The Power of Autodesk Construction Cloud Assets

JOHNATHAN WARD: Hello and welcome to this class on the Power of Autodesk Construction Cloud Assets. My name is Johnathan Ward. I'm one of the consultants within the construction division at Symetri Europe.

I'll just start with a little bit of my own background, where I'm from, what I do. I've been in the Autodesk channel for over 20 years and started in the manufacturing arena. Worked in document management for a number of years and then moved into the AEC space. That's probably for the last 12 years. Before that, I worked 12 years in industry, mostly in construction and manufacturing, a little bit in IT as well.

I live in the very far North East of England, a small place called Whitley Bay. I'm lucky enough to live right by the beach, so lockdown wasn't too bad for me. Lunchtime walks on the beach keep me sane and that, and it's a lovely part of the country.

So I climb in my spare time. Bouldering is what it's called-- indoor climbing. Lovely, big, soft mats that you can fall on. I find those very, very comforting, as I do often fall off the wall trying to make those big Ethan Hunt movements and then realizing that it's not Mission Impossible, and I'm not Ethan Hunt, and I end up flat on my back.

When I'm not climbing, I like to go and tear around local go karting circuit in the little championship that we run. 50 or so of us pitch up every month, and like big kids, go tearing around in circles.

So a little bit about Symetri. Firstly, we're part of the Addnode group, with over 2,000 employees throughout the world, working in three main sectors-- design, process, and lifecycle management. We recently joined with Microdesk, a company in the US primarily, but also with offices throughout Europe as well. And together, with Symetri and Microdesk, we are over 750 employees, 100 developers, and 400 consultants, of which I'm one of, and about a $300 million revenue per year, and we're the largest Autodesk provider.

So before we start, I just thought I'd go through the learning objectives, just ensure that we know what we're going to cover. We're going to look at how to manage assets in Autodesk Construction Cloud first and foremost. We'll look at some potential workflows between Construction Cloud, Power BI, Revit. We'll also look at how we can use 360 degree photo capture and how we can bring that into the Construction Cloud platform as well, and we'll look as well at site management using the assets within the Autodesk Construction Cloud.

So why? Why did we do this? What were the drivers? Well, they loosely divide into two areas-- client requirements and in our case, in the UK, a recent building safety act.

Clients side, lots of requests for maintainable asset data. They want to be able to monitor these through construction phase into operation as constructed asset models and all the information that goes with them.

They want to know that the models that they get refer to the construction of that facility, of that complex they're building. Not to know that this is where it was designed to go, but actually it didn't quite go there. It went in a slightly different place. We want to see all that together and have all of that information contained within those assets, rather than just a stack of either physical documents or a stack of if, you'll excuse the term, digital documents to actually see it in the model itself, and we see clients asking for that more and more.

And to capture that information and to monitor it as it goes through the construction phase. It's obviously easier to do that rather than wait till the very end, and then you have to go and clamor to find all the information. It's difficult to know actually where things have been fitted because a lot of it is hidden, and so that information capture is becoming more of a requirement.

One of the other drivers for this was an appalling tragedy that happened in June of 2017. You may or may not have heard about it. It wasn't certainly obviously in the news an awful lot here.

Grenfell Tower, a residential tower block, burst into flames. Very, very quickly engulfed the entire building, and that has led to a number of changes. There was a very in-depth report authored in 2018, and that in turn has led to a new building safety act that's just been enacted this year and an updated building safety bill. And a British standard, BS8644-1 detailing the digital management of that fire safety information.

And that's brought with it its own requirements, its own obligations for data capture, information capture, a new FIREie definition, excuse me, very similar to COBie, but obviously relating to fire protection systems. And also brings in the requirement for evidence capture as proof that assets are being stored in the correct way for our protection has been set up in the correct way and according to the specifications and the requirements.

A key part of all of that is the golden thread, the golden thread of information, and how that should pass through the various stages of construction, primarily for the fire safety reasons from technical design onwards. The idea is that this information begins at this point so that it can be built up and verified over the course of the construction. And it ensures that building owners and operators have a complete and accurate information regarding that building safety and also evidence that all the regulations have been adhered to.

So really then, the subject of this is how we manage all of that information. How do we gather all of that information? How do we store it? How do we present it?

We're obviously proposing here Autodesk Construction Cloud assets, but I thought it would be useful before we start looking at some of those industry examples to just consider what actually is an asset. What do we consider an asset, and how do we define that within the construction environment?

I think these are fairly obvious. The hand dryer, the water exchange unit, the heat extraction unit, they're all obvious maintainable assets. They'll be commissioned. We'll keep information about them, maintenance information, all of that. So yes, I think definitely assets. We can tick those off.

If we just broaden that a little bit, how about these, the plant and equipment. Well, certainly to the plant hire company, obviously they're assets. It's how they make their money. But are the assets to us?

I suppose the question really is, do we need to monitor these? Do we need to have any information about them? And that's certainly one way of looking at these and deciding, well, do we deem these as assets.

And a little bit further off track, people, rooms. Rooms certainly if you're in the hotel business, a room is clearly an asset. During construction phase, well, yes, potentially.

People, obviously assets, but would we classify them as assets and store information about them? Well, I thought I'd Google it. Google asset. What is an asset? And I came back with the Cambridge dictionary definition. The bottom part of that, as you can read is, sort of the, I suppose, what the typical explanation, the financial terms, assets and liabilities.

But above it, knowledge of languages is a real asset in this sort of work. Her eyes are the best asset. He'll be a great asset to the team, and a useful or valuable quality, skill, or person. So really wide open definition.

And then that got me thinking about classification systems. How do we classify objects, things throughout the construction process? This is the Uniclass 2015, but it could equally be OmniClass or CSI.

We've got the obvious products, definitely. Those are an asset. But also spaces, locations. We classify those, and we'll maintain information about tools and equipment are in there as well. Entities, elements and functions, even activities-- concrete pour, for example. Or within that classification system, all things that we monitor, we manage on site in that management process, then we will need information about them.

So that really just encompasses just about everything that we can think about. All these things we want to monitor. We capture and maintain information about them. So if we look at it in that broad context then, they're all assets, and we should have some way of managing all of those, and in one place would be fantastic.

So having decided that these are all assets, and in fact, we do need to keep information and track progress against all of those, how are we going to do it? I used to teach Revit many, many years ago, and one thing that I always used to find useful in teaching certain parts of Revit was to look at how a particular tool worked, rather than describing what it is, the name of it, look at how it actually works.

Because if we look at how the system works, then that lends itself to a more open approach to how we might use that in order to achieve certain goals. So I thought I'd spend a few slides just giving you an overview of how the asset module in Autodesk build works.

Well first and foremost, it is a database, and it captures information about objects, things, assets, if you will, that we enter. That's it. It keeps information, it's a database. That makes it very, very flexible, particularly when we start to look at the other aspects of that database. Not only maintaining information about an individual object, but also attaching additional information into that, information that also resides in Autodesk Build, keeping all of that together that's been uploaded for the purposes and we can attach into our assets.

There might be documents, specifications from the document management part. There might be forms, checklists that we need to install and commission a particular asset. There might even be scheduled activities. When is this concrete pour due to take place, and we can monitor against that. In fact, we can pull the information from almost anywhere within the system, including RFIs and submittals, photographs, even raising issues where, for example, an asset's been damaged.

One aspect of that is the Forms and the Checklist section itself where we can template all the inspections and commissioning tests that we have to go through, health and safety tests, maintenance routines, quality and safety, snagging lists. All of these can be stored in the system. They can be associated with an asset. So for one asset, there might be half a dozen checklists associated with it to determine what has to happen preinstallation, during installation, commissioning, post-commissioning, all tied into those assets.

And then the assets themselves, if we look at the configuration side, we go into the Settings, and we see categories, we see custom fields, and we see status sets. So custom fields, really any information that we need to know about anything that we're putting into the system. So probably a serial number, manufacturer. It might be, is there a work permit assigned here, information about that. Information about plant and equipment, damage, fields to fill in information about those.

Status sets, what status do we assign to that asset? Is it in construction? Is it out for delivery? Is it in the laydown area? Is it being commissioned? Is it being inspected? Is it damaged?

All different statuses, and of course, those statuses are very dependent upon how we classify or categorize those assets. Against a room, we might say, well, it's in first fix, it's in second fix, it's had a final inspection. For workforce, it might be CSCS card has been awarded. It's valid until such and such a date.

All these things, we can tie together. So within that database, we can subdivide it into those different categories, and within those different categories, we can decide on exactly what the information requirements are and what the status is required for all of that type of asset.

And then we can go about creating those assets. Now, we can bring them in from a spreadsheet. Obviously, we can create them manually, but that's quite a long-winded process.

The import method is actually more than just an initial import. It's also about updating information as well. There's an ID-- you can see highlighted in the left hand column next to the name here-- and that tells the system that this asset is already in place and simply to update the information.

Now, what I often do with lots of multiple categories of assets is that I will manually add one item, one dummy item, for each class or each category, fill in some information, and then I'm able to export those, add all my additional assets, and then simply re-import them. And the system will just read anything without an ID, and it will create the ID according to and create the asset according to all of the requirements. So it's really very, very flexible.

Now, we, as a proof of concept thought, well, lots of people or everybody uses Revit. Certainly a lot of people use Revit in the UK, maybe not everybody, but our prime authoring tool. So can we take information from that? Because that's clearly going to encompass a lot of those assets certainly from the technical design stages.

When we thought about that, we thought, well, we should be able to do that. The APIs are open. And in fact, that is possible. It's something that we will look to pursue over the coming years to see how we might implement that.

OK, so that's how the asset module works. And you can see that it's a very, very flexible tool that allows us to associate information from the rest of the common data environment and to manage information about those assets. So let's look at some industry examples. Some of these were done a few years ago. Some are more recent.

The first one, a concrete deck. And so the whole deck was obviously poured in specific sections. Each of those sections was created as an asset.

Into that asset, we can add checklists that are required. Make sure the form works, fastened correctly, make sure the rebar is in place, all sorts of checklists that we can assign to those assets. We can give them status sets. So they've been inspected, ready to pour, they've been poured, they've cured, they've had final inspection, all managed within the Assets module.

And then we can take that information out, and indeed we did, and put it into a Power BI dashboard. This is using a synoptic panel. It's a visual tool that you can grab for free. Put in a floor plan. It creates a certain file type, and you load that into your Power BI, and then you can map progress against it. In progress, it's been poured, it's had a final inspection.

Another example was curtain panels. Now in this particular case, the curtain panels were manufactured offsite, actually out of the UK. And it was agreed that a barcode would be assigned and attached to each panel. That would then create an asset in the system, and that would be used to track and trace it.

So it's in transit, it's been delivered to the UK, it's in the laydown area, it's been installed, commissioned, signed off, et cetera. But also to capture some of the logistics of that panel installation, associated checklists, generic and bespoke panel locations so we know exactly where they've got to fit, where they're designed to fit. And once again, these come out into a power BI dashboard so that we can see and track the installation.

It was also tracked within Navisworks as well. So that same information brought out and using the Appearance Profiler in Navisworks to color code each facade with its progress. It's in progress, it's being inspected, or it's awaiting inspection, or highlighted in red because there's damage, for example.

So a couple of instances of using Power BI dashboards, and these really apply to just about every industry example that we can go through. The two examples I've just shown were done a couple years ago. And at that time, we had access to the data connector, the data harvester that would effectively extract a load of tables. I forget the numbers-- 35, 40 tables. CSV files, and we could bring those in and work on them. But it was quite a manual process. You've got to download the files, you've got to extract them, pull them back into your Power BI dashboard, potentially then publish it out for other people to see.

What we have now is that the ACC Connector, the Autodesk Construction Cloud Connector is now Microsoft Certified, and it is included as part of Power BI desktop. Now, what that means specifically is that as well as not having to put a custom connector in there and manually refresh, we can load these into the Power BI web portal within your organization, and you can schedule the refresh, which is fantastic.

We can schedule that. These dashboards can be shared to all the right people so that in the morning, you just come in, and you've got four or five dashboards to go through with the highlight of all the progress that's going on.

You can download some PowerPoint templates as a starting point. They're extremely useful. You can get them from the account administration insight pages through the Data Connector tab, and you'll see this Power BI template gallery. You can download these. There's in excess of a dozen of them.

And they pull information from certain parts. You see there's an administration dashboard. There's an assets dashboard, there's a progress tracking dashboard, checklist dashboards, all looking at particular areas within Autodesk Build.

They're a great place to start because as well as actually giving you an idea of the information that's available and giving you those visualizations ready, you'll find they also built all the links to all of the tables. So each table is listed, and they're all linked together. That's all built out.

And also, you'll find there are some additional data entries in there as well in the forms of additional measures that can be added in Power BI and also additional tables that are extracted from the information and manipulated, so a little bit of that data modeling has already been done for you. So really a very, very good place to start.

Back to some more industry examples. Management of the workforce. This was used on a very large project over the last three or four years.

Armbands, like you might put your iPhone in when you're working out or something, all the details put in there. You've got a barcode, although actually these days, using an iPhone, you can use RFID or NFC tags as well as barcodes. All created as an individual asset.

One of the requirements in the UK is possession of the CSCS card to show that you're certified to work in the industry. You've had all the relevant accreditations, so you can store information about that. But also permits to enter controlled spaces.

Are you allowed to enter this area? Are you allowed to work at height? Do you have a work permit? All this information that we can just track. You point your phone at the barcode or put it near the NFC tag, and you're taken directly to the asset, and you can see all the information about that person.

Plant and equipment was another one in this particular case, the hire companies agreed to have barcodes put onto the plant machinery that was being hired out to the construction site, to the construction company, and it was managed through that. There again, set up as assets within the system, and we could see when they're coming on to site, they've been ordered, they've arrived on site, they've been inspected, they're ready to use, all different statuses. What are they due to go off site?

Also to log damage. Any fault for them, any damage, that can also be flagged in the system and raises an issue, and it's all tracked throughout the entire process, even down to site vehicles. So company cars coming onto site, are they cleared to come on, even simple things like that.

Hoarding inspections. Certainly in the UK, site [INAUDIBLE] have to be inspected once a week. We need to make sure they're damage-free and free of graffiti. So each section in this particular case was set up as an asset, its own status sets in place, certified or damaged, got graffiti.

We can evidence that as well. So we can capture a picture to say, it's clear of graffiti. Equally, if there's damage, we can take a picture of the damage, and we know the extent of that damage and what we're going to need to bring in order to fix it and correct the issue.

So all fascinating uses of the Assets module. It leads us into another area, specifically based on some of the legal requirements-- the additional legal requirements, rather that we have because of the new building safety bill, we need to evidence certain things, but there are other things that we want to verify on site as well.

We want to make sure that we have, as we said, accurate as built models, they'll be capturing all of the information about those various assets. We want to avoid the usual obvious drilling through a wall because you thought the cable runs were over here, but actually they were fitted here, but the model was never updated because we never verified on site that actually they were putting this location or what's behind the ceilings-- whatever-- the duct trims. I'm going to take down the entire ceiling almost to try and find what I'm looking for. But more importantly, to avoid the tragic loss of life from something like Grenfell.

So I'll look at a couple of different ways, different tools that we can use, and the first is just the mobile app. It sits on your phone, iPhone, Android, sits on a tablet, and it was actually utilized in every single one of those industry examples. Go out on site, you use it to scan a barcode, to get information about that person. Yes, you've got a hot work permit. Fine, carry on.

Flag that bit of plant, excellent. It's got some damage. We need to log that. We can log that directly.

It's a really very, very useful tool. It shows us initially overdue items, things that we need to deal with, checklists perhaps that we need to complete. And we can even complete those checklists directly on your phone or your tablet. These were actually taken on this phone. So not a huge phone, but you can see, it's still perfectly clear, perfectly easy to go and fill those in all based on the particular requirements.

The checklists that we look at that when we build them out to use on the mobile device, we can build intelligence into those things. So requesting, requiring evidence of a certain test-- a water temperature check, a water pressure test. This has passed, I'm going to flag it as passed. We can require a picture to say, well, show us the reading so that we can see what the actual reading was. They include that.

Or if we hit an item and we have to fail it, well again, we might say, well, as well as when you failed it, send information. Say it's damaged. We open the box, we're going to do the installation, and it's been hopelessly damaged. Take a picture, capture it as evidence. Also within that fail, we can have the system raise an issue automatically with no input required. It will be pre-configured to go to certain people, and it will raise that issue immediately in the system.

And again, as I said, we can use the barcodes, NFC tags. Tap the phone up to the barcode or to the tag, and it will take you directly to the asset, and you'll see all of the information about it. Really, extremely useful.

But we need more, not just for the evidence capture, but also to monitor progress on site. We might go out and do site walkarounds now. We might capture lots of photographs, store them somewhere. They're all static photographs. They might be geolocated. We might take laser scans and go and set those tools up and monitor in that way.

This is a slightly different way of doing it. We've got a 360-degree camera mounted on the hard hat, and well, we quite simply walk around site. We've taken a little bit of time to configure the system, and we do just walk around site.

This is one of our guys. This is Tom. He goes out and does most of the surveys for us. He is the expert in this. And in fact, he captured most of this information that you're going to see.

So what we have then, in essence, is a route that's mapped for us as we walk around and also a 360 degree site view of all of those different points as we walk through the site. We don't have to walk particularly slowly. We just lock out that route, and this is what we're going to do, and we walk through the site, and then it's processed offline.

We can do this walk once a week, once a month, and we can look back in time so that we can compare two scenes. So this is where we were. This is what it looked like in January. This is what it looks like in April. We can track all of those changes. Everything is date and time stamped for evidence and for information, obviously.

We can even compare it, the site view against the model. Do we need to make any changes? Have things been installed in the correct place? If they haven't, why haven't they? Do we need to move them, or actually there was a good reason for that, so we need to update the asset model so that we make sure that they're both in sync and they're both accurate as to what's actually been constructed.

This is what the tool looks like in use, so it's really easy, really intuitive to navigate around. This was actually a cladding refurbishment specifically for additional fire protection. And so one of the requirements was that there's evidence capture of all the fire protection systems behind.

And we can use the system, as you can see, we're looking at comparing September to July and then September to August. How are things being fastened? Are they correctly fastened? 17th of August, OK, we're getting closer to there. We can combine all of these together and review them offsite to ensure that in this particular case, as I said, the fire protection has been installed correctly, fastened correctly, and we can see that progress all the way through the construction process.

We can also use the software to locate an information and asset in the model, and then it will automatically synchronize and pull up information from the survey, so we can see exactly where that object, that asset was installed, and we can take reports out of that. So it might pick up, in this particular case, light switches. We'll select all of those, and we can have a report that matches the information model to the actual progress, see how they're progressing on site. Nice report highlighting where in the model all the switches are and their progress.

So what happens after that? After we've gathered all of this information, we've got it all stored, what do we do with it then? Well, we looked at a few ways, a couple of ways that we'll present.

One of them was just another proof of concept. We just looked at it, and thought, well, maybe during the design stages, construction stages, we can bring that information back into the Revit model. It may not be the complete picture, so specifications and things like that, but can we bring in some of that information back into Revit? What would it look like? Would it bog down the Revit model?

So again, this is just a little proof of concept. It's something that we may continue to pursue. But certainly it was a useful look at what we might do.

So this is another Autodesk tool, Tandem. And you may have heard people talking about digital twins, and Tandem sits clearly within that space. I've included it here, and I know I flagged it at the end and sort of towards the end of construction, after construction. Although I should point out that the idea here is that this information isn't just thrown into the system at the end of construction, at the hand over. Actually, we do start to feed that information, the golden thread of information, we start to bring that in from the detailed design, the technical design stages and bring that in rather than trying to just sort of back load the entire system.

But it's web-based. We're looking at just Revit models at the moment. We load those in. The information is extracted and presented in an inventory for each of those objects.

So we just look at the categories. It's not really saying, this is an asset. We define assets as a separate process. They're called tagged assets within the system.

But the information is brought in from the Revit model and is presented to us. We can then classify that, and we can use the industry standards, OmniClass, Uniclass 2015, or we can create our own custom standards, maybe a subset of that we're going to use, and then we can assign those classifications to all of the assets within the model.

I say model, what I really mean is the collection of models obviously from all different disciplines that will all come together that will give us one facility. We don't just load it all into one single model. That would be almost unmanageable. But then presented as a unified federated model.

And then we can present that information in a number of ways, and we can export information. We can also import information. We can attach documents in here as well to add to the information. Maybe specifications, for example.

One useful feature here that just sort of struck me as being a nice way of looking at things is to group things according to the spaces. So in the pharmacy room, in the pharmacy 1502, what assets have I got? In the waiting room, what have I got? A nice way of being able to just slice and dice the information.

Development is still in progress with Tandem. There's a big push on the development roadmap. This is a public roadmap. The address, you can see at the top of the screen. You can go and take a look at that.

It's tagged into new features that have launched, those that are currently in progress, and those that are under consideration. If you look at the under consideration, we can see Autodesk build assets. So that would be fantastic to be able to bring information from the assets. We've seen how we can use the assets and attach those directly into that digital twin.

Also under consideration is digital handover. Of course, what we're looking at here is a cloud-hosted solution. It's going to sit probably in the general contractors space to start with. How do we hand that information over? So that's all we'll look at specifically, being able to effectively transfer ownership of that and pass that over, rather than a series of exports and reports and whole digital pack of information. Simply pass over that Tandem model.

Some other items that are in progress, so a direct link to Revit. So that will allow you to push information, I'm presuming, from Revit into Tandem. It may bring it back out.

Excel plugin to interact with tandem data. A little bit like exporting the assets that we can do at the moment in build. We can export those. We can adjust statuses, information, serial numbers, things like that. Then we can put them back into the system, looking at things like that.

COBie-based templates so that you can set up some standard fields, some standard information that you need, and also IFC support, currently in progress. I'm not sure when that will be out. Hopefully quite soon. That will then capture all of the other information that's obviously not coming from Revit.

That's where we see the future going. We are hopeful that we will get there. I'll leave you with just one question-- how will you use assets?

Thank you very much for listening. I hope you found it interesting and maybe also enjoyable as well. Thank you very much.