Resilient Design with Triple-Bottom-Line-Enhancing BIM

STEPH LAROCQUE: Well, welcome to this early morning session. Happy that a lot of people decided to join us. My name's Steph Larocque and I'm the COO of a small software company called Autocase. The auto is not by accident. Autodesk is our biggest investor.

It wasn't a requirement. We actually were going down that path before we actually even got the investment. Our software was called Autocase before we got the investment. Not terribly creative, but it stands for automated business case-- is really what it means.

So I'm a Canadian, as is John, but we're a New York based company. Our primary-- we're two of the co-founders, by the way. There's three founders. Our primary owner is in New York City. He used to be the largest shareholder of HDR. You guys might have heard of that as in architecture engineering firm. The three of us come from HDR, and we started this company a little over six years ago. I guess it was about seven years ago John and John started. I was the last and final founder.

So I'm actually-- we're both based out of Toronto, and our software is actually developed in Toronto. But our clients are primarily in United States. Of course, we have a lot of Canadian clients as well. And I'll let John introduce himself as well, and then I'll continue. [LAUGHS]

Just keep going? All right. Well, then I'm going to talk some more about who we are. So we both were working in the environmental economics. And John was actually the leader of that, and then I became the leader once he left to start this company with John Williams.

And we developed something called SROI-- sustainable return on investment. Some people may have heard of it. It involves consulting. And our software, which doesn't directly involve consulting, we call triple bottom line cost benefit analysis. And that's where I'm hoping the slide moves forward this time. There we go. All right.

So I'll describe what triple bottom line cost benefit is, but SROI is a type of triple bottom line cost benefit analysis that requires stakeholder engagement through a consultative process. So just in case people are familiar with that-- that's not supposed to happen. We might have to use the computer directly in a second here if this keeps happening.

So what does triple bottom line cost-- it's moving forward on its own. Not sure why. Is there-- can I hit pause? Maybe that's what it is. Sorry about this, guys. OK. Think it might be steady now. Nope. [LAUGHS]

Well, while John's looking into it, I'll just describe it. Maybe he can make it stop moving forward. So triple bottom line is financial, social, environmental for people, planet, profit, or profit, people, planet. And cost benefit analysis, which a lot of people mistake for just sort of looking at the costs and looking at the dollar benefits, is actually, by definition, involves putting a dollar value on non-cash impacts-- things like mobility benefits, things like improved productivity, things like less illness, better wellness. So triple bottom line cost benefit analysis incorporates all that.

So from the financial perspective, you might have heard of lifecycle cost analysis. So it includes a lifecycle cost analysis where you look at the upfront costs-- the costs of operating and maintaining over the life-- the residual value at the end, the cost of disposal if there's any, that kind of thing. In terms of the social environmental factors, we add dollar values on all those things I just mentioned-- using best available third party information. And, of course, our software is designed to automate all that.

So can I move forward?

JOHN PARKER: [INAUDIBLE]

STEPH LAROCQUE: All right. We'll see what we can do. So I think I mostly covered this. You can see we have a nice little diagram on the side. But essentially, we look at everything from three bottom lines as well as, of course, incorporating them all. So for instance, we would look at-- in a building, we look at the owner of the building, the tenant of the building, and the community around it as an example, all right?

Let's try this. All right. So I think I covered that as well. You can see here, probably this describes what I just said in the easy-- well, this is not a minus. This is a hyphen.

So lifecycle cost analysis, cost benefit analysis, and triple bottom line is really what TBL-CBA is. All right. That didn't work. There we go. All right.

Goals. Oh yeah, so this is an example of what we're talking about. It was done with the software, but it doesn't matter that it was done with the software in this particular case. So this is Dewberry, a Washington, DC, essentially, based architecture and engineering firm. And we looked at the retrofit of their headquarters in Virginia. And these are some of the investments that they were making in the building, and you'll see that we looked at them from a triple bottom line cost benefit perspective. And I'll explain what that is.

So they were looking for LEED. So this could be seen as a business case for these investments in building a smarter building, getting LEED certification. All right. Good.

So in terms of electricity-- there will be other slides for other things like water-- but in terms of electricity, there is a savings in real dollars, of course. So that was reflected over the life of the building. So that's part of a lifecycle cost analysis.

Then, we put a dollar value in greenhouse gases and air pollutants avoided by reducing electricity use. So Virginia uses coal as a lot of their grid-- pretty dirty fuel-- and they get a lot of benefits if they save electricity. Can be very different in other parts of the country-- and I'll talk about location stuff in a second-- but for instance, if you're in the Pacific Northwest, as an example, it's a lot of hydroelectric power. You're going to get less benefits. So this is an example of the triple bottom line impact on energy of that retrofit of the building.

In terms of occupant benefits-- so think wellness and productivity. So reduced sick days. Reduced-- well, reduced asthma, et cetera. So we put dollar values on all these kind of impacts, productivity being the biggest one at the bottom. You'll see for sort of office building type spaces, typically productivity is the biggest benefit. That's because-- I'm sure people have heard this many times, or certainly if you guys were all architects you would've heard this many times-- but the upfront capital costs of a building is about 1% of the total operating costs, including salaries over the life of the building.

You look at it this way. The upfront capital is about 1%. The operations and maintenance over the life of the building's about another 9%, and the other 90% is employee salaries in the building. So that's why it's such a big impact.

We're looking at water here. So you've got the capital costs, of course, of putting in reduced low flow fixtures and things like that. But then you have the improved, or the social value, of not using that fresh water in the first place. And then there's a little bit of the air pollution and carbon from pumping the water that you wouldn't have otherwise had to pump as well. So that's impact considered there.

And then, in terms of waste reduction, you can see things like reduced carbon impact, and then other types of pollutants like VOCs, particulate matter, NOx, et cetera. So we put dollar values on all those things, and include them in the triple bottom line. So that was an example of doing that in a building context.

Here's our software. So like I said, we started this software, Autocase. You can do that kind of analysis very quickly and easily anywhere in North America, Canada, or the US. You just choose your location, put in a handful of parameters. You don't need a lot-- obviously, the square footage of the building, number of employees, that kind of stuff. There's lots of defaults.

We're mostly talking about buildings here, although you can see that we also do sites. So we do the surrounding area of a building, or the right of way on a transit project or a park. What we don't do yet with the software is things like a transit project, you know, include the value of getting from point A to point B. We're getting there. Wastewater treatment plants-- we still do that kind of stuff as an advisory service, but we do have buildings and sites automated right now.

All right. What do you get by automating that kind of stuff? Because we used to do it as consultants at HDR. We had the SROI practice.

Well, the fact that we have a existing database-- by the way, Autocase is all in the cloud. So an existing database of all these values, constantly updated-- methodologies are updated. Source values are updated. And we're constantly improving the product with constant releases. And the fact that you can iterate very quickly on project design throughout the project-- those are huge benefits to allow you to optimize your projects, OK?

Stuff that we're looking in the future that John might touch on is stuff like generative design and integrating with BIM, as an example. That's his part of the-- I'm just laying the groundwork for his part of the conversation. Another nice little diagram. Where do we get this data? Generally, it's federal government guidance. Sometimes it's best available university peer reviewed studies. But as an example for carbon, we would use the Interagency Working Group on the social cost of carbon value, which is used by the [? GOT, ?] let's say, for cost benefit analysis studies.

Location specific is very important because a lot of stuff like LEED, for instance, is fairly generic, as in you get the same amount of points for optimizing energy in one spot versus another, even though the grid may be completely different. Or you get same amount of points for saving water in LA where water is extremely scarce as, say, in Montana. We don't do that. It's very location specific.

Here's an example of all the things that we look at from a location perspective. But it can have a huge difference. If you take the exact same project and just switch the city in which it's located, you'll see completely different results show up. That's very important.

That we don't have German? [LAUGHS] We don't have Germany yet. What did you need specifically [INAUDIBLE]?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

STEPH LAROCQUE: All right, cool. Well, we'd love to add Germany as well as other-- we're actually looking at a project right now in Africa, and potentially getting some European Investment Bank money-- which is somewhat German money, I guess-- to expand beyond North America. We do want to do that anyways, but we're starting with our home base, if you will.

So here's a different way to illustrate what we're talking about. So just picture any kind of capital investment to improve, make a building smarter, et cetera. You've got increased upfront capital, typically. Now, sometimes people say it doesn't cost extra to be sustainable. They're talking about over the life, typically. Sometimes there's no upfront cost, but typically there is.

So let's say you're spending a little bit more upfront to get a better product at the end of the day. You can add some usually social value. Here's an example of the kind of things you might consider-- heat island effect, that kind of stuff if you're putting a green roof on. That kind of thing.

Environmental benefits which are-- those are probably the most well understood ones-- your electricity, your water, typically. And then you combine these things into a triple bottom line. And as I said, we report it-- not only financial, social, environmental-- but also owner, user, community as well. So there's lots of different ways to splice it.

Here's an example of some of the stuff we've looked at the city level, site level, building level. I'll just quickly cover these. In Edmonton, which is the gateway to the oil sands in Canada, we looked at-- for the city-- 33,000 different potential green infrastructure investments. That's about a dozen at whole bunch of different sites in a batch processing.

This is not our typical software-- this involved some advisory services-- but essentially, in about 24 hours, we were able to analyze 33,000 different potential investments. On a site level, in New Orleans for 100 Resilient Cities, of which we're a platform partner, we were able to look at a new 25-acre water garden and justify some of the benefits of that investment.

And for SFO Airport in San Francisco-- they're using it extensively. They're actually one of our best customers, and we're-- they demand this kind of triple bottom line cost benefit analysis on capital investments at the airport. There's a few other jurisdictions that are starting to do that-- city of Phoenix is an example. And we're growing attention in this-- usually from the owner side. The owner wants to know this kind of information because they want to know what their bang for the buck is.

Here's a nice little slide with a bunch of our different clients. You might recognize, hopefully, a bunch of these organizations. LA County is another really interesting one. So they're spending billions of dollars on stormwater improvements, and they just passed a new tax measure for stormwater tax, essentially. They need to figure out where to invest those hundreds of millions of new dollars, prioritize investments. So they're working with us to customize our tool for LA County. So it's probably our biggest customer. Well, that and SFO are our biggest customers.

Let's see. Here's another interesting project. It's with WSP, one of the world's biggest AUC firms, and it's the California High Speed Rail Project. So this is the biggest construction project in the United States. And like I said, we're not doing analysis right now with the software on alignments and what kind of cars they should use for the-- but we're looking at the transit stations from a sustainability perspective.

I'll let you guys read some of these bullets. You probably already have. But they're looking at net zero energy, et cetera. Huge high profile project.

So they looked at, so far-- and this is them doing it on their own. So I'm not actually super familiar with how the project went. I stole these slides from the client. So in terms of-- they looked at as a station in Fresno. They looked at different standards-- I'll show the results in a second-- like ASHRAE or Title 24-- and then the high speed rail standards that they're building to.

They looked a bunch of different things like u values, et cetera, as part of the analysis. And then, this graph over here on my right-- your right, too-- shows some of the results. But the main points over here-- I'll let you read those, but I'll just show you what I see. So if you go ASHRAE 2010, that was the baseline that they would have used, obviously. That's why it's zero. ASHRAE 2013, you can see some improvements. And then, Title 24 is even better.

By the way, the benefits here are split between the owner-- California High Speed Rail-- the riders, or users, and the community, as I said before. So you can see that the rider benefits from ASHRAE 2013 are much better in 2010. You can see there's, again, a little improvement for Title 24. But then the design alternative that they are choosing-- the California High Speed Rail alternative-- are the best of all, from a triple bottom line perspective.

You can see it's more expensive-- the blue line at the bottom. It's going to cost the owner more to build a smarter transit station. It's going to cost them more. But this is the justification. The benefits far outweigh the costs. And of course, as you might have imagined, when the owners are a county, municipal government, city, university, airport, hospital-- they tend to care more about these kind of triple bottom line results than a straight up for profit.

However, the for profit companies as well can take this information and use it for their own benefit. So if they're an architecture engineering firm, they can use it to help their clients get better projects built, right? If they're a logistics firm, like Prologis who's one of our customers-- the world's biggest logistics firm-- they can use it to justify getting some kind of benefit from wherever they're putting their facility.

So for instance, they put a smarter, greener warehouse in this community, and they can show that they're doing it better than anyone else, it gives them a benefit. Of course, it gives them PR benefits, it's helpful when they have their ESG type reporting, right? So that's what we're seeing. Mostly, the public side is very interested in the actual results, and the private side is using it to help them gain a competitive advantage for their end clients.

Let's see where we're at. Now, we can talk about BIM 360 and integration.

JOHN PARKER: Thanks, Steph. My name's John Parker. I'm the chief product officer for Autocase. And Steph mentioned, or I asked him to address this question about the company from Germany in the audience. Our data does not cover Germany. I forgot Denmark and Sweden. Sorry, guys. We haven't got anything for Denmark and Sweden either.

We are doing some work stuff, as Steph said, in Africa and Australia. Just want to point out that the triple bottom line cost benefit analysis is not location specific. The methodology is not location specific. The data is.

The cost benefit analysis, which has been around for over 100 years now, has been standardized. There are economists out there who will tell you it's not because they want to get you to pay for a custom cost benefit study, but it is standardized. Governments have standardized it.

So there is slight differences. If we're doing work in Australia, the cost benefit standards are slightly different than Canada or the US. UK-- same thing. But really, it's just the values that you're using. So in the UK and the US and in Canada, you have to put a dollar value on the value of safety, so the value of a human life. There's values that you use for carbon, as Steph said-- pollutions. Those values differ, but the basic methodology doesn't. So moving from country to country is a matter of changing the data.

So we did a hackathon this year to show how TBL-CBA could be integrated with BIM 360. And for us, this is a natural thing to do because BIM 360 is this warehouse of information. And we just suck information in and put information out.

And when we looked at-- that's the wrong way, John. OK. When we looked at BIM 360-- actually, when we looked at BIM, the one thing to us as economists that was obvious was missing from this was value. There's quite a bit of talk about 5D now, so three dimensional plus cost plus schedule to get you to the fifth dimension.

As economists, we think about value. So it's not just how much cost are you spending and when are you spending the money? Those are both important, but it's also what value you're getting for that. So as Steph said in the California High Speed Rail example, or the Dewberry headquarters example, those are cases where they're spending more money, but they are demonstrating, with triple bottom line cost benefit analysis, what the value is. So that's what we thought was missing was the value to the building owner, or the infrastructure owner, the value to the occupant or the user-- so productivity type benefits Steph was talking about-- or the value to the environment in terms of reduced carbon emissions. These are all measured against the costs. So that's what we thought was missing.

So BIM's got a lot of information, but it didn't have this other dimension that we look at, which is value. So there is information in BIM that we can pull out. So if you're designing a building and you're doing renewable energy on site, so reducing the amount you're taking from the grid, we can use that information. If occupants have access to things like thermal comfort controls, or you're changing the amount of daylight in the building-- those kinds of design considerations have costs, which are already being captured in BIM, but they also have the benefits, too, which is what we're calculating.

So if a project is capturing stormwater-- another example. So if you're putting a green roof on the building, you want to account for the benefits of that green roof-- the fact that it's cleaning the air. It's cleaning the water. And it's providing benefits, not just costs.

So we did a hackathon, and it's very easy in Forge these days with their APIs to open up a BIM project from somewhere else. We're cloud based, as Steph says. BIM 360 is all cloud. So we just open up the project in Autocase, and we ask, do you want to open it in BIM? Get the credentials and do it that way.

We can also pull in-- sorry, back up a bit. Autocase is designed, as Steph said, with a lot of defaults built in. So you put in a location, size of a building is an example, number of occupants, what type of building it is, and you can run an analysis. But similarly, once you get into the details of design, you can also look at-- I want to look at this HVAC consideration versus another one, or this amount of day lighting versus that.

So we're also able to pull the details out. So once you get to the more detailed design, we can pull the information in and rank the design. So if you've got various design alternatives, we can rank them in terms of the triple bottom line-- the cost benefit analysis.

One of the reasons we looked at this kind of use case is that more and more in the US-- we've seen a lot in Canada already-- but public private partnerships are becoming very much a thing in the US. I say in Canada it's been around for quite some time. In this P3 environment, you're basically designing at risk. So you're competing to win a bid, and so you can get to fairly detailed designs.

The important thing, of course, for the P3 is you not only have to win the bid, but you have to show why yours should be the winning bid. And in public private partnerships, some of these public benefits are important. So people need the quantification of the environmental benefits. They want to know what the benefits of cleaner air and so on, and that your design is meeting all of those.

Of course, the last use case we looked at is pulling stuff back from Autocase on the right back into BIM. So once you've got a design that you think is a winner, then you can export the information back. Save it with the design, so you have the business case with your design alternative. So this is why this design alternative's a good thing. Here's how many tons of carbon it reduces. Here's the impact in terms of occupant productivity, and so on.

So the other benefit to this type of analysis is-- what we found in terms of sustainability is quite often you get a sustainability advocate that says, this is the best thing we can possibly do. And then you get to the value engineering stage, and it's taken out because while it is a good thing to do and most people have it in their gut that this sustainability initiative, whatever it might be is a good idea, there isn't the case to support it when it gets to the value engineering. So we found it extremely important to kind of keep the business case current with the design so that any sustainability initiatives you may build into the building's design or site design can make it through that value engineering process.

And since everything is in dollar terms-- so over here, this is a ranking of two designs. They are in dollar terms. So we've taken all of these benefits, put them together with a dollar value on them, and added them all up so that you can compare different designs. So a design that may be focused on day lighting, occupant comfort. Another one may be focused on water and energy savings. Those can be ranked even though they're very different in their goal's objectives, the costs and benefits can be ranked in terms of triple bottom line cost benefit analysis.

So as I was going around the room beforehand-- I'm sorry, I didn't get to meet you all. There's quite a few people from construction, so I want to say just a few things about how TBL-CBA is being used in construction. So I've kind of alluded to these benefits that's been going on, and we've heard a bit about them from the case study that Steph mentioned with Dewberry.

So what we try to do is help people in construction is to win bids. And we know the construction industry these days is split into two, right? There's the people who actually build stuff, and then there's people who win the bids for the other half of the company to work on. So we're focused on helping those folks, those people that are going after construction bids.

And the concept here is you can make the case for your bid. As you're designing, as you're in the conceptual design, preliminary design, through the detailed design, you can show the business case. And you can share this with different stakeholders.

So if the primary owner is a regional government who set carbon emission targets and that's one of the goals for their building, then you can show them through the design how this thing works. If you're concerned about community pushback, as Steph said-- perhaps you're putting in a big warehouse somewhere-- if you-- or perhaps a better example, putting in a data center. And you are going to be the biggest user of water in the area, and you're probably going to suck half of the water out the aquifer. You want to make the case that you're going to be a good corporate citizen.

So you want to value that water use-- the social value of water. You also want to value the things that you're bringing to the community as well. So if you can show people what these social environment net benefits are, you get less pushback from opposition. So you can reduce delays.

So the type of benefits that we're talking about-- on the other slide, these were all the types of things you're doing. So day lighting gives improved productivity and health going around. Water savings-- obviously, you save water, you save money because you pay less utility costs. But there is also reduced benefits in terms of pumping. So you're not pumping the water, or the water is not being pumped by somebody, so there are greenhouse gas and air pollutant-- depending on where in the country you are, as Steph said.

There's also social benefits of water, too. If you are working in Los Angeles, as an example, water scarcity is an issue. If you're in Tucson or Phoenix, water scarcity is an issue. So there, there's a higher cost of using water than in Toronto, where I'm from, as an example.

So those kinds of regional differences are important. They get rolled into this automated business case. Going round again, if you-- so third one around-- the light bulb. The lighting benefits that you can provide to people are in terms of productivity.

Green roofs will reduce flooding. Also will lower the urban heat island effect. So some good examples of this where-- remember the green roof I had from Toronto-- it was all brown because it was just a couple of weeks ago. But there's a real cooling effect to a green roof. So what's the benefit of that? You reduce the urban heat island by a couple of degrees in the neighborhood.

Well, it doesn't matter much except when it really does matter. And those are on the few days when it's really hot and people die. And so we can actually quantify-- not us, but some smart people at universities-- have quantified the relationship between these excess heat and deaths. And we put a dollar value on those deaths. So to the fact that you've got a green roof will actually give you a benefit in terms of lower heat island.

Cleaner water, clean air. Some of the other ones-- well, the other ones are quite-- well, [INAUDIBLE] I'll highlight here is the one on here, which is quality views. So giving people a view of nature, giving people unimpeded views of the outside is a real benefit.

There's a benefit in terms of productivity and reduced absenteeism, which goes back to a business opportunity I saw when I was working in the 1980s in a little cubicle. I couldn't see the window, and I thought, wouldn't it be nice if I had a poster of the outside? And I thought about selling views from famous people's offices that you could put up on your wall, like the view from Bill Gates' office so you could have that in your office, as an example.

Anyway-- now we can actually put a dollar value on that benefit-- on the benefit of the quality views. So you can choose from a scale in terms of how many people have access to what kind of view, and we'll put a dollar value on that for you.

This is a bit small, but I'll just highlight a couple of things here. [INAUDIBLE] bottom line cost benefit analysis-- this is for buildings rather than sites, but it allows you to rank design alternatives. So if you've got three design alternatives in the top right, you can see quickly which has got the best net benefit. It also allows you to break that down by the triple bottom line-- so environmental, social, and financial in the middle here.

You can also think of this as people, profit, and planet. Profit is the one that people always focus on, the planet somewhat, and the social is one that is gaining more and more interest. So you can break it down into those triple bottom lines. You can also break it down by stakeholder-- so owner, occupant, or community as another example.

You can also break down where the value is coming from. So which initiative is giving you-- how the value, basically, builds up to the total value-- the waterfall in the far right. So you can think of this table here as the benefit-- who gets the benefit? Which triple bottom line cost bucket it falls in. The overall value. And then you can drill down and see which-- in the top-- which of the benefits are providing it.

So I said, what we're aiming at for construction is helping people win bids. And so that's responding to an owner's need for a healthy building, one that has a small footprint, and proof to the community and the building occupants that this is a good design.

So integration with BIM 360 is kind of an obvious one. As I said, value's missing from the design case-- making the business case for the design. So allowing you to track these benefits across the multiple stakeholders is what we're looking at.

You may have seen this diagram before in your Autodesk travels with the BIM kind of layer cake here, with Forge on the bottom, data in the middle, and then analytics. So we're sitting at the analytics level in BIM, but we are trying to add this fifth box, if you like, up at the top. So working back from operations, building, glue, and design-- before you get to design, you've got to win the thing, and you've got to make the case that this is a good design and this is-- or that we have the ability to track and show you the best design, or the ability to show how the design can add value.

So we're still kind of working through what the best use case is for the integration of Autocase into BIM 360, but it's being used on P3 and traditional bids. I'm going to tell you a bit about one example. Steph mentioned this one before.

So this is San Francisco airport. They have a $2.4 billion redevelopment underway for their terminal one. It's 1.18 million square feet, 770,000 of which is the terminal one center. It's a renovation that's targeted to achieve LEED Gold, and they've done a couple of things with TBL-CBA, kind of trying it out. Steph said they're moving towards requiring it. Or do they currently require it?

STEPH LAROCQUE: It's in the sustainability requirements.

JOHN PARKER: It's in the sustainability requirements.

STEPH LAROCQUE: [INAUDIBLE] that's for the terminal one expansion but [INAUDIBLE]

JOHN PARKER: Terminal one.

STEPH LAROCQUE: [INAUDIBLE] making it for all capital investors [INAUDIBLE]

JOHN PARKER: Right. So it's in the sustainability requirements for terminal one redevelopment. They're looking at it for all other capital improvements at the airport. So they require this triple bottom line cost benefit analysis.

In a very small table down the bottom, I've shown just a couple of the types of analysis they've done. This one was looking at the triple bottom line for several different options. So green roof, electrochromic glazing, motorized window shades, interior landscaping, radiant heating and cooling, ground source heat pump, and-- excuse me.

They also looked at some energy designs and compared some energy designs which are not up here. One was looking at just traditional grid use of taking stuff from the regional grid, and taking potable water from the local water system. And they also looked at another example, which was going to 100% hydroelectric, so emission free power, and 85% of their water being sourced from on site recycled. And they did the triple bottom line cost benefit analysis, and those energy and water things gave cost benefit ratios of between one and a half to five-- 4.9.

So what that means, the benefit cost ratio, is that these costs and benefits-- which are over a long period of time when you discount them back-- for every dollar you're spending, you're getting back either $1.50, or $5. So there's $5 in benefits for every dollar of cost, and that's taking into account the time value of money and everything.

But that's the type of feedback that you can get through the design process. [INAUDIBLE] various design initiatives, various sustainability initiatives you may have, and how you can make the case for this. So another one that they did was they also looked at things like reducing volatile organic compounds. So in their materials choice, they were looking at things which reduced VOCs, and looking at the environmental social benefits, and the benefits to health and productivity and so on.

So that's an example of how a very large construction project is integrating this triple bottom line cost benefit analysis into their work. I'll just leave you with a quote from Anthony Bernheim who works for SFO. I'll read it out for the record.

"Without Autocase, we would be shooting in the dark as to which design features are worth the money. Traditional cost estimates are too narrow, emphasizing first costs over lifecycle costs, and forgetting about traditionally unquantifiable dynamics like the impact of indoor air quality and natural light on employee wellness and productivity, or the benefit of interior landscaping and daylight for passengers and retailers. But those impacts are very real and they become quantifiable--" I can't read the last bit of this. I'm blushing too much.

So one thing I should mention is that how design benefits may affect retail spending, which as he mentions here, is something that's an area of study for us. We have not yet found good research. We have some research, but we go through this process where we said, can you make that link, or has somebody made that link between, perhaps, interior landscaping and employee productivity and health? If they have, and it's peer reviewed, documented, and perhaps there's a meta analysis-- a bunch of different studies proving that-- then we will build it into software.

If we have one study that says, oh you put a tree up then people will spend more money, but it's in a trade journal, it's not peer reviewed, we'll look at that and wait for the science to catch up. So we are using established research. When there is good evidence, we will build it into the software, put the data behind it, and add it as a benefit.

But the whole indoor environmental quality is an area, as you probably know as designers, builders-- it's one that is undergoing tremendous research now. There's lots of labs being set up. We are piggybacking onto that and looking at designs, such as [? well ?] and other standards.

But there's lots of research in the area, and we're following that research and building it in. The whole point about what we're doing is we're trying to automate this stuff so that you guys can use it and don't have to hire a team of economists to do it. Or just as Anthony says, go with your gut, but don't make the case.

There is one last thing I'll say before-- and I'll ask you if you have any questions. The one last thing is that there was a class hand out for this. If you can't find it, or you want me-- you don't want to go digging through the annals of Autodesk University, just give me a card and I'll send it to you. It's got more case studies, examples that we've talked about how people built resiliency into their design, and how various cities are using it, airports.

And then we also share some-- if you're going to do this type of analysis-- some things that we've learned along the way. We've been doing this for a few years now. So the traps associated with doing triple bottom line cost benefit analysis and what to look out for and what to be aware of. So as I say, if you can't find it, give me your card and I'll send it to you. Happy to answer any questions-- oh, OK. Steph, get up here.

STEPH LAROCQUE: I also wanted to mention, because we didn't mention it already, is that through LEED you can get credits now for doing triple bottom line cost benefit analysis, or Envision on the horizontal side of infrastructure as well for those of you who are familiar with Envision. So it's becoming more common to do this type of analysis in general. You can pick your questions--

JOHN PARKER: OK, we'll start in the back and work to-- sorry. Yes.

AUDIENCE: Thanks, John. Good presentation. So two quick questions. Typical cost for-- and [INAUDIBLE] solution [INAUDIBLE] subscribe to [INAUDIBLE] typical cost. And then what are the outcomes [INAUDIBLE] Can we get something to hand back to [INAUDIBLE] here's what we get back from [INAUDIBLE] What kind of feedback do they give you?

JOHN PARKER: OK.

STEPH LAROCQUE: Do you want me to take that one?

JOHN PARKER: He's the money guy.

STEPH LAROCQUE: That sounds like more of a question for me. He can do the hard questions. I'll do that one.

AUDIENCE: OK, Steph, I'll address the question to you.

STEPH LAROCQUE: All right. First of all, so pricing varies. We don't have a set price. If you go on the website, there's not a set price. But pretty much, we package in-- first of all, we get account managers with the software. So you get a real, live economist to work with, right?

So pretty much our pricing starts around $5,000 per year per license, and it comes with real, live support to make sure that you're using the software properly. So that's a subscription based service. But we also go on beyond that to like enterprise pricing for large organizations, again, as an example, especially if there's customization.

So some of those big customers, like LA County, as an example, they want a customized LA County solution. So it can be more expensive. But essentially, five grand per year for a module is how we do it.

In terms of what the customer gets, there's automatic-- the results-- I'm going to pop back here to one of these slides that show outputs. I don't think, John, that you'd mentioned, but these are just exports from the software as an example. So you can export your results in Excel. You can export your graphs as JPEGs. And, in fact, there's an automatic produced report that you can submit to get the LEED credits that I was just talking about a second ago.

So there's a lot of outputs that you can just take. Now, in terms of additional support for your end client, that can also be where our account managers or economists come into play. So for some clients, as an example, they want us to come-- they want our economist to come to, let's say, a city council meeting or something similar, or some kind of a local meeting. We can include that, obviously, if travel is covered elsewhere.

But we are all about customer support. So if you need help convincing your end client that this is valid and useful information to help make decisions, prioritize capital-- we're all about supporting that kind of activity.

JOHN PARKER: So if you run the LEED-- the thing that gets you the LEED points, Steph said you get a report out of it. It's not just a report of the results. It's also full documentation of where those numbers come from. So it shows the value of how you get to--

STEPH LAROCQUE: The methodology sources--

JOHN PARKER: Yeah, the methodology sources. So it actually gives you all the documentation as well.

STEPH LAROCQUE: And I just pulled this slide back up as well because on the right of this slide, you can see this is an example of the methodology. I can't even read it here or here, but I'm assuming it talks about our methodology because it's supposed to.

JOHN PARKER: Oh, yeah. Over here.

STEPH LAROCQUE: Yeah, on the far right. So when you're actually in the software, it describes the sources and methodology while you're in it, and of course there's documentation on the output side.

JOHN PARKER: So this is showing how we take federal comfort of a building and how we translate that into the productivity benefit, how it's based on this study here-- [INAUDIBLE] et al 2006-- where as temperature converges to 22 degrees, you get to optimum. If you deviate from that, you get reductions in productivity. And how we use different county level data in the US and Canada to monetize those productivity benefits. So that sort of documentation associated with it.

STEPH LAROCQUE: And that's just-- the part on the right is-- well, not this slide. That's two different-- but that's a screen capture from the software. That's exactly what it looks like.

JOHN PARKER: There's somebody else here.

AUDIENCE: I think you sort of answered my question. I'm just trying to understand [INAUDIBLE] updates [INAUDIBLE] the results are often useful because [INAUDIBLE] rather than [INAUDIBLE]. But it seems like it's a mix of real world values [INAUDIBLE] Have you [INAUDIBLE] to see how your metrics stack up after [INAUDIBLE] or--

STEPH LAROCQUE: Well, I'll take it. You can jump in after me. So that's a question we often get. It sounds like, did those things actually happen? Is that kind of the question?

AUDIENCE: Yeah.

STEPH LAROCQUE: Yeah, OK. So typically, especially as consultants, you don't go back and see if something actually happened, right? Because you're hired as a consultant to come in and make a decision or produce a business case, and then the decision's made. Then you go away and the thing's built or whatever.