Outside the Box: Pushing the Limits and Traditional Uses of BIM 360 Field

JOSHUA LANNEN: Hi, I'm Josh Lannen. I am quality control manager for BOND Brothers just outside of Boston. This class is Pushing the Limits in Tradition Use of BIM 360 Field. So what I'm hoping to show you guys is just what we think about outside of the box uses of the product using primarily equipment and tasks. And I have some pretty good examples, I think, of what we've done.

So I'm going to tell you a little about BOND. I'll tell you a little about myself, the problem, the solutions that we've come up with, some of our lessons learned, basic key elements. And then you guys have any questions, you can either wait till the end, or feel free to ask them throughout. It might be more relevant to the conversation I'm having.

So I did upload these slides in a PDF this morning. I don't know about the rest of you being jet lagged, but I was up at 3 o'clock trying to get this put back together. So a couple of things-- two exits, there and there. Whether there's an emergency or you decide I'm boring you to tears and you got to get out of here, just don't trample anybody on the way out.

So about BOND, these are the markets that we serve. We're a regional contractor pretty much in the New England area. We are all the way down in Manhattan and the Bronx. We also have projects that we're looking at in Virginia and Michigan, couple other specialty things with the District Energy Group.

About me-- I'm quality control manager for the entire company. That includes about 300 management people and 500 trade people. I interact with probably close to 200 to 300 people on a regular basis that are using BIM 360 Field. So I'm the primary and only administrator for it.

So I have a bachelors degree in civil engineering from Northeastern. D is for a diploma, and I earned that the hard way. I am also a licensed contractor. And I worked my way up through the ranks from field engineer.

I was a Turner tot, chief a party, assistant superintendent, superintendent, project manager. If there is a hat in construction, I have pretty much worn it, sometimes not too well. That's why I advanced and bounced around so much.

I am also a certified BIM 360 Field development pain in the ass. So any Autodesk people in the room? You hear to heckle me? Did [INAUDIBLE] or somebody send you?

So just to get a feel, what do we have? Contractors, raise your hand. Architects? Engineers? People that just came for the good looks and are very disappointed? There you go.

All right, so I start a couple of slides of a lot of the presentations that, when we build our projects, our clients and architects and everybody they have a vision for what this product should look like. So they have this nice shiny object. And then they give it to us in a big pile like this.

And it's up to us to try and assemble it. And it's kind of like a barbecue grill. And all the parts and pieces don't really fit together. And we end up kind of back where we started, but it takes a lot of work.

So what really creates that, I've come to think of, is what's the single biggest problem in construction that we face today? And that's a breakdown of communication. We've all seen this a million times, but it is as relevant today as it has ever been.

We don't talk to each other. We don't interface. We just don't have the conversations that we need to have. So when you look at with our data, how do you guys manage and collect your data?

We have people using Excel. We have people using Word. We have PDFs. We have field books. We have access databases. We have Bluebeam, paper sketches, napkin. You name it, we find it on a job site.

And then how do we store all that? Well, we have in filing cabinets, Dropbox, the shared drives. It's all over the place. These are just the things I found in five minutes, looking where it's stored on computers, is stored on iPads, is stored on laptops, phones, everything.

You cannot find anything usually in one cohesive spot, you know, that giant stack of paper that the superintendent hands you at the end of the job and says, here you go. Here's all of my records for the job. That's fantastic. Now what do I do with it?

So where does that leave our teams? You're staying there looking at a giant mountain of data. And we don't know what to do with it.

So all these create pitfalls and limitations. So because of this, we don't have a good way of taking version control and getting the right information. We don't have security and editing control over a lot of this data.

Because you just send us an Excel spreadsheet. They manipulate it. And it has problems. You can't really track the version of things.

None of these systems are collaborative. We don't have defined workflows. You're replicating errors, copy and paste. And then do you know the true status of the information you're looking at?

I just pulled this off the website of some of the top eight-- I didn't put them all up there-- just Excel mistakes. These number in the billions of dollars around the world. You read articles that will tell you that Excel is probably one of the single worst pieces of software ever developed, because it made people lazy and copy and paste. And it just creates compounding errors that nobody knows what the true value of those are.

So how do we improve our communication delivery of information to the team? We do it by getting the right data at the right time to the right people, so they can decide and act on that information. So our solution has been BIM 360.

We've been a customer since Vela. We've been using it for 13 years. I have close to 3,000 projects in our database of which, right now, about 150 are active in various stages either from warranty all the way through active construction. So we're constantly drawing on that.

But even with BIM 360, it's got the same problem. It's siloed information. It doesn't really talk to each other. All these things are different places.

So how have we chosen to break down those silos? With your issues, your checklists, your files, photos. We take the equipment and the tasks. We use them as the basket.

We take that as the place where you gather all your information. And you link all this information together, and you store it back and forth. What this allows is a cycle where people can enter the information from the office. It goes out to the field.

They can add onto that information. And then they can, hopefully, build that database and that deliverable to the client and, also, make those decisions that they need in a timely manner. So the first thing that we have to do is just not think of equipment as equipment.

We want to think of it as different things. We want to think of it as a tool that we can use to communicate with our scope tracking. We've use it for tracking databases, change order management. We've done foundation tracking, weld mapping, and even some light scheduling with it.

The thing I'll go through is not really quite in this order, but these are the things I'm going to talk about and, hopefully, get through. And you guys can learn some something and go out with it. So one of the first ones we had was firestopping tracking.

We have a utility customer. Their substations are all over the Northeast. They had a major fire in one. And they realized that they did not have adequate firestopping.

Because these are so old, these facilities are 50, 60 years old, they've been punched, cut up, beat up, walls torn down, doesn't matter. So what we did is we had all these multiplications. Everything had to be engineered.

Some of the fire departments said, if this thing catches on fire, we're not going in there. It's burning until everything in there is destroyed, because it's just not safe for us to go in there. We tracked over 1,000 treatments of just pipes to full blown openings.

And we had multiple engineered firestopping. So each one of these openings that we had had an individual detail that had to be followed for Hilti. Sometimes it's the same one multiple times. So how we had to convey that is develop a process.

We surveyed all of the facilities. We came out with Hilti and what kind of solution was needed to actually make these firestoppings work. Then this team-- and I can't take any credit for this.

This is all what the team did is they started creating barcodes. And they came up with a coding scheme that they put next to each one of these holes. And in some cases, you'll see we have multiple holes on one wall, each with a tag.

And they could scan that barcode, or they could type in that barcode, number and find out what the solution was. And then we tracked it. So we used the status within equipment to see what the actual status was. So we knew, when we were done at that substation, we could move on to the next one.

So what you have here is we have the station ID, what type of penetration it is. We have a location and a brief description of what we're actually supposed to be fixing. This was entered in by the project manager.

So when the superintendent or the foreman went out there, they looked at it and then, OK, well, this either makes sense-- it is a 3 inch core hole-- or, guys, this is a 1 by 1, you know, cable tray penetration. So I just blew it up a little bit. It's not that thing.

So I also didn't mention I'm not really good at putting together presentations. That's what marketing does for me. And I was too late to have them do it right, so you got to bear with me.

So just more examples-- each one of those, if you notice right here, we have three different penetrations. Each one of them has it's own unique barcode system. So each one of those will be tracked separately.

Each one of them has its own Hilti detail. So we create the equipment. We assign the treatment. And we track the progress. So this right here is the history of when it was created. So we have a whole lifecycle of each one of those penetrations.

We have the pictures attached to it that we took. Also, it allows us to have the product that we're supposed to use. And then we attach the cut sheet for those Hilti products.

So when the foreman or anybody doing this work they walk up to it, they have the actual detail. They know what they're supposed to do. And they have all the information they need to do this right.

Same set of substations and a very similar thing is they had fire doors that were a big problem. They needed a tracking mechanism. And the scope of work ranged on this all over the place from replacing an entire door and frame to just doing a little tweak of a hinge.

So each one of these, because of that, we have 142 doors that had some kind of treatment. Again, we took the equipment matrix, we assigned each opening a barcode. We had what kind of opening it was.

And then the scope of work for each one of those openings was typed into there. So when the carpenters went up there, they could scan it. And they knew exactly what they were supposed to do, whether it's adjust the hinge, replace the closer, just make the panic hardware work. And then we had the pictures of it for each one, so they could see that it was done.

So the other uses that we had is for project tracking. And this one started out kind of interesting. We had a utility customer in Boston for doing gas services.

And this project team started out with they have these OQs that they publish every single month. They're fit in three binders, a stack about this tall. Every single crew is supposed to have these binders in their truck at all times.

And they update them every month, but they update the entire thing every month. And they don't actually tell you what pages they've changed. So every month, we had 14 crews. We were taking the entire binder, putting it aside, and then putting all new binders out.

So they got permission from the utility contractor to do this electronically to where every single month we would download the new version, and then we would push it into BIM 360 Field library. And then every foreman had it on their iPad. So we had actual gas foreman.

When I was training them, everybody said it kind of looked like the Breakfast Club in my office, because I had a whole bunch of just-- you know, they're gas guys. They're sitting there with their shovels in hand digging ditches and putting stuff in. But they had iPads.

So this is how we get the information from the client. All the information's there. We mark up these folders. And we would enter it into an Excel database.

The woman who developed this called it the Bible. The people that took over after she left the project called it the unholy piece of garbage from hell, I believe, was the exact-- phrasing of it. So when I actually asked them for a copy of the file so I could use it in the presentation, they said, what do you want that thing for? I thought we burned it a long time ago.

It was tough. We couldn't do anything with it. One person managed it. And it was her system. It didn't make any sense to anybody, but her. So it was a disaster.

So we got the idea based on the door tracking and the firestopping that we would use the equipment matrix. And we went through probably several iterations of this. This is the latest one that we have, where we get the work order number, the address, the neighborhood in Boston that we're using, or the borough in New York that we're doing, because we use it there.

The status of it-- so they use this for tracking their billing, whether they've marked it out. We have our permits, when the permits expires. Dig safe numbers are in there.

If there are any restrictions on the permit, we also have the checklist linked to this. So when the superintendent goes out, they do what's called a bird dogging report. They walk out. They do a checklist. They take pictures of all the existing conditions.

So then when the foreman and the gas crew shows up, they can actually see the checklist that the superintendent did. Because they know what address they're working at. So they just type in that work order number. And they can see all of this, whether it's been done.

Before they leave the office, if they see that the status hasn't been posted or that they don't have valid permit times for it, because of a holiday or some other restriction, they know that. And they can plan their work accordingly. So it gives us one singular database that all these crews-- we at a point have anywhere between 10 to 20 crews around Boston and New York City using this database to track their work.

The best part about this, too, is because it organizes anything, we know the job number. We have the whole history. This tracking system that we've used has saved us in real dollars over $200,000 in claim avoidance just by having the information that we can find quickly.

It's probably saved us even more in soft costs where we haven't had to go searching around and asking people, hey, you know, can I have your iPhone? You know, what pictures do you have for this day? We go to that work order number, and we have the entire history of it there.

So this is just an expansion of the database. We also know who the foreman were. We know checklists that are there, if we've done the checklist, when we started. We also put quantities in here for quantity tracking.

So we can match that for the billing, whether we hit ledge. Because all these have unit rates we get paid for. And so the people on the office side, they can track all this information. And it helps them with their billing. It's made their life a lot easier.

Probably one of the most satisfying things I had was the guy that manages this sent me an email one day. It said, thank you so much for making my life easier just by setting this up. And all it really was is I gave them the idea, and they set it up and ran with it.

So these are just the examples, the checklists that we have. We have the entire project history on the other side. So we know when people showed up. We know when the restoration crew was there. We have the restoration checklists in there.

We attach the permits. So if a police officer or anybody comes up and says, hey, what's going on, you actually have the permit attached to the piece of equipment. We have the pictures.

Believe it or not, in the city when you post no parking for construction in neighborhoods, people rip down the signs and park there anyway. I can't believe people would actually do that in a place where parking is really tight. So what we've had is, in Boston especially, we have police details with the crews.

And they'll take their picture and say, this is the what was posted three days ago. You can clearly see the signs were there. And the police officers will then-- OK, it was posted. Somebody ripped the signs down. They're going to knock on doors or just start calling tow companies and get cars away.

So I think that fact alone has increased efficiency. You don't have crews that are staying around waiting for cars to be moved, because we've proved that we did what we were supposed to do. One of the best examples we had was a checklist with this where we buried a gas line that's supposed to be 3 feet deep.

We got called by the client and said, your gas line, they just went out to put the meter in. It's barely a foot in the ground. We pulled up the checklist. And part of our checklist process is that you take a picture of the finished trench before you backfill.

We had a tape measure picture clearly showing it was 3 feet deep. The developer of the site-- it was a greenfield site-- owned up the fact that they re-graded the entire site after we put that gas line in. So we got paid to put it in.

We got paid to take it out. We got paid to put it back in again. And we also didn't have the lost opportunity of that crew being somewhere else. That single instance saved us over $15,000 in crew costs.

So it paid for about half of the license, I think, for the year in that one instance. So the biggest advantage of this is that we got people to actually buy into the system. We made it easier.

We got them involved, so they would actually use it. And when they used it, they saw the benefit. And, you know, that was the swing of, I guess, the rollout or the implementation for us.

When they actually saw that they were proven correct and their job was saved in their mind, like, hey, this isn't so bad. Josh isn't just the jerk pushing stuff on us to be better. They actually bought into it.

So this next one, one of my project managers came to me. This is the museum at Harvard. He hates our change order management, because there's a lot things we do very well. And our project management software is terrible.

But he came to me and say, hey, I want to try and use BIM 360. I've tried other software. It just doesn't work. So I want to use it as an info exchange.

So what we did is he came to me and said, yeah, sure. We'll try it. I try to make everything in BIM 360, because it's my baby. And it proves my worth. So we came up with an idea.

We said, OK, we'll try using tasks. So PCO gets sent out. Subcontractor, they create a task on their end. And they upload their pricing to it or whoever the assignee is.

PM reviews that, adds comments. If it's good, he will change the status back so the architect and owner can review it. They can add their comments. And it goes back, or they reject it. And we've turned it into an info exchange.

There's a couple of flaws that we've come up with it, but this is what it looks like. Again, it's kind of hard to see. So I apologize for that.

But you just have your PCO numbers on here. We have the status. We know where the status is through each step, the subcontractor or whoever it's currently assigned to, the date that it's due. And then we also put it on a calendar view.

That's the nice thing about tasks is you can show it in the schedule, so people can prioritize it. The project manager can set that up to when he needs due dates. And he can also look at that whole thing and says, all right, this was supposed to be due to me. And it's a very quick way to look at this information and just see where we are instead still trying to comb through an Excel spreadsheet or a prologue printout or whatever it is.

A couple of things that we found is that it's a flaw that we think with tasks is tasks do not send out an automatic notification when you've been assigned a task unless you subscribe to get bombarded by every single BIM 360 email that comes through. So that's the one drawback we have right now with this process. There's a couple other quirks that we're still trying to work out.

This is very much a work in progress, but it is working. But the lack of immediate notification has been problematic for us. And that's one thing that I've been telling Autodesk for quite a while with tasks in general is that push notification that something's happened specific to that person for an action item outside of issues or checklists, it's needed for tasks. Because they're a higher level of importance in my mind.

AUDIENCE: It doesn't have that functionality right now?

JOSHUA LANNEN: It doesn't. So the work around we've had is we run a task report that is scheduled to go out and show each subcontractor what their tasks are by the day. But there are some limitations.

Also, the reporting of the tasks, the way they come out in the spreadsheet view, we have some custom fields that are in there that they don't show up on any of the reports. So it's been work in progress. It is working.

And the team, they're sticking with it, which is good. But I'll be the first one to admit this is far from a perfect process. But it's working.

AUDIENCE: Next year.

JOSHUA LANNEN: Next year, yeah. So this is just how it looks. And I blew up the pictures a little bit more of how you have the task assigned, the status. Here's the Excel spreadsheet that was attached by the subcontractor with the pricing.

We have comments from the project manager back to the subcontractor or what they have, feedback, from the architect. And then we have a history. So we can go back and see what was going on with it.

The nice thing about a lot of things within Field, especially the tasks and equipment, is that history, being able to see when somebody touched it and figure out what went on. So if information disappears or anything changes, we know exactly who did it and when. So the next one I'm going to talk about, we did this.

It was a foundation tracking, where one of my really, I guess, thoughtful or innovative assistant superintendents, he decided he was going to use the equipment matrix to track his foundation. So he set up the equipment. He then took his foundation site plan. And he barcoded every single pier, footing, you name it.

And then he would carry this. He had this on the wall. So anybody could walk up and scan it with their iPad. But he also carried one around in his pocket. So when we knew where it was, he could take his iPad, scan it, and then do his checklist. But he also had the pier details on it.

So then you could find all the checklists that were done, the pre-pour checklists, the rebar checklists. Everything that was done for that one instance was there. I don't know if I-- so this is where there's a couple of things wrong with equipment. And this was one that has been a glaring problem with us for a lot of things.

If you notice on this right here, attachment deleted. One of the assistant engineers on this project, he did a database update. And somehow we lost every picture for this for a whole set of equipment, because of whatever he did. And we couldn't get it back.

So one thing I will caution you on on all of this, it's good, but you need to-- and I'll talk about this, kind of our lessons learned. But I'll mention it now. You need to keep tight control over who has access to this and manage it through the process, because sometimes you will lose data. And it is not fun when you have to explain that.

The good part is is a lot of these photos, because they were taking equipment, they copied into the photo library. So they weren't completely lost. But we just didn't go back and put them back in, because it was going to be too much of an effort.

So this next one is a project we have in Boston. It's a theater project, very fast track project, one of those where the client needed it done by a certain day. And then they just took a really long time getting everything together and the design finished.

And it's been very tough. What happened is the pace of construction actually exceeded the pace of design, surprise, surprise. Field work bulletins weren't not issued in sequential order.

So we had close to 50 bulletins at the time we set this up. And bulletin three, if you looked at the pour schedule, needed to be done-- bulletin 43 had to be done before 3. So we were trying to figure out how to get our hands around this.

So given the calendar view, we looked at the task module. This is one of those ideas that worked good, but never got executed to its fullest. So we set up all the tasks. We took a copy of the field work.

The task name was the field work order number. And then we attached the field work bulletin to it. And then we were supposed to set the schedule.

The team never really did that. So if you notice, we have everything due on one Wednesday in the middle of the month. That was the day I set it all up.

The plan was to have them move it around and actually show it the way you saw with the PCO module. But it wasn't a total loss, because they were able to look at the task and use the information embedded within the field. So this is just what the tasks look like.

We then have the attachment there. And then we had the sketch attached to it. So it allowed the team to take that information, organize it, and then have somebody out in the field find the sketch that they were doing, so they knew what field bulletin was and what the sketch was without having to search through a library, carry sketchbooks out, go back to the office. Everything was set up there.

So I'll give it a partial success. But had we actually put it in the schedule, I think it would have been a little bit more successful for us. But I still count it as a win.

So next example I have is weld mapping. And we used the equipment. All of our stuff, it's gas. It's electrical. It's dangerous stuff. We only have one chance to get it right.

And when it goes wrong, everybody's pointing fingers. We're on the news, and helicopters are flying over, and sometimes people go to jail. So we don't want to be in that situation.

So because of that, there are strict constraints over how we modify our process and each step. So what we did is we came up with the process of taking our equipment matrix and we developed a weld map. So when you look at the weld map, what we have here is all of our joints are numbered.

We have the type of closure that we're doing, the location, so the zone or the station number that it's in, final inspection complete. So we track the status. And then we see the checklists that are done and the day it was created.

This has kind of turned into a big company standard for us, that project. This information was from a different project. This was one of the second or third projects down at the University of Connecticut. There's over 1,000 lineal feet of high pressure steam that runs snakes all over the campus.

We have a detail on every single joint and all the steps that we took. This is what one of the weld maps looks like. Each one of those is associated piece of equipment that you can click on and use and drill down and find that information for.

AUDIENCE: Did you barcode the maps as well?

JOSHUA LANNEN: We didn't barcode these. We do have weld maps on them, but we don't barcode them, someday maybe. The better outcome of this, I think, would be to use something like the GPS tracking from your phone when the picture was taken and put it on a map.

And that's something, if you guys are around on Thursday, we won't discuss this. But Josh Canter and I are part of a more in-depth thing about AI and machine learning with Autodesk of how we're trying to take some of those ideas and take these photos. And especially in our horizontal work-- where right now we've got a project that's 7 and 1/2 miles of electrical duct bank that's welded from Boston all the way into one of the suburbs, power plant to substation-- if we could geotag each one of those photos, and then when you click on the photo you know the equipment it came from, we can get that whole history and find it. So it's one of those future things that we're on the cusp of being able to do, but it's not there yet.

And this is the steps that we took for these pipes. You have the welder. So we have the weld tag on it. You see the shielding on it.

The welder, he has the inspection on it. And then we actually have the coding picture. So we do this with gas. We do this with electrical, chilled water, steam.

All these things have warranties. And they have very specific processes. Each one of these has the checklists attached to it. Here's the pressure tests being done.

This is probably one of the biggest successes other than the tracking of using the gas services. The other one that we've done is just simple pile tracking. With this, we have a couple projects. We had thousands of piles.

This one here only had 250 only. The other one that we had before that had 1,890. We have a piece of equipment for every one of our piles.

All the attachments are there. The checklist is attached to it, the blow counts. We have an entire history of each pile as it was done. When we have the inspector's report from Haley Aldrich or whoever the geotechnical engineer, we take the report, take a picture of it. We attach that to the equipment matrix.

Then we have everything there. So something goes wrong, we can find it quickly. That's a lot better than thumbing through a field book or however else you would do it.

And non-construction tracking, so this is probably the one that I think I'm most proud of just for how it came together and what happened. One of our employee's son, he's getting ready to go to college. And he's trying to become an Eagle Scout.

So he came up with this idea that he had a plan to document the grave sites of every single veteran in his town. I think there are 12 cemeteries. There were 1,600 veterans that were located.

The town had a kind of a loose Excel database that wasn't really maintained. It was kind of a mess. So the employee came to me and said, Josh, what I've seen in BIM 360, do you think we can use it?

I said, I don't see why not. Let's give it a try. So I got permission from our executives to use our database for a non-company use.

I reached out to Autodesk, and they liked the idea. But we haven't fully pursued how we can get that out to them. So what we did is we took the baseline information from the town in Excel database, and we pushed it in the field.

We came up with different categories. And we can't see them all. But if you guys ever want it, I can make it available if people want to see this. And we have the names, if we could find it, whether a KIA or whether they died of natural causes, the cemetery that they were in, the branch of service they were in, the theaters of battle that they served in.

And then they took it to a next step where they were looking were their placards, did they have flag holders, were they identified as a veteran. It was a pretty cool thing.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] family [INAUDIBLE]?

JOSHUA LANNEN: Well, that was kind of the next thing that we you could go with this if you think about. And you jumped ahead of me, but this is what it looks like. So we have all the information here that we could find if it was on the gravestone or in the public records. And then they took a picture of every single headstone to have in the database.

They gave this over to the town and the VFW. If you think about what you could do with this-- they wanted to try and be able to let other Boy Scout troops use this. I don't know how we do that, because that's something that Autodesk would probably have to sponsor.

Because we would have to extract this out of our database and put it into something. But if you think about it, 40 million people have served this country to protect our rights. Sorry, I get--

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JOSHUA LANNEN: But like you said, if you went and, with families permission, barcoded this, you could have the entire history of that soldier for people to go up and see what their life was and what that person was.

AUDIENCE: You could literally sort that by battle, by theater, by army. by branch. You can sort it by state, [INAUDIBLE].

JOSHUA LANNEN: It's one of those things that the power of it is almost unlimited if you could set it up. So, sorry. So lessons learned, best practices-- you find your champions. Find the people that will actually adopt this, people that will hear you out.

They'll suffer through the pain with you. They'll deal with the things that it doesn't do exactly the way they want. They'll work within that framework. And they will try to make it happen.

Start with small projects. I don't suggest taking on anything huge. Although, when we did the first pile one, we took on 1,800 checklists, 1,800 piles at once. But we had already proven that on smaller scale.

So the proof of concept was there. You know, that firestopping within the substations, that was probably one of the best things that we could start with. Because it was small and contained. And it was a very small group of people to do it with.

Don't be afraid to fail. As I kind of alluded to with my GPA in college, I'm not afraid of failing. I actually did it pretty well. But I still got through it, and I persevered.

So don't be afraid. If it doesn't work, try it again. Try it a different avenue. Put it on the shelf for a while, and then pick it up again if you find a different solution or a different use case for it.

And that's what I said. Don't be afraid to abandon it. Keep an open mind and try new things. Nothing up here was ever designed by Autodesk to be used the way we use it.

I wasn't just sitting there one day and said, hey, I'm going to push this process on people. Somebody came to me with an idea. And I heard him out and said, hey, let's try it. Let's see what happens.

Some best practices to think about-- be careful when creating your custom fields, especially in equipment. What you may end up with is a whole bunch of useless information across all of your equipment types. So if you have foundation information, you're going to look at it all the way across your pumps, and your switch gear, and your fan coil units.

The one thing that is a problem with equipment is you can't copy and paste some of those statuses for each one of your subtypes. So there's a lot of thinking you have to do on setting that up to clean up your data and make it true. Limit access to edit and delete equipment and tasks.

That's one of the hardest things, because it's counterintuitive to what I'm trying to say is we want everybody involved with it. But if everybody is involved with it, it can start degrading the data. But because of the history, you know who did it. And we can try to figure out what happened. And a lot of times, we can recover that.

You can see, especially on the status changes, what the previous status was before it changed. So if somebody does a bulk update and it messes everything up, you can go back through it manually, put it back to where it was, and get that true status back. And when using tasks, you got to develop a really strong workflow based around it.

Get people to understand how we're going to use it, what the intent is, and where their role fits into that. The biggest challenge they'll face is just people's mindset. You can show people things and show them that it's better, but there's still, in this industry, a lot of people that are stuck in their ways.

I'm even stuck in my own ways. But, you know, don't give up. And just keep pushing ahead.

If you all like to reach out to me, there's my contact information. And I will take any questions you have. Go ahead.

AUDIENCE: So do you tie BIM 360 Field to any of your other non-operational uses, like [INAUDIBLE], scheduling, [INAUDIBLE]?

JOSHUA LANNEN: Not currently. I'm still trying to convince people of that last one that there's a better way. And some people are starting to come around. Pre-con, we're making some strides in that of at least getting the documents in there faster. I'm trying to show people early on.

We have a lot of superintendents now that they're doing their pre-construction photos in BIM 360. So then estimating will look at it when they do the walk-through. And they at least have access to that and if there's certain checklists that we're doing.

So not entirely, but we are using it. And we are using it for turnover. Those weld maps, there's data books that we have to turn over to all these customers, giant volumes of as-builds.

So we take those entire things, we hit print. And I could have brought it here, but that one project, the first thing we did, the data book is literally this thick. I think it was 6,000 pages of information that we had collected for that project for every single weld.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JOSHUA LANNEN: That we only had one, because we were able to give them the PDF copy of it. OK.

AUDIENCE: Your thoughts on taking the line items from your [INAUDIBLE] and tying them to [INAUDIBLE] BIM 360 Field, so I can track back and forth along [INAUDIBLE].

JOSHUA LANNEN: Oh, it'd be awesome. But it is such an arduous manual process, you'd smash your head against the wall before you actually got through it. If they could automate that or if you knew a way to work through the API and get it to do that-- I don't-- but that is definitely an option that would prove successful. Yeah.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] use the drop [INAUDIBLE] on all those welds and [INAUDIBLE].

JOSHUA LANNEN: We have not used it for the welds. But I had a project for MIT where the superintendent used the drop pins for issues. And they did it for creating-- it was Building 2 at MIT, which if you see any of the pictures in the movies of MIT, there's the great dome, it's the building on the right.

It's a limestone building. And we had individual treatments all over the place. You know, like, that quadrant had this treatment. And they actually put pins and used the issue status to track what everybody was doing and go all the way through and then figure out how it was close.

The problem we found with the pins is they don't get locked in place. And we had the problem on that MIT project. And why we haven't really done it since for that reason is they get moved around. And all of a sudden, you're-- that's why I think if we can use the geotagging, somehow get that with where the picture's taken based on GPS, I think that'll be a better success and then have Google Maps or something actually create that pin for you. Then you click on that pin and see the information. Go ahead.

AUDIENCE: So the information [INAUDIBLE].

JOSHUA LANNEN: Probably, but I haven't done it. Through the API, there's all kinds of things that you can do. I've seen other people do that.

I'll tell you right now, I personally am not. I'm not a programmer. And that's one of my frustrations is I see what you're talking about, some of those just great ideas.

If you could get it into even Microsoft Power BI, you can create a dashboard on some of these things. But, for me, I am not that knowledge. If you find out, please email me, because I'd love to know about that. But it is possible.

And I think with the next generation of Field built on Forge and some of the other partners I've talked to about that effort, I think eventually that will be something we can do for those integrations. Because if you could start tying in production tracking, then it would tie to your cost, tie to your schedule. All of the pieces are there. Somebody just needs to link them up.