The Road (and Rail) to BIM Success Begins with GIS

MARC GOLDMAN: All right. Well, thank you for joining us for the Road and Rail to BIM Success Begins with GIS session. I'm Marc Goldman. I'm the AEC Industry Solutions Director at ESRI. And with me are a great lineup of some of the team members from Skanska UK leading GIS and BIM initiatives. We're going to get into intros in a bit.

First, I just want to kind of lay the foundation here kind, of create a level-- here. Now, GIS and BIM have been talking about for years now, bringing them together.

And what's happened over the last few years, I've gotten together a couple of times with a colleague, a peer, a friend over at Autodesk, Aubrey Tucker. We've been talking about the evolution of BIM from the perspective of GIS and how the two of them together have led towards a digital transformation that is happening all around us, that we're all part of. I mean, if you're in this session, I imagine that you're somewhere in this maturity model of adopting GIS and BIM and part of a digital transformation.

I'm not to go through each of these little balloons here. But you can see, over the last couple of decades, there's been significant work by Autodesk that has enabled BIM to be more than just desktop BIM but has really changed the way work takes place through the Cloud, via the Cloud, connected to Clouds, et cetera.

And similarly, on the GIS side, from the ESRI point of view, the evolution of integrating BIM in our GIS platform quite a bit has happened in the last couple of decades, beginning with ArcGIS Online, including ArcGIS Pro and its capabilities, bringing in IFC files now, Revit files for years, our connectors between our platforms. So quite a bit has happened over the last couple of decades that have brought BIM and GIS together, enabling new workflows, enabling new productivity. We're going to get into a lot of that here.

What this has done in some regards, it's led us on a path towards digital transformation. GIS and BIM, I propose, are really core to that digital transformation. And where are we now? We've certainly improved our coordination efforts by BIM or GIS, much less the two of them together. And we're certainly much more productive in using digital methods versus paper methods, very much driven by GIS and BIM coming together.

In this idea of maturing and evolving through digital transformation, we had been at a static stage for years as these tools have worked individually. And information sharing was a challenge. As they're coming together, as GIS and BIM are becoming intertwined, as projects that are strongly BIM-based have now GIS underpinnings and vice versa, projects where GIS might have simply been used for planning and visualization and analytics, BIM is being added to it. And this idea of converging information brings us from just coordinating to collaborating and having true project controls.

But where I think we're all heading-- and the topic du jour of the last year or two certainly around digital twins and the impact of Construction 4.0 and Industry 4.0-- trying to get to a point where our buildings are dynamically driven through the information that we're collecting. And GIS and BIM, again, are just core to that conversation. The number of projects that I've come across through my friends at Skanska and other firms where digital twins are being built out and the full automation is right at the edge of reality is exciting.

So with that sort of as a background of GIS and BIM being so important to digital transformation, and that it's a maturity model, it's an evolution that we're going through, I'm going to jump right in here to a quick series of introductions. So I'm Marc Goldman. Like I said, I'm the AEC Industry Solutions Director at ESRI. I'm working with a great team of marketers and product managers and account managers getting the word out about all the capabilities that GIS serves the AEC industry.

I've had the pleasure of working with the four folks here listed below me. I'll let them introduce themselves. But over the last couple of years, a number of times, Anita, George, and I have been on webinars like this and chatted offline just to understand what's going on in the industry. And Jan and Balazs have joined us, as well, in prep for this panel discussion. So I'll let you, Anita, give yourself a brief introduction.

ANITA SONI: Thanks, Mark. Hi, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here. My name is Anita Soni. I'm the Deputy Head of BIM for Skanska Infrastructure in the UK. And I'm currently working on the High Speed Rail Project, which is the biggest project in Europe, delivering BIM to our clients.

MARC GOLDMAN: George? You might be on mute, George.

GEORGE FLOROS: Thank you. Yeah. Thank you very much, Marc. Hello, everyone. It's very nice to be here. My name is George Floros. I'm the GIS Lead for Skanska Infrastructure, essentially overseeing the GIS implementation in our highways and rail sectors. And alongside Anita, Jan, Balazs, and Marc, today we will be delving into the benefits of BIM GIS integration for transportation infrastructure.

MARC GOLDMAN: Great. Thank you, George. Jon?

JAN: Hello. My name is Jan. I work for the Central Digitalization Team of Skanska UK. And I function as the GIS Lead for the business. And I support enabling functions operating units and projects in different levels to transform digitally through the use of GIS.

MARC GOLDMAN: Great. Thank you. And last but certainly not least, Balazs, you want to introduce yourself?

BALAZS HARASZTI: Thank you, Mark. Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Balazs Haraszti. I'm a Senior BIM Manager at Skanska and the Digital Integration Lead on the RDP Highways framework looking after digital solutions and making sure team is working more digitally on all these schemes of the framework.

MARC GOLDMAN: Great. And what we've got here are the GIS and BIM leads for some of the largest infrastructure projects taking place in the UK right now. And we've had some great conversations over the last few weeks on these four topics about GIS and BIM improving project delivery, all the way through from Handover all the way through to Handover. GIS and BIM Handover, GIS and BIM improving collaboration and efficiencies. The fact that integrated solutions really must be comprised of GIS, BIM, and CAD in line on all the various other formats. And finally, how GIS, the integration with BIM amplifies the value of BIM, how it democratizes BIM, brings the information from just a small group of stakeholders to many folks on the project, all the way out to the general public.

So with those four topics in mind, we're going to dive just kind of into the first one here, this idea of GIS and BIM improving project delivery from design through Handover. And when we think about GIS in an AEC sense, I think that the first thing that comes to mind is planning. That it's a great tool for understanding context and planning. But the examples of projects where GIS with BIM and without BIM, for that matter, have been instrumental and perhaps even critical success factors through the design process through construction workflow and all the way to Handover.

Again, the number of projects that I've come across where that's true? Honestly. I'm going to let George and Anita kind of dive into this and talk a little bit more about how [AUDIO OUT] are essential and critical.

GEORGE FLOROS: Thank you. Thank you very much, Marc. And in fact, I would like to take your statement of little bit further and say that GIS, I consider GIS to be essential to enable what we call digital twins. I'm sure a lot of people in the audience have heard. If not everybody has heard about this term, it's quite a vague term. It is open to interpretation. So we are not going to drill down on the different interpretations of digital twins today. But I would like to take a step back and introduce the motivation behind the BIM and GIS integration for design to Handover.

And essentially, the motivation is for a seamless-- if you'd like-- connected, integrated flow of information, starting from project inception, from the very early stages of project inception, up to operation and maintenance. And eventually, of course, decommission. And there are a lot of statistics out there which say that the biggest cost during the project lifecycle are coming from the operation and maintenance phase. And we as a construction company, with our customers, start to recognize this more and more and more.

And we identify the linking between the operation and maintenance stages with Handover, with construction, with design, with project conception, et cetera. And this is where essentially our motivation is coming from. Working in an integrated way from the very early stages of the project can improve not only the way we deliver the project during the design and construction stage, but also the way we hand over the information to the next stakeholder to operate and maintain their assets and what we have actually constructed.

And I would like to comment quickly on this photo. What we see on our left side of our screen is a snapshot of the natural environment. And we can see lots of different layers of information coming from it. Of course, buildings, roads, vegetation, environmental information, water bodies, overground and underground assets. And essentially, it is essential to be able to represent the natural environment to represent digitally the natural environment somehow.

And if we go on to the next slide, please, Marc, typically these are examples. These are some examples of the questions that we asked during the lifecycle of the project. How can I make sure, from a contractor perspective, that I'm going to design, build, and construct my project on time? If you are the customer, how much is this going to [AUDIO OUT] inception? If you're part of the communities that are being affected by how, how is what you're going to build affect my daily life? And of course, engineers asking, where am I going to build this? And also what information do I need to provide or coordinate to enable this successful delivery?

So if we click again, please, Marc, we can see that there are lots of different stakeholders being involved in the stages of this project, starting from inception to handover to operation and maintenance. And this is exactly what hopefully, in my opinion, digital twins should aspire to answer. And all these relationships are quite complicated, complicated questions. They are interlinked. They are interconnected. And in my personal opinion, GIS is a fantastic tool to be able to be the common denominator based on location to bring all these different stakeholders together.

MARC GOLDMAN: As you said earlier when we were chatting in kind of these previous questions that we on the screen, our element is the common denominator.

GEORGE FLOROS: Yes.

MARC GOLDMAN: And then which project is this?

GEORGE FLOROS: Absolutely. So this is one of our projects, a rail project, High Speed Two. Anita will elaborate on this further on. And what we can see here is an example of exactly this concept, where GIS and BIM come together. They form this digital foundation. Surveying is critical because we need to make sure that this information is constantly updated and fed with life information as captured on site.

And then, on top of that, once we have built this digital foundation, we can augment it. If you could please click again, Marc, we can augment it with additional information, connect live data sources and smart sensors. This is critical environmental information, health and safety, as I mentioned before, overground and underground assets. Creating this digital representation that should, in principle because-- Anita will be discussing the challenges right after this slide-- that should, in principle allow us to manage the behavior of our assets.

MARC GOLDMAN: See this front HS2, this has got the green and red-- content in green and red. Content is from BIM, like you showed. GIS is the generic rest of the structure, surveying information. And this is from a web app that you made available to who on the project team?

GEORGE FLOROS: Yeah. Spot on, Marc. So the 3D models are produced using BIM authoring tools. We are using a WebScene ArcGIS enterprise to bring all this information together and disseminate within our projects to facilitate the collaboration and the communication among all these different stakeholders.

MARC GOLDMAN: Like I said.

GEORGE FLOROS: Yeah.

MARC GOLDMAN: Go ahead, Anita. I think these are some of challenges.

ANITA SONI: It was just to note that this-- in answer to your question-- it's made available to everyone on the project, Marc. It's not just for the BIM and GIS team. It's for everyone to embrace, of course. So obviously, we have this nice ideal scenario, which is what George is showing in the previous slide of collating all this information together. But realistically, as we all know, there are challenges associated with this.

So if you've seen myself or George present, we generally have our challenges. And we tend to theme them with the two categories of Technical and Cultural. So on the left, I've tried to group them more from the technical point of view. And on the right, the cultural. And I'm not saying it's a direct relationship. But you can loosely connect between this technical and cultural.

And I think for us, as well, we're trying to find out why. Why are we having these particular challenges? So if we look at data interoperability, that often means different-- again, loosely making the assumption-- different teams producing different information, potentially different authoring tools, different file formats, et cetera, which immediately introduces the silo in the industry. And people are producing different information for different purposes. And they're not necessarily talking to each other. So that's one of the biggest challenges, I would say, with this solution.

Data capture. We're constantly capturing and recapturing information. And I would say I've definitely seen projects where we're just recapturing the same information. So there's lack of that value realization. And I think not being able to see that information, not knowing what's available, and it's accessible, you're then definitely doing a lot of rework, for example, which is time and cost.

MARC GOLDMAN: Can I throw something out?

ANITA SONI: Yeah, sure.

MARC GOLDMAN: Is GIS and BIM helping? Certainly with the interoperability, GIS is a brilliant platform for bringing in data of all types, from Excel files and everything in between. Data capturing, certainly it's a great platform for capturing data. What have you guys seen? What do you use on your projects for improving the value of data capture through GIS and BIM, if I can throw that out?

ANITA SONI: So I'll answer first. Maybe George will have an answer, as well. But for me, particularly survey information and from my background, as well, being able to access easily survey information rather than going to laser scan surveys and point cloud surveys. Being able to see that information quickly without having to rummage through various different platforms or crazy naming conventions and not understanding Platform A, Platform B, for example.

So it's accessible. And it makes sense. You can understand what you're seeing straight away. So there's no need to go ahead and rescan it. You can do a lot. A lot of the information that you need to analyze from the point cloud survey, in particular, with the context of the design information around it is invaluable, in my opinion.

MARC GOLDMAN: I'm going to keep advancing just in the spirit of time here. You kind of just touched on some of this. Accessibility.

ANITA SONI: Yes, yes.

BALAZS HARASZTI: If you don't mind, I'm chipping in to the previous one. Also, you first mentioned that when we talk about survey data, BIM data, or GIS data, what the end user will see on the screen is a nice, organized interface. A nice, organized picture about the project. But behind it, there are thousands of files which load it into it. So when we talk about survey data, there are thousands, if not millions, of pictures assembled to create that kind of point cloud interface for people to analyze the current data, which is going to be visible in a single platform with the click of a button, which is, I think, amazing.

MARC GOLDMAN: Yeah. All those files, all those different file types, all that information in various locations all brought together is a great value.

ANITA SONI: Yeah. And I think, particularly on the project that I'm on at the moment, it's actually been really interesting to educate and make the survey team aware of the need for making sure there is a nice folder structure for file naming convention. And they're definitely appreciating the information management side for these purposes.

MARC GOLDMAN: I know we could talk forever about going from file-based systems and file structures and file folders to more engaging, compelling interfaces where a map on a 3D environment is your means of accessing information. That kind of opens up to the next little chapter here about GIS and BIM improving collaboration and efficiency.

So instead of sorting through Windows Explorer or Mac Finder or SharePoint folders or whatever, the idea of collaborating and being more efficient because you're able to just access information more effectively. You're able to find information without an extensive search process because it's just intuitive, it's logical. Information is based on its location. And it's one of the things that I've seen that really improve the way teams work together and efficiencies.

BALAZS HARASZTI: Well, yeah. Let's see. If you ever tried to implement a new system, Marc, I think on any project, we're facing really similar challenges to what you see on the right hand side of the screen. So when we're talking about setting up GIS platforms or BIM platforms or any other type of platforms, we usually need to consider the ecosystem we currently have on the project, which comes together from various systems with various complexity, multiple data providers feeding into the system, having multiple disciplines with different culture in the system, which basically makes it really, really difficult to integrate.

And also generally ending up with having an inconsistent system, which we are ending up with people arguing with poisonous environments which can be created if people are not careful enough. And that kind of triggers the conversation on the left hand side, where people start to complain on the system. So is the information, what we see there, is up to date? Is it reliable?

People who aren't used to using digital interfaces are working on paper side, which is really, really typical in construction industry. They keep asking the questions. How can I print this? Where is the Print button on the maps? Which, for digital people like myself and probably most of the people on the call, can be sometimes really frustrating as we are kind of trying to drive the industry into the direction where everything can be accessed by a single platform. Or if not accessible by the single platform, it's still easy to use, easy to access, easy to collaborate on it.

So when implementing any of these new systems, we kind of need to take care of both the frontend and the backend interface. So I'll just hand it over to Jan to talk a little bit about what we did on the RDP project on the backend. And I'm going to talk about the front end later.

JAN: Thanks, Balazs. As Balazs said, we have a number of variables that we need to consider. The main issue is that a lot of them are not under our control. So things are coming our way. And we have to deal with them. And we are within a constantly changing environment, as well. So things are moving all the time.

So having reliable information throughout the project is key. And we call that the single source of truth. So we have a lot of different users that will access data in different ways. So we're looking at this in the old way, front and back end. So the back end, we look after all the detail. Everything is there. Everything lives there. The users, they don't need to know about everything. Because they will get overloaded.

So think about if someone is using a web browser. On a site, I think the connection is a huge issue most of the time. So they're in the middle of strange weather conditions, et cetera. So we make sure that we give them the right information to the level of detail that they need. However, if you look at, for instance, revision control on the right hand side of the screen where we have the map, we include BIM data there that they can find out quickly what is this data coming from. Where is it, let's say, within the common data environment?

So if they need more information, they can go and find it. But if we do have most of the data there, if you think the different functions that work on a project, they will get overwhelmed. And they won't be able to find what it is. And as Anita said earlier, the naming standard and all this, a lot of the functions that work, they will not be so familiar with this. And it would overwhelm them. And then at the end, they stop using the platform.

So having a platform that provides easy access on the front end side quickly. And then if you need more information, you can go in the CD, we have multiple database systems. You know, we have built this little Cloud there. But it's a number of systems that we look after. And the end user can access the single source of truth, reliable data, without having to worry about it.

And another thing I would like to say is that, in the construction sector, if you miss the opportunity to give them the right information, they will stop trusting the system. Then they will stop using it. And they will go back to the non-digital ways of pen and paper. And yeah, Balazs can describe how we group the data, how we put it in a way that it made sense for the end user.

BALAZS HARASZTI: Yeah. Thank you, Jan. So once the information is fully transparent and we understand that we can rely on this data we're presenting on the maps or presenting in the BIM models, it's quite important to provide a user interface for the user to easily navigate and easily find what they need to find or are searching for in this environment.

So traditionally, then when GIS teams are setting up GIS maps, they are usually segregating it by different functions to kind of focus the attention on each of the maps to the important thing, which is relevant to each of these disciplines.

However, the new functionality that will be built into the system is basically utilizing the grouping of information, grouping of GIS features, to enable the team to use just a single map. So when they engage in a coordination session in a conversation, they don't need to swap over to the different maps. They can remain on the same map. And they can activate the relevant function information just with a press of a button, which I think is really an amazing functionality on the GIS map.

The second level of the grouping which we introduced was really important for me especially from the BIM perspective to integrate on a higher level with the current design and make it fully understandable and familiar for design teams, as well, to work with, which is basically implementing the volume strategy we had that the coding structure we apply in the BIM model is on the [AUDIO OUT] layer levels and the fine levels are going to be visible for them in order to easily find the information or what they want to search for.

And obviously, at the bottom of this structure, we have the GIS layers itself. As we traditionally had, each feature in the GIS is segregated by layers. And this is still holding all the information that the BIM model stores, it's still holding all information that the GIS layers or GIS object stores, providing an ultimate interface for the user project teams to interact with.

MARC GOLDMAN: So out of the images that we've had on the screen here, these last couple of slides have spurred some questions from-- let's see, I think that you guys are probably the perfect duo of the four folks from Skanska-- which is kind of just probably a basic question. What tools and workflows use GIS in Civil 3D? So how are you getting this model into the GIS environment? If you could just touch on that real quick. And that's going to be a good segue way to our next little chunk of time.

So just real high level, what is the process if you're working in Civil 3D and you're working in ArcGIS Pro? And you've got these Web Scenes. Could you just talk for a second about how this comes together? And also talk maybe a little bit about of the push and pull of data between GIS and BIM, that it's a flow of information. It's not just a file sitting somewhere that one time gets imported. Can you talk on that for a second?

JAN: Yeah. I mean, I think we're going to touch on this later. But yeah. We can mention it.

Balazs, go ahead.

BALAZS HARASZTI: Yeah. I can touch on this from the BIM perspective. So by the implementation of the latest ISO standards, I think worldwide now everybody is familiar with the term of common data environment. So this is the ecosystem I was talking about, which contains multiple systems with various complexity. So the environment we are basically using for storing all the documents, all the models, and everything else is basically a document management system, which manages all the revisions on the project. And all the files, all the information has a proper audit trail behind it.

So this is really important. And this is really a key for us, to keep this audit trail when we're transferring information over to another platform. It doesn't matter if it's fully automated, semi-automated, or a manual process. As long as the information is transferred with the information container, it's going to go in there properly. And people will get the confidence that the information is reliable.

So basically, we're just following the standard ISO 19650 process in terms of managing the information availability in this document management system. And our GIS Lead George can easily pull the information he needs to pull from the system, just basically searching for the latest information in that system.

MARC GOLDMAN: So by means of using ISO 19650, that's your naming structure. That's your folder conventions. That's standardization of file level. So that's part of-- and I assume you've also got various Python scripts and such that are--

JAN: Correct.

MARC GOLDMAN: Pulling information out of that file repository and then being able to visualize that through automation in WebScene.

JAN: If I can elaborate a little bit on that?

MARC GOLDMAN: Yeah.

JAN: Again, if you remember the earlier slides, the different systems that we interface-- I know this session, we were talking about ESRI-- but we have to deal with a lot of other systems. And we would like to keep it one kind of ecosystem that everything flows with web services as we discussed before, Marc. That is not the case. So we have to use third party systems or custom scripts. And depending on the data currency, how often we need to do that. And I'll elaborate a few slides further down on this.

But if the data are updated every week, and it's a simple data set, then we evaluate. If this is going to be for six months, then we do it this way. But usually, we try to automate or semi-automate it through third party software or custom Python scripts.

MARC GOLDMAN: OK. You know, I may kind of use this as the segue to the next section, which was this idea that integration of these solutions can't just be about being in CAD or PDFs and documents. That when you start talking about GIS and BIM, you should get away from file-based conversations and truly data-based conversations. And when you're talking about data level of GIS features being mapped to BIM objects, it just opens the door for a whole new way of working.

So this idea of this topic of integration and that GIS is a foundation of that integration was something we've talked about a few times over the last few weeks as we've been prepping for this. I'll let you go ahead and take it away here.

BALAZS HARASZTI: Yeah. Thank you, Marc. So most people who, if you ever worked on a construction project, I think you know the term the devil is in the details. So everybody in the engineering side of the business is kind of looking for the fine details of the BIM models, looking into the connection of the different elements, collection of technologies, the methodology, what we are going to use to basically adopt this project on site.

I would slightly disagree with that term of the devil is in the details. I would say it's also in the context. So we really need to understand that, without the existing condition of the ground, without the existing conditions of the field, without the existing condition of the environment, it's really, really difficult to create an efficient design.

So integrating the BIM with the actual GIS maps, which can store information from both current environment and the concept environment, what we are planning to build onsite, is essential. So we need to understand how the current design will actually fit into that environment. We really need to understand and make the right efforts to implement all the current features we have in that environment to create this efficient design, to put the bridges in the right place, to put the roads in the right elevation, to make sure we're using the technology and using accessible working spaces for the project team to build this project efficiently.

It's really important also to not just see the context, just to go back a little bit into the traditional content of the BIM models. So the information we are storing in the BIM models are essentially really, really very well structured. So we need to make sure that this information carries over into any of the platform where the model is getting carried over. And this information is all about that specific objective. Selecting in the GIS map is accessible for people without downloading any specific tools, without need of a strong machine. They can basically just click on an element and see what's the information, what we actually designed to build on site.

MARC GOLDMAN: You touched on something there we said yesterday with Stephen Brockwell, who's our Product Owner for ArcGIS GeoBIM, which we're just launching, and [? Stephen Santalowski ?] one of the product managers on the team, as well. And we were talking about how important integration is and GIS and BIM coming together. And one of the things that came up was the importance of your data model and just thinking through that and all the workflows you intend to support.

So it touches on one of the questions that someone threw out here, which is, I've yet to find a good workflow for aligning GIS data to Revit. And I guess you could probably say the other way around, aligning Revit data so it's most valuable in GIS. You mentioned here the parameters and properties from the BIM environment being exposed in GIS thinking through that data model, thinking through what properties you want, thinking through what's going to change in your project. That's, I assume, a critical part of a good integration.

And you're showing on screen here this view within ArcGIS that shows the properties and parameters that came out of the object, which was presumably originally a Revit file or a Civil 3D object. This idea of creating a good data model and forethought around that in the integration process. Is that something that-- who on your team is involved in that? Is that something you all get involved with on a project and take days and weeks to figure all that out before you start bringing systems together? Or is that in the execution plan?

BALAZS HARASZTI: Yes. It's partially an execution plan, of course. So the information management team generally is coming up with an initial BIM execution plan of what kind of information we want to store in the BIM models. But at the end of the day, it's always a collaborative session where you need to sit down with each of the functions who's going to tell you that what's the information that is important for them. And having that information implemented in various stages of the model development enables the team to easily collaborate over those models.

So one of the key benefits of having a BIM model or using a BIM model on any project or any stages of the scheme development is that the information stored in the model is very well structured. So it comes with a very well designed data model already, which we don't want to lose and we really want to transfer over into the any other platform. Regardless if it's GIS, a CDN management system, a risk management system. Doesn't really matter because all this information is relevant. And the reason the information is there is because the teams need it.

MARC GOLDMAN: In the next few slides, you actually have got some of the integrations that you've done kind of illustrated.

ANITA SONI: Yeah. So this was going back to what you initially said, Marc. It's not just necessarily about the CAD aspect. This is about getting paper into GIS. So this is actually a really good and nice example of positive impact for health and safety and linking that site to the [AUDIO OUT] on our projects.

A positive intervention card, which is basically to highlight any near-misses or any changes that can be made on site. And these are distributed across the site office but also on the site. And not only did GIS allow us-- or first of all, we digitized this. But then it was that link of the app from that form, a digital form, to GeoBIM essentially.

So with that paper form, it usually takes about two working days, we calculated, to get that information into a register. And again, that's a register that someone is managing. And they disseminate it probably as a spreadsheet or something similar. But now, what we can see through the app and the linked GeoBIM, I think it's within two hours or an hour. We've basically gone, we can highlight the issues that have been raised.

A big KPI for construction. And it can be made available to anyone on the project, as well, instantaneously. It helps with safety inductions, as well. And it also shows the site scene very quickly information about any incidents or near-misses that happened. So again, it's making dynamic. It's the accessibility. And it's very easy to communicate and contextualize that information.

And this one's slightly different. So this is more about the context and communication. So on the left, we have our accommodation environment, for example, for let's call it the graphical common data environment where we're authoring survey information. And on the left, you can see that's how it's been authored. However, there's no real context to this.

And when we need to issue survey information-- providing information of what surveys have been done and what date, for example, to again showing the latest versions-- but then also providing that link back to the authoring tool or environment that you need. You can do that. But by going straight into GIS, you've got that context. And you can communicate quite quickly.

So these yellow boxes and pink boxes that you can see on the right, those are the survey boundaries. And that provides instantaneously in terms of from a design management point of view and also our designers, it provides that information straight away and gives that context. Whereas on the left, there's not really any context. It's quite hard to communicate that information.

And then the triangles are now showing where there's survey control for the site engineers to then carry out their works and do all their setting out, et cetera. So as I call it, the commendation environment to the geospatial common data environment. Again, it's shown very quickly in a clear way from left to right. You can see how GIS has really helped contextualize that.

MARC GOLDMAN: Sure.

ANITA SONI: And then, this was more about the actual benefits realization that we've encountered. I talked earlier about opportunities. And here, we've got some evidence. So we've talked a lot about the single source of truth today. So what does that actually mean? And it's about accessing accurate and latest information quickly. And what Jan was sort of like, we need to trust it. It needs to be trustworthy.

So from some case studies that we've done, we've shown a massive, more than 90% decrease in time spent looking for this information. I believe there's a lot of statistics going around about engineers spending a good few hours looking for information and ensuring it's the latest and having to do double, triple checks to check that that's the latest information. Whereas with GeoBIM, for example, you have that based on all the planning of the data structure, et cetera, that Balazs was talking about.

And then in terms of accessibility, you're accessing accurate information. And we've taken this kind of rule of thumb. So if you've got different file formats coming from different tools-- as we said, we're not just working with one tool-- for us, that means basically 12 licenses at a cost and training for that, et cetera. So by incorporating that into GeoBIM, you're saving a lot of money on software licenses and people needing it to access other people's information. If we can just collate it and put it onto this one platform, you're saving a lot of cost there roughly.

And then the dynamic aspect. It's that health and safety card intervention that I just showed in the previous slide. We've gone from 16 hours-- so two working days-- to one hour essentially. Roughly, that's where we came to a 94% reduction. But it's just showing the dynamicness of the site to office and office to site, essentially.

MARC GOLDMAN: So these are quantities that you've quantified. These are findings that--

ANITA SONI: Real benefits. Yeah. So at the beginning of our discussion, we talked about what the potential is. And here, we're starting to have that benefits realization. And particularly for clients, they're looking at how is digitization, BIM, et cetera, how is that saving us cost and time? And we're starting to quantify that as KPI requirements.

MARC GOLDMAN: So what you just said there is kind of a good segue way to this last bit of the session here. How the BIM data, the information that you've collected, the investment that you've made to generate these rich BIM models for various purposes, is great for those people who have the thousands, tens of thousands of dollars of software on their desktop to explore the BIM objects, to extract properties, to run analysis against that within Revit or within Navis or within InfraWorks.

But sometimes you need to get that information out to a much larger audience than just those who have either an expertise or the budget for those kinds of tools. And that's something that I've been really impressed with, is how great GIS does at, here we say, amplifying the value of BIM, as well as other formats. And I'll let you guys kind of take it away here. I think Jan and George are going to talk to these slides.

GEORGE FLOROS: Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you, Marc. So we've discussed a little bit of motivation. We discussed the challenges. And then we demonstrated some really good examples of what we're bringing together. So in the next couple of slides, we would like to touch a little bit on how this is happening. And I would like to start with a high level workflow. Then, I will be handing it over to Jan to describe a particular example. And then, we'll be describing a few more examples of how we are actually achieving this.

It's very important to have a registry, first and foremost, of where our data will be coming from or is coming from. One of the highest risks is out of date data. So we need to make sure that we are aware of our data sources. And we can see here some typical examples of what currently are our data sources within our projects.

The next thing you need to have in place is you need to have a spatial database, a geospatial database. If you'd like because it is essential to be able to vet this information, store it, and manage it in a geospatial database. And then, this is directly linked with your GIS tools, with your GIS desktop. And then you can start implementing your GIS workflows, maintaining control of your information.

Now you see we have a dash connection with electronic document management systems. And this is critical because one of our big ambitions is to be able to link the geospatial database with EDMS. We will speak a little bit later on possible ways of achieving that.

By utilizing the GIS workflows, it is extremely important to have in place processes to quality check your output, your data, whether we are losing any information when we go from BIM to GIS, or vice versa, or from CAD to GIS, et cetera. What information is being lost? Where and why is this happening?

Of course, the endpoint is either sharing this information collaboratively to the project using a web GIS portal or, more importantly, delivering accurate and correct information to our customers. So I'll now hand over to Jan to go through the first workflow. And yeah. Thank you.

JAN: Thanks, George. So yeah. This is an example workflow, an approach we follow. We followed a number of projects where the graphical information is not that important. But we're interested in the BIM or the metadata. So we capture the metadata from the BIM models. We will get the GIS data and then various data from the operators or supply chain. In times--

It depends. And that's because I've seen some of the questions. It depends on the volumes of data and the data currency. So if they didn't need to stay up to date every minute for every five minutes or every 10 minutes, then depending on the volume of data, we will look at the approach that will be able to transform the data and make it available for the end user within that time frame. Because if you have large volumes of data, sometimes it takes a long time.

So we usually write scripts which we will push all this data within a database system, a Cloud database system, or more than one, which crunches the data. Because we found that performance there is significantly higher than doing it directly on the web, especially when we don't have end to end workflows because of integrated systems that come from the vendors. So then within that, we will crunch the numbers. We will do all the transformations, metrics, KPIs. And then we will come to the end, the one source of truth.