Description
Key Learnings
- Discover the key project and team dynamics that led to choosing Collaboration for Revit and BIM 360 Team compared to other project delivery methods
- Understand the initial setup and preparation of BIM 360 Team models within your organization and across team members
- Learn about key workflows during day-to-day design and documentation, and lessons learned
- Learn how using BIM 360 Team can streamline multioffice collaboration and the ROI of that investment
Speakers
PRESENTER 1: The most important thing about the airport is the movement of planes and people.
CHAD SPEAS: Los Angeles World Airports hired Corgan and Gensler team to design the new Midfield Satellite Concourse.
STEVE KNUDSEN: It's about 1.2 million square feet. It has a new concourse, has a passenger tunnel, and it has a gateway building.
TIM SULLIVAN: This was an opportunity to work with another architectural firm to come together to provide great design and great service to our clients.
BRENT KELLEY: Many times when multiple architectural firms will associate, they look at how they break work apart. In this case, we decided to co-mingle the team. All the way from the top management down to how we actually produce the document, we had members of each firm working side by side
PRESENTER 2: BIM 360 Team is used by both the design team and the construction team and primarily allowed Corgan and Gensler to work as one seamless team. We use Collaboration for Revit on a daily basis to simultaneously work on Revit models. We have folks in all of our offices-- Phoenix, LA, Dallas-- accessing the models at any given time.
TIM SULLIVAN: Using BIM 360 Team or Collaboration for Revit allows us to be flexible in how we access our data. If I need to pull in an expert from Houston or New York, I don't need to go through a process of trying to send them files, zip them, and do all those gymnastics that we used do in the past.
CHAD SPEAS: The mobile apps on the iPad have been extremely useful in meetings. And our ability to share, move around the model, look at the model digitally definitely helps that real-time conversation.
BRENT KELLEY: One of the big benefits is the owner is literally in that model as well, looking at things and making sure that they're happy. Previously, we had to look at drawings and we had to hope that they understood a 2D drawing. They're actually able to understand three dimensionally as they're moving through that model. So it's really changed their ability to understand and in reality has actually reduced our amount of time necessary to get through design.
CHAD SPEAS: BIM 360 Team and Collaboration for Revit has provided us some incredible cost savings when it comes to infrastructure. Relying on the cloud for our model hosting also eliminates requirements for local servers, maintenance on servers, server updates. You can actually take design further with the same dollar.
STEVE KNUDSEN: We never shy away from using new technologies. It's about how well we integrate with all the other players and how well we communicate with them. That's inevitably the success of every project.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
CHAD SPEAS: Let's close that before Carl starts talking over us. Awesome. All right.
CHUCK BLACKFORD: All right, we'll get started. I think there's going to be a bunch of people filing in here in about five minutes, so don't get too comfortable. We'll slow roll it here at beginning a little bit. OK, so we're just here to talk to you guys today about some of our experiences implementing C4R at the firm. Hopefully, you'll leave with some of our lessons learned and help you along the way.
OK. So a little bit about us. This is Chad Speas. He's the design applications manager at Corgan. So he's responsible for the support and training of all things design application related at Corgan. He manages all of our relationships with Autodesk and support. He's implemented a firm-wide training program for Revit and several other design applications. Generally a great guy. Graduated from the University of Texas. Oh, I'm sorry.
CHAD SPEAS: Texas A&M.
CHUCK BLACKFORD: Oh, the other one.
CHAD SPEAS: University of Texas A&M.
CHUCK BLACKFORD: The other one.
CHAD SPEAS: The University of Texas.
CHUCK BLACKFORD: Yeah. But he's actually pretty smart, so it's good stuff. Consensus builder. One of the great things about having Chad on our team is he brings 15 years of experience as a practicing architect at pretty much every level of practice, from green intern to project architect or project manager. And he thinks about things from their perspective instead of from an IT perspective.
CHAD SPEAS: And then this is Chuck Blackford that's already said some really great things about me, and I appreciate it. Number one boss right there. Am I right? Graduated in '96 from the other University of Texas. So that's the long con right there. No, I'm not doing that.
Again, really great guy. I think what I love working for him and with him on-- and if my mic's too loud-- is his passion for creative thinking. We're a team. It's not a boss-colleague-- it's a very collegial relationship that we have on what we develop for the firm, how we work together, what we do.
And he puts that into what he does on a daily basis, from service delivery, strategic planning. He manages not just the design applications with me but also the IT infrastructure on the other side too. So he wears 1,000 different hats. And then SharePoint is his new fun job. He really loves doing the SharePoint work.
CHUCK BLACKFORD: I wouldn't call it fun.
CHAD SPEAS: See if the clicker's working here. Oh, going the wrong way. Here we go. Back, back. Just a little bit about Corgan. We're 79 years in architecture. We're a focus architecture firm with interior design as well. So we hire our consultants. We really look at the project and hire the team for the project. Health care, education, critical facilities, commercial, and aviation. So you'll see a lot of aviation information today, our bread and butter.
So enough about us, about you guys. I'm ecstatic that there's this many people in here. We figured Thursday night after the party we would maybe have some 30 people, 20. So thank you for showing up and sharing this conversation with us.
A lot of BIM managers on your titles. So we get a little report of who's going to attend. So it's great to see the management side and the architecture side. But we also want to make sure that there's a couple educators in here, a couple contractors and IT professionals. So we'll keep the contractor jokes to a minimum.
But the other smaller groups, I think there is something in here for you guys as well. So we don't want to forget about not just the architects and BIM managers. But if there is something that we don't cover, by all means let us know and bring it up, because we do want to-- this to us is really broader than just design, and there's a really good opportunity beyond that.
So there's a little activity. We're going to start with an activity. Everybody raise their hand. Now put it down. Now raise it again. No, I'm just kidding. So raise your hand for a second.
CHUCK BLACKFORD: So for real this time, raise your hand.
CHAD SPEAS: Yeah, right. Lower your hand if you have not used C4R yet. So keep your hand up if you have.
CHUCK BLACKFORD: Wow.
CHAD SPEAS: So that's a pretty big group of folks that haven't. OK. Good, good, good. If you have 1 to 10 entitled users, lower your hand. This was really easy in my head. This might be more confusing than I'm thinking. So we reduced it pretty quickly. 10 to 25? 25 to 100? Nice. There's one, two, three, four, over 100. So we have 2 over 100.
So you guys are running small to medium entitled users if you have it. And then I saw a pretty good portion of people that didn't. So we'll talk a lot about adoption, growth. How do you get some things, projects set up? How do you test it? So we'll talk a lot about that today. So that's a good mix.
Before we begin, let me make sure I'm not taking over Chuck's slides. We don't work for Autodesk. They don't pay us. Kind of pay us to be here, but we don't work for them. This is our experience with a very maturing platform.
And we'll talk about something that we even just found out about on Tuesday, so we were able to get it into the slide deck for today, which we're really excited to share. But it's constantly evolving. It's constantly changing. We've had an incredible success with it. Your mileage may vary a little bit. So take that with a grain of salt.
This project, the Midfield that we'll focus on-- and then we'll broaden it a little bit. We're working with very sophisticated teams. So the adaption of that, just it's opening up a whole new project delivery style with some framework of previous ones. It really does work.
And you might have heard some headaches. It does go down. It's a cloud based service. It's dependent on internet speeds. There's a lot we'll talk about. But honestly, for what we accomplished with it, it is very successful when compared to other things that we'll talk about today.
Some assumptions. That you've been to manage.autodesk.com. That you understand how user entitlements work. We won't get into the back end stuff. It'll be more of some of the user facing and the manager facing. How you single sign-in. Logging into Revit. You've at least heard of BIM 360 team and Collaboration for Revit. So that's a good thing. And that you're interested in using a collaborative, high trust solution. So that's the assumptions that we have there.
CHUCK BLACKFORD: All right. So some of the learning objectives we're trying to cover here. We want to just talk about some of the dynamics that you need to be aware of with different styles of project teams using it at the-- and it's the initial setup stuff. We want you to come away with a better understanding of that. That was supposed to be your slide.
CHAD SPEAS: Yeah, it was.
CHUCK BLACKFORD: That's in case you were wondering why I was-- and then key workflows, day to day design, documentation, lessons learned. The lessons learned, hopefully several of those will come across to you guys and those will be some good takeaways for you. And then we're going to talk about ROI and getting executive buy-in.
So why did we choose BIM 360 Team? Starts with-- everybody's seen this diagram in all kinds of flavors and forms and styles. Owner-architect-contractor agreement. But really on this one, we were dealing with something-- again, on the midfield project specifically and a lot of projects that we're working on nowadays, we're dealing with a much more complicated project team.
So we're not just one contractor. There's multiple contractors. And they hire us, the architect and design team, not the owner hiring us as well. And then projects are getting bigger. There's more work to be done. The Midfield is $1.6 billion. Everybody says, with a B. And so the teams are just bigger and bigger and bigger just to be able to cover the scope and the amount of time it needs to accomplish.
Then we have our consultant teams that we need to coordinate with. The owner-contractor now has an agreement. So once we put this team together in a design build or joint venture perspective, we go after the project. We win it. We all have to work together. Now we all have an agreement with the owner.
And then, from a design perspective, we still have that responsibility of talking to the owner and understanding, what are your goals? What do you want the building to look like? How does it feel? How does it function? And so we still have that relationship to deal with as well.
Fabrication's a big thing. Phasing. Construction. Et cetera. So we've got all the contractors and subcontractors to deal with. And then there's everybody else. There's hundreds--
And especially in the case of LAWA, the Los Angeles World Airports group, there's departments and security and all the different programming requirements that go into an airport that we've got to wrap them all up around the same concept. So lots and lots of people. And we'll talk about the numbers a little bit more here in a minute of who we're working with.
So then, some of the approaches we've taken in the past. And I'll go through these pretty quick because they're pretty obvious. But the traditional workflow, which had issues with potentially consultants working with outdated information. Had to have someone dedicated to making sure uploads were happening on a regular schedule. And then just it's not very conducive to integrated teams because of a lot of those limitations.
One of the things that we often have are where we have to set up in a project office somewhere for a project. So that even further exacerbates things because you're often closed to the outside network. We work on a lot of pretty security sensitive jobs. And so their IT security is always wanting to keep everything locked down. So then, when you try to have external collaborators and stuff, obviously there's a lot of issues there.
And so often the ability to bring in staff from all of our other offices too can be a pain with project offices. So to address some of those things, we really went heavy before Collaboration for Revit on the VDI front. So that was how we really were able to set up project offices. And even sometimes when we just had disperse project teams, we'd have them work on VDIs.
Some of the issues with VDI that some of you were aware of. Very high initial cost to set up. A lot more IT management time than a traditional project. Requirement for all the VMs to be current and to keep everybody on the same playing field.
The headaches for licensing. So what I mean by that is when we had-- we'd set up in a project office, and if we were prime, we'd have everybody working on our VMs. But often with Autodesk licensing it can be difficult if you're trying to have other companies collaborate on models and you're expecting them to be able to use your licenses. I don't know if anybody else has ever had that issue, but we did. So you really have to worry about legalities on that front.
And then liability for the other firm's productivity. This is a huge one to me because by people working on our virtual desktop infrastructure, we're taking on a liability for their productivity. So if they're missing deadlines, they're pointing the finger at us saying, well, it was slow. The VM was slow. Our people are 20% as productive as they would be in a regular one, which is often not the case, but hard to prove sometimes.
There were no sighs ughs when this slide came up, so maybe you guys had great experiences with it. We did not. But it was one of the things we tried. Inconsistent user experience was a big one. BIM managers had to learn a new way of managing their projects. Users accessing projects was different. So there were a lot of issues there.
CHAD SPEAS: So to summarize that and put it into a nice simple graph, I think, to really share what we're trying to accomplish with this new platform, this new tool, is increased collaboration and reduction in costs. That's the goal. So to put the four on the board there. I'll show you how to do the fancy PowerPoint animations there.
But we've got that traditional workflow. Low costs. Ready to go. Share documents. Dropbox. Box. [INAUDIBLE]. Whatever you have it. But your collaboration levels are very low. It's a very manual collaboration.
Then, as history went on, hardware acceleration shoots all the way to the other end of the spectrum. You're starting to get that advanced collaboration opportunity. But the cost of that is just you've got to have hardware in all your offices and all over the place.
VDIs, like Chuck was talking about, moves us back to still a huge investment. I'm sure a lot of companies have made investments in VDI. So we're not saying that they're good or bad. But it's a cost versus collaboration analysis.
And then, finally, BIM 360 Team sits in that really nice quadrant of the graph where we are experiencing that high level of collaboration with some caveats. But we also are showing that it's reducing our costs, our monthly expenses on those employees.
And Chuck's got some really nice slides here later on that that really get into some of the nitty gritty of the ROI conversation. So that's how we see it laying out from a graph perspective.
CHUCK BLACKFORD: So one of the things that we had to do early on-- so it was important to get executive buy-in. So if we were going to the PMs and saying, OK, you know how we told you you were going to be working in VDI for these projects? Well, now we want you to try something different. We had to have buy-in from the top down.
And so we put together some compelling arguments, we thought. And we'll get into how we tested and knew that we were more confident that we were going in the right direction with C4R in a bit. But some of the things we had to talk about in those conversations with the C-level folks were just the sharing infrastructure that I talked about a minute ago, the decreased liability for our firm on other people's productivity.
It also leveled the playing field. So we'll talk about that here when we go into some of the project examples. But the Midfield project's a great example. It was Corgan and Gensler, which if you know anything about our firms, that was dogs and cats trying to play together.
And me going to our executive management and saying, OK, I want to work with Gensler in a really high trust environment where we're all going to have access to each other's stuff. We had to really think about how we presented that. But I think the liability conversation won that argument in the end.
Overcoming current investments. So that was VDI. We had been sinking a lot of money into VDI before C4R. And I hear this a lot from a lot of other IT leadership people, that it's difficult when you've been selling VDI for four or five years and you've sunk hundreds of thousands of dollars into a VDI to say, OK, all those are reasons we needed it are no longer valid because there's a better solution.
But that's the nature of the beast with technology. You just have to stay agile. And when better things come along, you can't just keep beating an investment into the ground because it was the right thing at a time and it's not now. You just have to make that argument.
And then, just alignment with our Corgan's IT cloud strategy. That was a big selling point because we've been diversifying a lot into taking advantage of a lot of other cloud solutions-- Office 365, Newforma, some other collaboration tools. And then cost analysis. So I'll talk a little bit about that here. So back on the VDI conversation.
And this is going to probably appeal a lot more to the IT professionals in here. But it was a really important thing and a big part of what we had to get buy-in on. And so the cost breakdown here that we talk about is a host now-- the typical host we would get for a 10-user office is around $35,000.
And then, once you start expanding on that, so if you add more users and you have to have multiple hosts, then you have to have shared storage. And the costs escalate pretty rapidly. And there's not a lot of-- often in our experience, the size they think the project team is going to be and the size it becomes are not in the realm of reality with each other. And so you're often scrambling at the last minute to expand a complicated infrastructure in a remote location, things like that.
So just the breakdown there. So the big selling point here was just scalability. We have controlled cost to add project team members if we're working with C4R versus trying to add to our existing VDI infrastructure.
CHAD SPEAS: So to summarize this and put it all in perspective, just really why we chose BIM 360 Team-- low cost of infrastructure. Speed to market. We can get users up in a matter of minutes or an hour pretty quickly. Flexibility and work locations. Now we're not requiring everybody to be in a single office. We're not requiring them to be-- they just need to be connected is really the important part of it.
Central location. That data is stored in the cloud. I can get it from anywhere, on my phone, on my laptop. Anybody with anything can access that data. No latency is-- maybe it all depends on your internet connection. But we're comparing it to like a Citrix solution or VDI type solution.
We've had projects in the past where things are bogging down, bogging down. We go and we talk to the host of the VDI, which in a lot of cases is our joint venture partners. And then they talk to Citrix or somebody and they say, oh, you're three updates behind. That'll help speed it up. So there's too many variables in the conversation.
And I like this one the best. Chuck's a little bit more focused on that liability and who's controlling what data. But it's a platform we already know. So all I have to tell my users is, go into Revit. Sign in. Open it up. You're working. It just points you to a different spot on the interwebs, if you will. And we'll talk a little bit about that here in a second.
And then, ultimately, integrated production collaboration. Gensler-Corgan in this case study instance, but any other projects that we host, one team manager works with one set of staff. No everybody works for everybody. And it's really an important way that projects are moving.
So we chose BIM 360 Team for our high trust collaboration environment. Let's do it on a $1.6 billion, 1.2 million square feet, biggest project we've had in a long time project.
AUDIENCE: Go big or go home.
CHAD SPEAS: Go big or go home, exactly. So this was our first one out of the gate. Just a little bit of history. Autodesk has had skyscraper in the past. So that's kind of worked-- hasn't. We talked about Revit server. This was announced at AU 2015. We were prepared for a notice to proceed on this project March 1 of 2016.
We met February, March, April with the design team and with everybody and made a decision about April 15th, May 1st to go with BIM 360 Team. So we were four months out of the box of this being a brand new project.
So for just a little bit about Midfield if you're not familiar with it yet. There's about six programs within the project. And we'll show some site photos, some other site and construction photos here in a second. But the TBIT terminal here at the end of the U of Los Angeles Way. International gates that Fentress had done and opened just a couple, four or five years ago, I believe.
We have utility tunnels. We have passenger tunnels. And then, two runways over, so a couple hundred feet out to the west towards the ocean, we've got our satellite concourse out there. To put it into scale a little bit, on its end it'd be the fifth tallest building in the world. Pretty impressive. Two Bismarck battleships long. So it's a beast. 12 lengths of the strip. So Vegas always wins still.
We were required to coordinate underground existing conditions, existing piping services. Again, like you talked about, the passenger tunnel. Structural. We put everything in Autodesk Revit. We had everything in Navisworks. I think we we're using Vayo. We were using a couple of the joint venture software. So we were doing a lot of collaboration with everybody on the project team. Some nice imagery from our media lab group.
1.2 million square feet. Just run through it real quick on the numbers. Three months of setup, like I talked about, which on a project like this was just crazy. And that included project management office. That included staffing charts, who's doing what where, contract negotiations, et cetera.
We have over 100 C4R specific users on the project. So right there, even for this project, that's bigger than even a couple of folks that I had mentioned in here. 100 just production models. So this doesn't even talk about study models, annotation models. This is just the geometry to get the set done. And it's about a 1,500-sheet set. The scope is just astronomical.
We're probably over this in the total project, but a terabyte of production model data. So we're just moving a lot of data. So see success with that type of scenario. An incredibly savvy owner. This is probably one of the most savvy BIM owners that I think we've worked with. They have a 700-page project requirement document that they handed to us and said, here's what you're required to do.
So that included risk management, production management, data sharing, info exchange, et cetera, et cetera. And BIM was mentioned in it 200 times. So if you just did a simple search of the PDF, it showed up. And it showed up in areas that you'd never thought it would. It was nice to see and it was nice to work with them on.
Ultimately resulted in a 100-page project execution plan for us. So that included everything from design procedures all the way through construction handoff, info exchange, and then included some project close-out data and information. Average model size, 300 megs, just to give you some--
And then, this is probably the number one thing. They wanted full-time owner access. So there was a lot of conversation around what does that actually mean? Are we talking you want to see how the sausage is made? Are you talking you just want quicker milestone updates? Even today, we're still having that conversation.
But we wanted to at least sign off on the essence of this, that BIM 360 Team allows us to publish models quicker, get the data faster. They don't have to have Revit. They just need a web browser. They can get it in. They can see what's going on. So it just allowed us that-- well, we know you're asking for, but let's really understand the essence of what you're asking for. Because they don't have Revit users and seeing the production side of things.
CHUCK BLACKFORD: OK. So some of the challenges, just to summarize. We had the owner and five major players. They wanted them co-located in a site location. But in addition to that, they wanted team members in remote locations. So the various offices wanted to be able to lean on expertise in their home office or in other locations.
This is always what they ask for, the infrastructure, hardware, and software working together seamlessly. So some of the players that were involved there. And then that was our initial floor plan that we had for the co-location.
CHAD SPEAS: It's a 20-trailer compound. It's incredibly impressive.
CHUCK BLACKFORD: And so early on, the whole sharing thing was a big piece of conversation. And so both internally and with the other firms just this idea that, wait, so structure can get in the architecture models if they want to? And yeah, they can. They shouldn't. So we're going to talk a little bit about the high trust environment here and a little bit.
And then, just the Corgan and Gensler trying to figure out who is going to house the data. So a lot of those conversations happened early on. So everyone working on the same scope. And as is often the case, we had the conversation--
Well, you could really just define scope, take a traditional approach with this. Everybody has their own areas. And that was quickly ruled out. And that was really ruled out by the client. They wanted a more collaborative-- all the teams playing nicely together.
All the people at the co-lo. It was everybody from the Revit users to upper project management on the project. And then the no room for ego was more for us to have this-- so Corgan is the prime on this project, but we couldn't take an approach of, OK, here's how it's going to be. It's going to be on our VDI infrastructure, which at the time probably would have been the safe choice because it was a known for us.
But we knew that that wasn't necessarily fair and in the spirit of the true collaboration and teaming. And so we all had to check our egos at the door and just try to come up with what was the best solution. So the co-location, we had members in three different states, and then actually some other ones as well that came on down the road.
And then the infrastructure question. So it came back to the VDI and what are some of the pros and cons. What are some of our experiences? And then that level playing field is what led us to C4R.
CHAD SPEAS: It seems like it's a very VDI versus BIM 360 Team conversation. I'm just sensing That.
CHUCK BLACKFORD: Yeah, it kind of got that way.
CHAD SPEAS: I know that's what everybody's experiencing, which is--
CHUCK BLACKFORD: Yeah. And we still have our existing VDI that we use on occasion that we-- remote employees who want to jump in and work on a project where it's not already in Collaboration for Revit and we don't want to put the whole project team up there for one person working remotely.
So we do see that potentially going away. In five years from now, I could see us having-- because really the primary reason for our VDI is for Revit. And so I could see just putting all of our-- when there is a need for a remote participant to put it up in Collaboration for Revit.
CHAD SPEAS: So we had the mantra, "keep calm and collaborate." Keep moving forward and work together. So hot off the presses, just wanted to share a couple of site photos and where the project is. I don't know if anybody's flown through or is from LA and has seen where this is. The pace that they're moving at is just ridiculous. It's fantastic to see.
So while you're looking at these, talking over them a little bit, just proof that we did collaborate. It is working. Every project team has their issues, and we can all lament about what the problems are. But just seeing the progress that they're making is proof that this platform did get us ultimately where we wanted to go.
Steel going up at a crazy pace. Some roof units and other general construction photos. We also have a really good opportunity working with the Autodesk and the C4R team of getting some reports out of them. Definitely talk to your Autodesk rep or your reseller and work with-- I'll name drop Carl Bernard and Chris and Adam and those guys, Adam Peters.
But we get these reports every once in a while on what our model open volume is, what our save with central volumes are. I'll show those here in a second. But we really use these just to say, are things in check? We're not getting these to really proof-- that's probably not the right thing to say.
We're using these as a check. We're also using them to prove that it's worthwhile, that we're not seeing anything out of the norm. Are we right size to our entitlements? Is it a platform that we can go to our executives and say, yes, it's earning us money or it's saving us money?
So we're seeing some really nice trends with these. We're also seeing some important trends of holidays. How do we manage holidays at the end of the year? This was an issue for permits. So I'm seeing normal, normal, normal. There's maybe a curiosity here about why weren't we opening models. But there was probably a model lock right there, and then everybody got in, got out.
A spike for production. Reduction for issue for permit. We had some design change directives that came out here. Again, probably another big one. And now this tells me that, OK, that project team has fallen off since July. Are there some entitlements that I can pull back into the pool, I can pull back and use for other future projects? So really informative from a user management perspective.
And that as well, save with central volumes. I'm expecting those to be in line with each other in a general trend line. And you'll see I've got another example later on where they're not in line. And so there's a question about that.
CHUCK BLACKFORD: And so then, just active users on the project. We have dips for holidays. And then we have a process that I thought we had labeled on here, but I don't think we do, where we will go in and send a message out when we're about to have to buy more entitlements because of--
And it's one of those areas for improvement for Autodesk on the management side, is because we can't really easily see activity per user, we have a process by which we send an automated message out to the folks who are using it to check their need for the license. And then we will sometimes shave people off and--
CHAD SPEAS: I think we have that coming up in a minute.
CHUCK BLACKFORD: OK.
CHAD SPEAS: Preview [INAUDIBLE].
CHUCK BLACKFORD: Got ahead of myself. So yeah, it's nice to see those active user accounts. And I think this speaks to-- the number of people that we threw at this project that were opening and saving the central was a lot of people. And I know that's a big concern for folks on larger projects. How many people can we have accessing a single hub?
CHAD SPEAS: And so one final plug here. We worked with Autodesk on creating an augmented reality experience. So I don't know if you guys have made it over to the Future of Making Things exhibit area when you came in from the keynote on the far right side of the exhibit hall.
Our media lab worked with them. This is the model on loan from LAWA that sits in the project management office. Put the HoloLens on and you can see the digitized terminal. Some fun facts with it. Turn some roofs on and off. Yes sir?
AUDIENCE: The [INAUDIBLE], what was that generated from?
CHAD SPEAS: Oh, sorry. Go.
AUDIENCE: C4R [INAUDIBLE].
CHAD SPEAS: No. So these are spreadsheets and some analytics that Autodesk has sent to us that, again, I'm not sure-- that's why I say work with your Autodesk representative. I think these are public if you ask. But I wanted to say these are available. But they've sent us all of these analytics on some specific-- we've sent them journal files and we've sent them project names, and they know what hub it's on.
And then they can just pull some of their historical data over the last year or so. And then they send us these analytics just in a really raw format. And then we use it to say, are we good? Are we bad? Are we right sized? What do we need to change, make better?
CHUCK BLACKFORD: But this is something that would be great, if there were a dashboard on the management side where you could dive down into these. So I think the more they hear that from you guys for suggestions for improvement, the more likely it is to happen.
CHAD SPEAS: I think it's you.
CHUCK BLACKFORD: All right. So now we're going to talk about-- so we did that project. And it's been a success by our measure. And so how have we grown our adoption? And we did this even before Midfield to validate.
And any time where we're trying a different scenario, so maybe an international project or something that's not very similarly set up to this project, we'll go back through our testing scenarios. And we really just are trying to break it.
So before we ever committed to recommending C4R for this project, we did things like we uploaded-- they had this ridiculously large single model of the Tom Bradley Terminal that we put up in C4R and threw people from all of our different offices in it. And we're basically trying to break it.
CHAD SPEAS: Yeah. That was about 800 megs. We had 10 instances of it. And we had Dallas, Phoenix, LA, and a remote employee at a Starbucks all try to save to central at the same time. And it finally broke. We were like, OK, I think that's OK. That's acceptable.
CHUCK BLACKFORD: But it was interesting. That was one of the aha moments for me early on, was when I connected with my hot spot on my phone and it was like working in the office, really.
CHAD SPEAS: Yeah, no doubt.
CHUCK BLACKFORD: Not on that model, but--
CHAD SPEAS: On a regularly sized model. This is doghouse [INAUDIBLE].
CHUCK BLACKFORD: Yeah. So testing on that particular one before we committed was about six weeks. And then we have been in really integrated conversations with the BIM 360 guys and the factory all along. And they've been awesome and working with us.
So four things up front that we always want to lock in. Schedule. Team setup and staffing chart early on. The list of deliverables. The dates. And then RFP is really important. So we want to see what we agreed to, because often there's things that we can address via the execution plan.
And then steps for success. The end user entitlements. Invitations to the hub. Invitations to the project. And confirm everyone's Revit and C4R are up to date and installed.
CHAD SPEAS: We'll talk about version control here in a minute just to share some info on that one. So our fallback plan, pretty simple. Traditional workflow. We still know it works. It's worked for thousands and thousands of years, building amazing buildings all around the world.
So we wanted technology to be a stepping stone, to be an aid. We didn't want it to be a hindrance to our collaboration. So we needed to make sure. And if we needed that net, everybody was familiar with upload, download, sharing models, more traditional strategic workflow.
So pulling back the curtain just a little bit just to share what our experience is with our hub management. I don't think this is talked about a lot. And I'm not sure if it's been in other classes or anything. But we have one corporate hub. So Corgan-- I think I'm stealing your slide.
CHUCK BLACKFORD: That's OK. You're doing great. These are really quick. We're going to go through these because we have some more intriguing stuff towards the end to get to. But we have a single hub. We have 30 active projects on it currently. That's people full-time working in it.
We have 164 or 160 C4R entitlements. We've had about 300 individual users. So that goes to that. We send out the message, are you still using It, and swapping people in and out.
CHAD SPEAS: In perspective, we have 600 technical staff that we're managing. So almost a third are C4R at this point.
CHUCK BLACKFORD: Is working in it. It's not easy to manage those. So we've put-- we'll show a screenshot in a second, one of the ways we've made that a little bit easier. We have 1,200 total hub members. That's all the firms collaborating on the projects that we have on our hub.
This is just hub information. So save to central volumes. We like to keep an eye on this and see where we're going. And you see it's trending in the right direction. It has some of the same peaks and valleys along with the other reports.
CHAD SPEAS: Sorry, Chuck, go back to that one just real quick. I think it's also important to notice when new projects come online that those are the checks, again, that we're trying to-- what trend line is coming.
New big aviation project comes online. We're tracking, tracking. The same thing in here. We right-size once a year. We're trying to do a right-size and make sure at our renewal time we have the right entitlements. They're monthly based. We can take them off, add them as we need to.
I think this one, just an honesty here about this guy. That spike is like, wait, what happened? What's going on? I don't know if you guys are aware. Autodesk was actually allowing un-entitled members onto C4R. So our Nashville project was this.
CHUCK BLACKFORD: Which was awesome. No.
CHAD SPEAS: Yeah, which was great for us for a little while.
CHUCK BLACKFORD: Free software.
CHAD SPEAS: Until you get caught. Not that we were doing anything wrong. So this showed at end of September we had a big deadline for this project. They just ramped it up and they just loaded it up with people.
And so it said, oh, heck, wait a minute. We need to watch this a little better, manage it better. It was really eye opening for us because the last thing we want to do is be on the bad side of Autodesk from a licensing perspective. And I think that leads into this creation.
CHUCK BLACKFORD: Yeah. So we've just added this. We service now in the firm for our help desk and service desk across all the shared services-- HR, IT, accounting. If you need help from them, you go to this environment. And so one of the things we added in there was the request for Collaboration for Revit when somebody needs to be added to it. And then, that allows us to report on that and automate messages out from there. And vise versa.
CHAD SPEAS: It was a good tracking mechanism. Tells us who the BIM manager is. Potential end date so we can keep an eye on it. We can't track 30, 40, 50 projects from our IT team.
So it's just a nice reporting tool to be able to see who's on, who's off, compare it to our Autodesk account. Again, there aren't any good reporting tools from Autodesk's side. So we're trying to fill in the gaps on those things.
So all the honest moments now. That's all the fluff and the cool stuff. What have we learned? Just sharing some-- these are about seven or eight high-level ideals and things that we manage and want to share with you guys. Using the Manage Cloud Models tool within Revit, you don't even have to be in a model, which is really nice.
Go into Collaborate. Click on Manage Cloud Models. You get a nice dashboard for your project. You go Projects. Good feature. Relinquish All. So this is nice when we've got that random person that just goes on vacation and owns a bunch of elements in a model. You can just relinquish everybody's ownership, which is nice.
You don't have to go in and change their username like you did in the past and then come back out. So much quicker, much easier. Be careful with that a little bit, because you do relinquish everybody's ownership. So if there's something specific--
AUDIENCE: You can do that on a per user basis.
CHAD SPEAS: Yeah. Now you can. You're absolutely right. So now you can pick who you want you.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
CHAD SPEAS: What's that?
AUDIENCE: We call it the ban hammer.
CHAD SPEAS: Nice. I like it. And then, view versioning. Lots of version control. We'll talk about some archiving here in a minute. But there's a lot of good information. It's about three or four levels deep, so it's hard to get to.
File management. Dead linking. This is an issue when you-- we still live in a CAD based workflow. We still need those background files and civil files in working with everything. So we have a process that accommodates this. But we think they've solved it. Well, almost.
So I'm really super excited about this. This just came out late last week. I think I'm sharing it with permission of Autodesk because it's available to own. So you're hearing it here first if you haven't heard this yet.
They have what they call the Autodesk Desktop Connector. So it's a dashboard tool. I'm sorry, it's a integrated Windows tool that works like OneDrive, works like Dropbox. It allows you to connect into BIM 360 Team. The "almost" part is that this is only currently working with 2018.2 from a Revit environment perspective.
So you can load in your CAD files. You can load in linked Revit models. You can see all the file types that you can use there. Then, from within Revit you browse to I think it says BIM 360 Team Drive, and then it pulls this up. So it's different than A360 Drive. It's different than BIM 360 Docs. There's a lot of different tools there.
But they're finally getting to being able to solve that dead-linking issue. Syncs with BIM 360 Team as well. Get more info here. I didn't want to spend-- I could talk probably an hour on this one just by itself. So go out, go to the help desk. We'll give you guys a second to grab that QR there. But I think this is for us.
CHUCK BLACKFORD: And this posted too, so you can--
CHAD SPEAS: Yeah, and we posted this this morning. So I think this is really going to help us in a lot of different ways. And we'll talk about some of those again here in a second. Team communication is still paramount. That's the soft skills side of any type of collaboration.
So for Midfield, and we use this kind of approach on a lot of other topics, this A3 cheat sheet one pager, front-back sometimes, with naming conventions. Something you can give to a new hire. Something you can give to a project team member that's coming on that's starting to get involved in a project.
These are the rules of the road. They're not going to read the 100-page execution plan. They're not going to pull all that data. Or they're going to be dangerous if they don't. So you want to give them one thing here. So soft skills are super important.
We do utilize the app quite extensively-- sharing, sharing markups, field documents, seeing the model in the field. We often use the example you're at happy hour on a Friday. Your boss calls. He or she needs drawings, models, whatever it is. You can email them directly from the app. So it's really nice and smooth on the go. It's very useful, very powerful.
Some additional items just for general consideration. Chuck talked a little bit earlier about what it takes to just set up a project. But the things that really get us is that acquisition of entitlements. The last thing that we want is to put our-- we do it a lot anyway-- put our reseller behind the eight-ball a little bit.
Project comes online. They need 30, 40 new entitlements. They need them yesterday. And now I've got to call our reseller. Our reseller has to call Autodesk. They have to get the approval. It's two, three, four days. Our project teams aren't productive. Everything.
So having that being right-sized at an entitlement perspective. We have 160. We have 140 to 150 active. So we try to keep a little buffer in there. Sometimes you don't receive the invitations, so making sure everybody looks for those. You've probably heard a lot about drive limitations. 512 for your caching. And collaboration cache is important.
Going to BIM 360 Team instead of network storage. So when you link models, the icon in your quick pull-down within Windows, it's something different than your ABC drive, et cetera. And then time to publish, rate link, and download models. You're still moving data, so you just have to understand that you're moving hundreds of megs of data, that it just takes time sometimes. So it's quicker, but it still has some use.
Who hates seeing this? For the users of C4R, who hates seeing this? Yeah, exactly. My heart skips a beat when I see this one every once in a while because we're dealing with technology. Things go up and down. And I even want to give Autodesk some credit here that they're addressing issues. They're working.
This platform, like I said, is maturing on a weekly, daily basis. There's times too that they need to implement something that's really important. It has to go down for a few minutes. The point here is just keep working. That's what we tell our people. It's usually resolved in a few minutes, an hour.
The only time that I got really sweaty was August 25, 2016. It was down for four hours. And I was literally worried about my job. It was not cool. But they recovered. Everything's OK. And we've worked through it.
So it's caching in the background, saving local. It'll sync back up. Everything has been syncing really well together. So just work through it. And also, if you don't subscribe to these, health dashboard-- just heatlh.autodesk.com-- gives you a really nice rundown of all their systems. Really important.
CHUCK BLACKFORD: OK. So we talked a little bit about the high trust environment. Especially on the Midfield project, that was important. But that's going back to that executive buy-in. I consider it a limitation still, the lack of permissions in the environment. And I think that's something that they've heard a lot and that they're hopefully working on.
But it is something that you need to make really clear to all the decision makers before you put their project up there. So there's no really discrete permission sets. Version control is big. So our rule of thumb that we've found is everybody on a particular project needs to be within two builds of each other.
We found that out the hard way on Midfield. Ideally, you have everybody on the same build. But you certainly don't want to get further apart than two builds.
CHAD SPEAS: Yeah. And really this is important because they are making those agile changes in the back end. In Revit, Desktop is so integrated to Revit cloud through the C4R server storage that one, two, three builds off, it starts to do funny things with the database and just the delta changes that you're pushing.
It's also important on projects like ours. We're smaller than Gensler, as an example. They have a very robust IT system. Their updates are very controlled. They test them and they need to test them.
We have an ability to make that decision on the fly, to be a little bit more agile. So we can push a build update, a sequential update, whereas you need to be in sync with other team members. So again, keep that in mind.
This chart here on the left-- I didn't put a QR code up here, but I maybe should've. It's in the data. But you search for how to tie build number with Revit update. And you can search and see what all that information is.
CHUCK BLACKFORD: And then, backup and archive procedures. Just some of the methodologies we use, which aren't ideal. We use the Managed Model Tools that Chad went over earlier. We rely on the publishing where people are going to get the models.
We save a copy to network storage. But we rely on the project teams to do that, which from my perspective makes me nervous. And we're hopeful that the new desktop connector is a roadmap that eventually we'll be able to tie some automated systems into that to get our backups down.
CHAD SPEAS: And on that one, Chuck, to share, we talked about the limitation is 2018.2. And then desktop connector is baked into 2019 when it comes out soon. It is still syncing 2017 and previous. So when you go open up Windows Explorer, double click on BIM 360 Team, see all your projects, you're seeing all of that folder structure that's already hosted in the cloud.
So where my mind is going, and maybe a couple of you guys that are managing BIM 360 Team projects, is now I can take my project structure in File Explorer and copy that over and it will update on BIM 360 Team. Haven't quite tested it yet, so I'm not sure if it's absolutely perfect. But that's where I'm going, that now we can manage-- yes?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
CHAD SPEAS: Oh, good to hear. I love it. So now we don't have New Folder. Type it in. Say OK. New folder. Type it in. You can copy-paste. So that's wonderful to hear.
CHUCK BLACKFORD: I saw you shaking your head on the two builds comment. Is that--
AUDIENCE: Yeah. Finish up. I'll provide some feedback at the end.
CHUCK BLACKFORD: OK, great.
CHAD SPEAS: That'll be good.
CHUCK BLACKFORD: OK. So we're going to go through these pretty quick because we have about five minutes.
CHAD SPEAS: Yeah, we have about five minutes or so with some questions. So we just wanted to-- is it me? No, I think it's me. So we just wanted to share real quick a couple of-- Midfield was a really good-- obviously, dipped our toe in it on a really high level.
We've got those 30 projects. We're also now taking it internationally and want to show that there's still some additional opportunities out there. But this is one project that we have, which is-- we are absolutely spread out. Design team in Dallas. I'm out of our Phoenix office from a support perspective. The project is in Scandinavia here. And then our consulting team is in London.
But what's nice is our data-- because of how Autodesk is hosted on Amazon web services, their regional, all that data is cached. I'm pretty close to the data that I'm trying to access. So it's again going back to that latency issue. I'm reducing that latency. Everything is sharing across.
We can also start talking a little bit more about that 24-hour workflow, that our team in London is doing work. And then, if we did have anybody in New York but we also are going to have people in Dallas, that this work is then getting uploaded and worked on throughout the day. Then, at the end of the day, there's no extra work to upload. They come in the morning and everything is current and up and running. So it's really nice to see that.
Again, just showing some of the metrics that we've got from Autodesk. This one is interesting because it is in an early design phase. So we are seeing this is going to show us that design is going to be a little chaotic. It is going to be a little up and down. It's working across.
Maybe there are some other takeaways from this from an international perspective, that there's travel days that need to occur. So people are going to be down. And then they're going to work on it for two or three days and then down for a couple days. So it will help us right-size our entitlement.
And again, I'm seeing the same model open volumes as I would, say, with central. So I'm seeing some good info there. Active users, exactly the same thing. I would expect as time goes on to see some leveling off at different phases.
And I wouldn't imagine on a project this size-- and now we can take these metrics and look at project size and scope and scale and number of models and really start to extract this data even further and see what's in line.
Another project that we have in Singapore. The same scenario. This one even gets a little bit more complicated. Owners in Atlanta. Our contractor is out of Portland working on a project in Singapore. But again, the broader network is robust enough that we can share that information and we can move people on and off as we need to.
And our BIM managers and our project team leads, they've raved about this. They can be on a plane, access data from one country to another, and not skip a beat. So again, it's been really successful and useful for us.
Again, save to central is what I'd expect at an early SD into DD phase. Open volume is the same thing. But here's a really good-- this is where we can take that data and show here's what my model open triggers are like, and then applying that line in a scaled fashion over what my active users are.
Now I can start to look at this area and say, OK, what happened? Talk to our leads and project managers and say, is the project on hold for a little while? Can I pull these entitlements back? Was there an issue? Did we have rogue projects out there that just stopped using it because it's not working for us that we maybe don't know about?
They've pulled it off. They're just not accessing it. So how do we right-size our entitlement count and our adoption usage? And we can start getting that information. This is near you.
CHUCK BLACKFORD: It's all you, man.
CHAD SPEAS: Nice. So again, gave some case studies, gave some examples, some lessons learned. So I just wanted to make sure that-- go back over our learning objectives. Key project team dynamics that led us to choosing it. A couple of takeaways.
Get comfortable with BIM 360 Team. Try to kick the tires, break it, figure out what the limitations are within your organization. Understand account management, moving entitlements. It's all name based services, so moving entitlements on and off is really important.
Provide training sessions. Any time we're getting into this because it's still new to them-- it's new to a lot of folks that are even in this room-- talk about it. Figure it out. Work through the issues. What's a day look like? What's the general workflow look like? And do a little training [INAUDIBLE].
CHUCK BLACKFORD: And we provide those even to the consultants and the other architecture firms just to make sure everybody's on the same page.
CHAD SPEAS: Understanding the setup and preparation. Again, testing. Finding the right projects. Contractually discuss with consultants. I had a conversation with a colleague a couple of days ago just about how design teams want to work and how structural engineers want to work.
We're all over the place in design and we're all over the place in the early stages. MP&E and structural, they want the answer and they want to work the calculations. So there's still some different mindset on how to collaborate to a certain point.
But find the right project. It's not ready for everybody. It's not like Chuck was saying. We're a couple years out from hosting everything in the cloud. It's just not quite there yet. So make sure you're using it as intended.
Day to day design. Documentation. Some lessons learned. Document your workflows. Use your execution plans. Get the right hardware. Live good model management. This is still one of those important things. Again, you're still in Revit. Things still break, get disconnected. Corrupt files. It's no different. It's just trying to access them a little bit different.
CHUCK BLACKFORD: The difference is your users will say it's because of C4R now instead of bad model management. They'll find somebody to blame.
CHAD SPEAS: And then, that desktop connection again. I'm really excited about it. I excited about little things like this. So it's going to end up changing-- I've got some workflows. I think it's going to end up changing a lot of workflows for us for the positive, which is great.
And then, how a multi office collaboration and the ROI discussion. So with that, that's our info. Keep in touch. Ask questions. Yes sir?
AUDIENCE: The report thing's pretty cool, but is there a restriction to what kind of subscription you have to get the reports? What kind of [INAUDIBLE]?
CHAD SPEAS: We just have--
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]?
CHAD SPEAS: No. We're not-- I know I think I had an inner EPS on there. But no, we're not EPS. We're just a standard person. Anybody can--
AUDIENCE: And they gave the reports at will?
CHAD SPEAS: Mm-hm.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]. Everybody clap?
[APPLAUSE]
CHUCK BLACKFORD: Thank you.
CHAD SPEAS: Thank you. Thank you.
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