a few you who haven't shown any hands at all here. This is going to be quite in depth of how do you actually get data from site, manage that data, and bring it into AutoCAD Civil or to do with geotechnics and borehole data. If that doesn't really appeal to you, may not be quite the right class for you in that case here. By all means, please don't sit through a class that has no relevance to you whatsoever.

AUDIENCE: You should have started by saying this is the boring class.

GARY MORIN: Pardon?

AUDIENCE: You said, this is the boring class.

GARY MORIN: That's so boring to say that. It has been said so many times. So let's keep this informal. We'll go through-- I'm going to hand over to Thomas now. And his first time at AU so be easy on him. And he's got a great presentation to share. So over to you, Tom.

THOMAS PALLUA: Thanks, Gary. As Gary said, my name's Thomas Pallua. You can hear an accent. I'm not a native speaker. So if there is anything you don't understand, please interrupt me. Be happy I have my personal translator here from the UK. You might not even understand him but we'll try.

Anyway, a little background of myself. I came over to the states five years ago and basically spent most of my career in Europe-- Northern Italy-- working on a tunneling project. I'm an engineering geologist. Drill and blast hard rock tunneling, that's my field.

I've done a lot of site investigation. And over the past five years, I started working here in the States at the McMillen Jacobs in their Seattle office, which is our biggest office. About 70 people. And you can see we have 20 offices all over the country. Two in Australia. One in New Zealand. Two in Canada. 400 staff.

Our markets are transportation, water resources, hyrdopower, conveyance systems. The services we offer engineering/underground engineering/geotech, design and permitting, construction management, and also dispute resolution.

These are the learning objectives of the class. I'm not going to read through them. We're going to repeat them every time we have a new topic. So you'll remember what we're talking about. And as Gary said, feel free to interrupt and ask questions. Gary's going to do that anyway. So that works well we found out.

So let's go into the meat of this presentation a little bit. The talk is loosely based on a project that my company is still designing-- executing in the Seattle area. I can't name the project by name. It's about 90% design right now. We are the prime consultant and geotechnical lead on that project. We have six sub consultants.

And among others, we work with another geotech sub, which is kind of a strange arrangement because we are a geotech firm ourselves. But that's just how it was bid. And the sub consultants. Basically, their scope of work is to collect data. They got all the geotech data report. And to make it simple, our job is interpreting that data.

So basically, we had to develop a geotechnical profile for the tunnel, predict groundwater and ground conditions, design the tunnel and associated shafts, and design civil structures. So what's the project all about? It's a combined sewer overflow structure. I don't know how many of you heard about those. I will explain that particular structure on the next slide a little bit more in detail.

Anyway, there are five shafts, connections to existing facilities with micro-tunnel that goes beneath a navigable canal. We have diversion and dropped structures. We have a big storage tunnel-- 18 feet and 10 inches inside diameter-- to store the storm and wastewater.

And then the construction will basically be done with a tunnel boring machine and a micro-tunnel boring machine. So the connection between the new structure and the existing structure will be done with a micro-tunnel because it's only 78 inches inside diameter.

Combined sewer overflow systems are quite used in the States. It's not my area of expertise as a geologist but I looked it up and was quite interesting what I read. They're talking about older cities in the US, which compared to European standards is always old. Yeah, OK.

They're saying everything basically that was built before the 1970s was designed as a combined wastewater and stormwater structure. So now you're there with these existing structures. Obviously, you don't want to go back in, rip the whole city up, and divide the storm from the waste. So you just keep them combined, and you design big enough so you don't have as many overflow events as in the past. So that's what you basically do.

So how does it work? Basically, when the pipes-- in this case, the tunnel-- gets too full, there's an overflow to the nearest body of water, which could be a river, a lake, or the Puget Sound in the Seattle area. It's obviously an economical way to design those and construct those things because it's a combined system.

The advantage is-- in case of low and moderate rainfalls-- you have both the storm and the wastewater going to a treatment plant. The disadvantage during heavy rains, you have to overflow. So basically, nowadays the achievement that the cities and the counties want to get to is reduce those overflows from actually 10 per year to 1.

Let's talk about the drivers and the needs to change from our legacy system and go to HoleBASE. Why did we do that in the first place? So I was working for the company five years. And the old system was in place probably about 10 years. I heard a lot of stories about it. And everybody was a little bit frustrated.

So we had this project with a large amount of data. 70 boreholes. Not a lot by our stuff, but by a subcontractor using gINT. 17,000 groundwater level readings that we had to manage. It's quite a bit. So we saw that we probably-- our job was to produce geotech profile along the alignment. With gINT, this has always been a struggle, difficult. We wanted to change. Then we wanted a uniform approach.

With the legacy system, basically, we had no consistency. gINT didn't facilitate a unified, standardized approach. So each project was an individual file-based system often stored on local machines. And each project had to be individually configured. We wanted a standardized repeatable approach. Put our standards in place once and then we could use them. Simplify our workflows. Make everything smoother. Easier.

We had various technology issues with the existing system. Basically, as I said, the old system was in place for almost 10 years with no significant updates. The customer support was very poor. I would say almost inexistent. And then very inefficient data entry and workflows. A lot of little things that created frustrations that-- right now to you if you didn't use gINT, you might not see that. But the frustration was felt in the office with this old system.

And the biggest issue that I have been seeing is basically during the data entry. This process was very difficult and no way to preview what I was entering. The file description. There was all-- at the end when everything was entered, you could save and then preview. You didn't know if you did any misspellings. You didn't know if you wrote something wrong. But you saw it at the end. So that was not a good system for us. Oh I think I jumped one.

So we wanted to create-- the creation of the geotechnical sections was also very slow in the system, in the old system. So basically, what you had to do is export from gINT as a DXF, re-import to AutoCAD, and lots of post processing that way. The imported six are not dynamic.

If you had to do changes, you had to go back to the data management software again and restart the process. Change file descriptions, re-export your DXF file, re-import it into CAD. And basically, it was just a nightmare.

GARY MORIN: So basically to generate a profile you have to code-in AutoCAD. You DXF out gINT, DXF into AutoCAD, then had to go through a whole lot of editing until you scale it, point, put it right. And if any of the data changed, you had to do the whole process again.

THOMAS PALLUA: Yup. I--

GARY MORIN: Does that ring bells for other people here?

AUDIENCE: Yeah.

THOMAS PALLUA: I'd like to repeat something one of my CAD drafters told me once when I was working with him. He said, you know, I really like to work with this geotech person sitting in Boston because she knows how to massage this gINT data very well, so I don't have to do a lot of work. I said, well, I don't want to learn how to massage data. They're already there. I don't need to make them computable for CAD to use. So I thought we needed something different here. That's not working for us.

So basically, we needed a standardized approach, more efficient data entry. We wanted the ability to query data and filter data, to analyze the data. Instead of looking at individual paper borehole locks. And so we needed a system that was designed with a data-driven approach so it could be queried. So you only import or you input data that can be queried. There is no way that you can input data that don't belong in the system because it's standardized.

And then we wanted-- this was a big driver for us. We wanted a much closer integration with AutoCAD Civil 3D. And we wanted something that could create sections and profiles very rapidly instead of losing hours, sometimes maybe days, to get something out because we needed to look at the data that came from the field sometimes right away.

And also we needed to-- in this case, of this particular project-- be able to manage large amounts of data, which sometimes with the old system was not easy. And we also were looking for a system that allowed us to-- once those sections and the profiles are created, it would be easy to modify them and not go back to the database. Make a bunch of changes to a bunch of exports again. Do a bunch of imports to CAD again.

And it was just not a smooth workflow. We wanted to just go back to the database, change it, and those changes directly come into CAD using dynamic objects.

So that brings us to the next topic here. How did we develop new workflows to incorporate both the legacy and the new data? So we basically found out about HoleBASE through another software company called Dataforensics located in Atlanta. They had developed a software that works on a tablet for logging boreholes.

We started talking to them and shared our frustration. They shared their frustration with gINT with us but said, we can help you make your workflows a little bit more easy. It's never going to be perfect, but it will be better. But then they said, but we started working with this other company located in the UK, and they developed this software called HoleBASE. Have you heard about them? I said, nope. All right, let's do a presentation.

And so basically, that convinced us. Especially when we saw what was possible in AutoCAD Civil 3D. The close integration. The centralized geotechnical data management. Where you have a configuration pack that is configured to your company needs and can be changed only by certain people that have admin rights across offices because what you want to avoid, and what we wanted to avoid again, is having our New York office doing something completely different than we do.

We wanted to have a standardized uniform approach to what went out to our client. And it needed to be relatively easy to use and to configure. Ongoing development was also important instead of having to wait 9 or 10 years for something to come out. And obviously, the customer support is very useful and helpful.

GARY MORIN: We're very friendly.

THOMAS PALLUA: I remember, Gary. I called you once. You were somewhere traveling in the UK and watching some soccer game. You still were talking to me. You said, I'm here in the hotel, but I can find some time between one soccer game and the other. I was like, no, OK. That works.

So basically, with this new system that could be configured to our company needs-- so it does standardized configuration packs protected by admin rights-- we got all that we needed. Central server, standardized configuration, standard templates, a data driven design approach, and the possibility to query the data, which is, in my opinion, very, very important.

HoleBASE allows this dynamic integration with CAD and very smooth workflows with AutoCAD Civil 3D where the data is imported seamlessly and sections can be created in moments.

GARY MORIN: Maybe it's worth just going back to that previous slide because, I think, one of the inherent differences between the approach that we're working on with gINT is because each gINT project was its own file database, each one was configured separately. Each engineer would do it their own way. So it's completely inconsistent.

So to actually try to put consistency across it would have took an awful lot of work. So with what Tom just went through here, the way in which the HoleBASE is configured it's all configured centrally. So by just doing it once, everybody's using the same system. Someone has to go out of the way to change it from the standard system, which you can do. But then it's much more managed on it all, which is your main driver was that--

THOMAS PALLUA: Sure. I remember us having with gINT a bunch of library files all over the company. And people would just copy them and alter them based on their needs because they needed something. And then they kept them on their C drive and did their own thing. And then somebody else came in, did the same thing. So it was like a nightmare.

GARY MORIN: Just imagine it's like using AutoCAD and everybody has its own template file. That would never happen, would it? Imagine you could actually manage all your template files that were standards with everybody you work with. Same principle.

THOMAS PALLUA: Yeah, same principle. Yeah, we talked about this one. So basically, seamless workflows from the central data management software to CAD importing the holes and creating sections. That was the biggest driving force for us because that's what we mainly do as a talent firm.

We need to look at the geotech conditions-- the ground to groundwork conditions-- in 2D and in 3D in the future, I hope so, immediately before we even reach, let's say, 30%, 60% of design. And that needs to be as quick as possible. It's very useful to be able to create sections when the data comes in from the field already instead of being waiting a long time.

GARY MORIN: Really, tell those InfraWorks guys who are doing the tunnel design all in InfraWorks that actually they need some geology in there as well to go with it. Designing tunnels without geology could be a bit iffy.

THOMAS PALLUA: So the next big thing that convinced us was also the fact that the software is relatively easy to use and to configure. The interface is familiar. It's very similar to other programs that you have been using in the past I always thought. It required less training. And it's also very responsive compared to some other software.

So how did we incorporate the legacy system in our workflow? And in this particular project I'm talking about, the data was supplied to us by the sub consultant in the gINT format. So what we could have done-- but we didn't-- was to have either Dataforensics or Keynetix create a mapping file for us so that gINT data could be transferred directly to HoleBASE.

At the time we chose to do this ourselves via CSV files. Would I do it again? I don't think so especially if we have a big project like that. But I'm going to go into the details over the next few slides.

So basically what you see here-- I had to gray out the project name. These are the gINT files on the left side that came out from the export. So it's a normal XLS file. And basically, you can name it whatever you want. And it will be named every time differently based on who you're working, who does the export.

As opposed to HoleBASE base has their standardized naming convention and it's a CVS file. And it's always the same. It has to be like this. You can't change one thing in that file. You can't change a space. You can't change anything. Otherwise it won't import anymore. So that's a standard already there. So looking a little bit more in detail in those two different Excel versions that we have here.

In gINT, you see that the header columns, the naming convention is different than in HoleBASE. So it's not only extract the file from gINT, rename it the right way as a CVS file, and, boom, I can import it. No. The column names have to be recognizable in HoleBASE. So what we needed to do-- it was time consuming-- figure out which columns were similar or had the same information. Copy-paste every time. Time consuming. Not fun I tell you.

Why do we do it? We just got the software and said, OK, we're going to figure it out ourselves. Sometimes you learn the hard way. And also something I want to point out with gINT is they don't have a standardized approach to input data. So as I'm showing here, you have that related comment in a description. And some people do that because you can do it. But it shouldn't be there. And that creates a bunch of problems if you import in a different system.

GARY MORIN: Yes, it's like putting that in slightly different words. Though gINT is a data management system, quite often people just literally put data as descriptions as remarks just typed in anywhere. So again if you equate it back to AutoCAD, you may have a very strict layering system. And if you know what your layers in, it can really help out when you start turning things off and on.

You know precisely what's going to happen. If someone just puts everything into layer zero and type it all in, it makes life much harder than actually managing that going through it. It's really the same principle here. HoleBASE likes having data in the right places. Then you can analyze it and work with it time and time again repeated processes. When it's all mixed up, you can't really do that.

THOMAS PALLUA: Yeah, you can't query it, which is the biggest thing. So what have we learned? Creating those CVS is time consuming. On a big project, we won't do it again. We'll go with the mapping file, which then can directly be imported from gINT into HoleBASE.

GARY MORIN: So just to explain what a mapping file is. So you saw those different table names and the different field names. A mapping file is an XML thing that we create that basically says this goes from here in gINT into here in HoleBASE. And there's some rules that go with it from here to here. Once it's created, you can just then import it and it would know. Besides, you had to do it.

So Tom told me when he started this job he wasn't gray. He's gone gray through trying to work out how it all goes. And with a mapping file, it would make that process a lot easier. The only negative side is is that every project database you got, if it's a different structure, that mapping file has to be tweaked a bit. If you got some uniformity and you can project slowly, it should allow you to do it. Use it time and time again.

THOMAS PALLUA: Most of the time you don't even get uniformity from the same company. That's a problem. That's the problem, which now we have a standard. And it's what it is. It can be queried. It can be-- all different kinds of things can be done to the database.

So what we did then in the future-- this project is quite a while in the past. We are using the pLog system-- which I'm going to go over the next slides a little bit more in detail-- to basically collect data digitally right away from the field and don't have to do any data import. It's done in the field standardized. But then it goes to the cloud and comes to HoleBASE. I don't have to do anything. Saves a lot of time and money.

So what did we do to boost our efficiency and develop new workflows? As I said, we introduced the tablet approach in the field to capture the data on site. And can be directly imported into HoleBASE SI, and it's only entered once. And we use the Advanced Description Builder, which helps us to standardize this process.

The Advanced Description Builder means that basically-- I think I have another slide, but I'm just explaining it right now-- every or our company-- I don't know if every other do too-- our company has a standardized approach in how they want to describe soil and rock.

It's a specific format; The order, how the words are, where we put the semi-colons, where we put comas. That has all been built based on our needs. So in the field, I don't have to remember, oh, wait, do I put dense first? Or do I put brown first? It's all drop-downs. And however I input it doesn't matter because in the description of the log it's standard. Comes out.

So this shows-- this little video here will show you how the import from the pLog is done into HoleBASE and how quick that goes. So basically, in HoleBASE itself you select your project-- previously created-- Import data. Little window opens. Select the pLog tablet mapping file. Then in pLog you select your project again. Click Next. It's analyzing the data, telling you if it's valid or not. Everything's green.

GARY MORIN: This is basically the same process, as well, when using again mapping file to export data directly from gINT as well. You just go through this import process that goes through, gives you the choice here of different boreholes, do you want to bring in the whole lot, just bits of it, what data do you want to bring in. And you go through this wizard. It's telling you what changes you're going to have to your data.

Then a few seconds later you're in here. What Thomas was saying-- and I must admit, it took me a bit to realize it. He's basically told me early on that the guys onsite capture them with pLog, they upload it, and within five minutes they can have in HoleBASE looking at it in their office what's just been caught onsite. Looking at their information. Complete change of while working and what they're doing by this one here.

THOMAS PALLUA: Yeah. So here you have your borehole log. While your field geologist is still out in the field mapping, Finished, let's say, the first hole, I already have the data. Can look at them. Maybe I realize, maybe in the next hole we should do some more SPTs at this and this level because I spotted something.

So in these workflows, what we needed to achieve is creating standardized templates that could be saved to the configuration pack or at the project level, which means you can make them available for everyone to use if they're safe to the configuration pack or just for the people who use that specific project. Which is quite interesting because if you have a tweaked template that's only working for this specific project, you don't need everyone to see it and get confused about it.

And the big thing. This process would allow us to have those templates available for other projects going forward. We didn't have to create them every time. So that was a big improvement in the workflow.

And these templates were created in Template Studio, which is an add-on to the program. I have to point out that the template design in gINT-- I haven't done it myself, but I've watched people doing it. It was hard to do. And you almost had to be a programmer to understand what you're doing.

And then the big advantage of this was the same techniques to create these borehole templates could then be-- in the workflow could then be used to create the strip templates in AutoCAD. And that brings us to the next slide.

So we created the strip template for this specific project. We already knew how to use Template Studio because we created the borehole template and it was a quick, easy workflow. In this particular project, we decided to show two graphic columns. On the left side, USCS units. And on the right side what we'd call Engineering Soil Unit.

It's basically a simplified unit where you group different soils that have similar geotechnical characteristics to make the profile more readable for a non-geotech person. We wanted to see the different instrumentation.

In this particular project, we had several piezometers in the hole, could be a VW piece vibrating wire piezometers or well-readers you see here with the different assign we differentiated. And then we wanted to show the water levels of the different instruments. And remember we had 17,000 ground water level readings so we needed to filter this data to make them available in CAD.

The next step was to create a standardized hatch patterns and--

GARY MORIN: Just work it so that template and what you're saying to make filtering that data. You set it up, configure it, but then you just use it time and time again. So actually you can use that template. Once it's being configured, it's just like instant work whenever you go into a profile. Those templates came out. So it's worth just bearing that in mind. There's been a ton preparing it, but once it's done it's just repeatable. Incredibly fast.

THOMAS PALLUA: Yeah, let's even say on our project and on projects that came in the future we wanted to show just USCS instead of Engineering Soil Unit. I just go back in Template Studio, delete that second column, save the strip again, and it's available in CAD. So it's that easy. Once it's saved, it's available for other project. And that was our goal. Simplify. Make the workforce easier.

AUDIENCE: Real quick. So for those profiles in Civil 3D, they would behave like Civil 3D profiled--

THOMAS PALLUA: Civil 3D objects.

AUDIENCE: Right. So that based on the scales that you set up and the vertical exaggeration that would be dynamic and--

THOMAS PALLUA: Sure. Yeah. You can modify the scale-- the hatch scale. It's all feasible in AutoCAD. The headers, the text that is you can modify with the Civil 3D tools in tool space.

GARY MORIN: But Yeah. So basically, you just point labels for the actual headers. But the actual vitual saturation, et cetera, was all based on your Civil profile view settings. If you changed your vertical scale, the vertical scale also-- even one's that are inclined an angle, they would also automatically change for you as well. So you don't actually have to do any work for it.

THOMAS PALLUA: So no need like in gINT. You have to do this-- you find your right scale. You have just a trial. And how many times do I need to-- OK, import it. No, this scale's not working, go back, export another scale. So that's all gone.

The next step was to create a standardized hatch patterns, which we wanted to have in CAD. And Keynetix was already underway to create those and responded very quickly to our requirements because what we wanted in CAD to have the same patterns that we used in the borehole log. So it would be comparable and standard. We didn't want something that wasn't standard.

So now we have all the standard USCS patterns. And we have also standardized our ESUs because what we wanted to avoid was Seattle use a green color for a tool like deposit and New York would use yellow. That's not standard. So it's just one color. If you want to call this unit [INAUDIBLE] deposits, it's yellow all over the country.

GARY MORIN: One thing to point on these as well-- I'll just quickly come over here. Can you see some of these hatch patterns here? Crazy, they're asymmetrical on it. So one of the features we added in full term is when you draw your log strips now inside Civil, you can just specify the scale based on the width of your log strips.

And they will come in so it fits your log strip perfect. So you get the asymmetrical, so you got different materials, different of these slope classifications on either side. It should fit symmetrical down the middle of it all on it. What a crazy idea. An asymmetrical hatch pattern.

THOMAS PALLUA: Who came up with that? So once we integrate it all these workflows, what are the capabilities delivered by integrating HoleBASE base SI and AutoCAD Civil 3D? We got a much faster data management. The workflows and the outputs would be much quicker and repeatable, which I can't repeat that enough but that's the most important thing.

You want to be able to have a standard that you can use over the projects and not come back and reinvent the wheel every time you have a new project. That is way too time consuming. We have a greater opportunity to spot anomalies because we got the data earlier. We can look at them. We can look at them in 2D. We can look at them in 3D. Almost fresh out of the oven. From the field in the computer. Very smooth.

We can identify gaps. And the Advanced Description Builder helps us to really standardize our descriptions and over the project and over the offices.

GARY MORIN: Just to come back to the quickly identifying gaps in data. Can you elaborate what you mean by that?

THOMAS PALLUA: Let's say my field person is out on a project drilling 10 holes. On the first day, they drilled the first hole 30 feet deep. It's all logged with the tablet. I'm in the office, downloaded from the cloud, have it on my computer. I look at it on the site. And I see there's some unexpected soil conditions, so I might decide to drill the next hole 10 feet deeper.

I might decide to take some samples at that specific layer. I might see that there is some contamination there. OK. Let's modify our drill pattern. Let's drill another hole that's very close to that other one. So I can react to those anomalies very quickly--

GARY MORIN: Because you're getting the data from site into HoleBASE, you can view it. You can understand it quicker, and therefore, respond to it.

THOMAS PALLUA: Yeah, I don't have to wait for the field person to come back after a week of field work and give me the handwritten field notes, which I can't read because they are dirty, they're handwritten, and so on. This helps a lot.

GARY MORIN: OK, thanks.

THOMAS PALLUA: So what we would do before we had this approach with the tablets was-- and I think many of you do the same-- we went out in the field with cheat sheets. They were laminated obviously so we wouldn't get so dirty. But because in the company we already have a standardized approach, so we didn't just send out people and say, hey, just log it and come back, however you want to do it it's fine.

We had a standardized approach, but you always had to look at the sheet. Oh, what do I do now? OK. Right. OK. This is it. OK. Now I have to write brown. Then I have to write dense. Then I have to write descriptions, and so on.

Now we just go with our tablet and we don't even think about that anymore. What do I have to report first? What do I have to report last? How do I describe it? Can I describe it correctly? Or do I describe it wrong? No, it's just a dropdown and those are my options. I can do anything wrong any more. It's standardized. It can be repeated for every product.

So with this integration between HoleBASE and AutoCAD Civil 3D, we have this dynamic integration of the geotechnical technical side and investigation data into AutoCAD. And we can create dynamic geotechnical profiles and sections in seconds as opposed to hours.

What we wanted to achieve for the future is create a geotechnical models for BIM. This means the basic could go room from 2D models to 3D models. And the software gives us the opportunities to achieve these goals in the future.

So we created these repeatable standard layouts. We started with this one, and for this particular project created sections in CAD in seconds, and to have this consistent look and feel even across projects and even across all our offices. Also the updates to data can be propagated directly into CAD in seconds.

So if I have to do some modifications, some edits to my borehole strip, I can go back to HoleBASE base instead of ML. I'm going to call it CL. I go back to CAD and say Update. Done.

GARY MORIN: So therefore, why don't we get this right. You spotted some gaps in your data. You've asked the engineer to do a new hole. They've used it in pLog. You already started drawing that and having that data coming through into AutoCAD Civil so you can visualize it on profiles. They upload it to HoleBASE. You hit Update inside AutoCAD Civil. And your profile here is updated.

THOMAS PALLUA: Yes. Correct. Correct. So what allows us this whole integration process, it allows us to be engineers. Faster workflows and the efficient process allows us to spend more time on engineering instead of massaging data, as my CAD designer called it. And which is the big thing. That's what we need to do. We need to spot allowances. We need to reduce risks. We need to get better, more efficient and spending less time on it. And I'll have Gary finish the last few slides.

GARY MORIN: I actually like it from the Keynote speech we saw yesterday where was it more-- better for less. So basically I think what you're saying is you can do more, you can do it better, as you get less effort in doing it.

THOMAS PALLUA: Less time.

GARY MORIN: Yeah, that's good for me. OK. Let's move on. So I'm just going to sum up this because some of these things are really sort of, talking to Tom, what their aspirations are. A lot of the stuff you've seen, they're doing that now. But this is where they want to go over the next few months. We'll just skip through this quickly.

So they've got a lot of knowledge already. So they've done a lot of work from Seattle, old projects. They've done some even before then been paper formats and stuff like that. So one of the options is this archive they've got. What they want to do is pull that together. So in HoleBASE, it has a mapping interface. They can put on the map interface all the previous projects plus the digital ones. And if they got them PDFs, they can pull those in.

So anytime they start a new job they can go in, they can look at-- move onto the next one-- they can look at what projects they got in the area if they use an AutoCAD civil. Those of you with AutoCAD Civil know that there's a full GIS capability in there.

So in fact, they're already doing this. They're bringing in background images, shape files. So that when they're digitized and look at where the extensive geology is, they're not just using the borehole data, they use all of the capabilities of AutoCAD map. Pulling that information through as well AutoCAD Civil. AutoCAD Maps in to AutoCAD Civil going forward. And that includes aerial photography.

In fact, this part is inside HoleBASE so when they send guys out onsite, they can quickly go in, look at, plan where they are going to put the boreholes, and where they're going to position them. Is it sensible to get there? How do they get onto the field or into the area? Where can they go and stuff.

So they're looking at using all this additional information and compiling it all, pulling it all together. Actually, Tom's already said all this. One of the things that is really advantageous compared to how they were working is because the capture data on pLog, that information is being captured and being put in and people are looking at it. And it means if they've got equipment on site, the drilling drilling rigs are there, it's relatively easy to say, hey, we need another hole.

If you do six weeks down the line, you can't get those drilling rigs back on site again. They're already on another job booked up. It's going to cost too much. so it ends up the work you're doing is not so good. So this allows him to have a much faster turnaround of what's going on there and mobilize that equipment. Move on.

So another area-- it's one of the benefits at the scene that know this is the area they want to go. A lot of geotechs are used to working a certain way at having borehole [INAUDIBLE] on the plan. A whole bunch of boring logs, and they start studying this. When you start seeing data in context, it gives you another way to view it, to understand it. So we're just going to a little slide. It's a very Mickey Mouse video this one, but it shows you the emphasis on it.

In this particular case, we may have a scan DTM. Come in no the information the guys are on site and they've captured the boreholes data and perhaps got the soil classifications. They've just initially put it on there using the Advanced Description Builder. And they sent that back into the office. HoleBASE has downloaded it and pulled it in.

Without even going into HoleBASE to look at individual borehole logs, you can pull the data directly into AutoCAD Civil. So we got the borehole locations come up. This could be literally half an hour after the data has been captured on site. We're now looking at those boreholes being pulled through with the classification. Looking at where it fits in the context of what's being proposed on the site.

We haven't got any site buildings on here but imagine we're building a multi-story block. There's a central loading core coming down. Where is that compared to some soft peat we found on the site? How did they collate with each other? So a much faster tool and an easier tool to look at and understand what's going on around you, so like conditions of it all.

And again this then moves on this is showing you the capabilities make people think different way of working compared to how you my having worked in the past by using this. Yes, you needed all your 2D production work. Yes, you got to do that. That's goes into the that's. That's what you've got to give to your clients.

But there's so much more you could do by using this type of technology. And even when you come to explain to clients here, well, we've done this work, but you realize you have a major problem with this particular location?

Giving them diagrams. Giving them information that you can actually talk to the rest of your construction team or to your clients about so they can actually understand some quite difficult things going on with your tactics.

This is not something Tom does at the moment, but it's an area which they want to move into.

THOMAS PALLUA: We don't own InfraWorks yet, but we're going to push to get it.

GARY MORIN: Yeah. There are so many shiny objects around here. He's saying, I want to use that, I want to use that. There's some great technology. So it's all about how do we actually view-- understand what's going on around the site and share that information with people.

So again, this is another one using HoleBASE data, using AutoCAD Civil. Generating these 3D fence diagrams. Highlighting different levels of contaminants other information on which you could use to talk to people. Or you as an engineer, just using it yourself to try to figure out what's going on around the site.

THOMAS PALLUA: That's it.

GARY MORIN: That's it. I'm going to thank Thomas. Great presentation, Tom. Thank you very much for doing that. And I'll open it to everybody else. Are there any questions at all? Thank you for coming to the class.

AUDIENCE: What is the-- so for the process out in the field, [INAUDIBLE] to HoleBASE, do you do it by hole or do you do a collection of boring before you upload it to HoleBASE? [INAUDIBLE]. I want to know if that [INAUDIBLE] area, if not I want to get that guy to drill more holes maybe in that area to get more data but I want him to leave the site. So what's the turnaround and do you get him to upload a few holes before [INAUDIBLE].

THOMAS PALLUA: I think so especially for bigger projects. Let's say, particularly this one, if we did our own on site investigation with 70 boreholes, I think there's plenty of time to react. Now if I have a project with three boreholes, not so much. Sure. It depends also a little bit on the budget. Sometimes you win project with the budget that's small, let's say, $15,000 for the site investigation. Can you drill another hole for 5,000? Sometimes, it might. Some clients my allow you to do that. Some clients might not. But what I tell my loggers is when you're out, I want the data at the end of the day, I want them up on the cloud.

AUDIENCE: Gotcha.

THOMAS PALLUA: So I can react.

AUDIENCE: So in other words, you're concerned about [INAUDIBLE] and location. So start with a [INAUDIBLE]. And they upload that data, get it back to us, move over to the building, and then have enough time to react, to say, before he leaves the site [INAUDIBLE].

THOMAS PALLUA: I think so. Yeah.

AUDIENCE: I have a few more [INAUDIBLE].

THOMAS PALLUA: Yes, you can.

GARY MORIN: You can do. So basically, in the configuration interface, you tell it which hatch pattern do you want to use for each geology. You can go and change that, but now we all support each hatch pattern onto a separate layer. So you can go into that layer and just say, hey, change [INAUDIBLE] on this or hide it or do whatever you else want.

THOMAS PALLUA: You basically give it certain CTB files associated with whatever you want to print. In our case, let's say a red because we know that prints out in this pen thickness. And it looks good on. And it's black and white. That's how we want to show our logs. So yeah, we can do that.

AUDIENCE: Gotcha. With the field crew, you have an aerial you can communicate with the tablets. Can you also show a [INAUDIBLE] from an AutoCAD drawing? So sometimes we've had to back out afterwards and the proposed condition-- you're not going to get that on a Google Image or a [INAUDIBLE].