Talk Data to Me: Project Success with BIM 360

BRENDAN DILLON: I'm Brendan Dillon. I'm the BIM Manager at the Denver International Airport.

AUDIENCE: Welcome.

AUDIENCE: Is that the one with the tent?

BRENDAN DILLON: Yes, it is the one with the tent. It is the one with the big, blue mustang, also known as Blucifer, which there are pins there on the table, if you want to grab one on your way out. So yes, that's us.

AUDREY VOORHIES: So we're going to go over our workflow, what we do regarding our asset management strategy. We always start with the BIM Execution Plan for large projects. We're going to show you something that Brendan has created, this Project Slice, on how we slice a Revit model, and then give it to our consultants.

And then recently, in the last year, we've implemented BIM 360. And we take these Project Slices, and we upload them to BIM 360. And this has become our new workflow.

And then each submittal time, we have a BIM review process at the 30%, 60%, 90%, and 100%. We're going to go over that. The 60% submittal process is very crucial for us.

We have to have our asset data loaded into the Revit model. And we then start our clash detection using Autodesk BIM 360 Glue. And then at the 100%, we start using Field, BIM 360 Field, and we have sort of some scripts we created for model cleanup on Dynamo. And then we're going to go over our warranty tracking.

BRENDAN DILLON: So a little bit about Denver International Airport-- yes, we're the ones with the tents and the big, blue, demon horse. We had about 58 million passengers last year. We're on track for somewhere in the area of 62-ish this year. We're the sixth busiest airport in the country, 18th internationally.

We have somewhere in the area of 17 million square feet of existing facilities. We have 53 square miles of campus, somewhere in the area of 300 lane-miles of highway. We're currently undergoing a $1.6 billion renovation of our main terminal, and we have another, I think, $1.4 billion gate expansion plan that's going to add 39 gates to our existing 107. So we've got some work going on.

As a team, we're part of the Asset Management Group in Airport Infrastructure Management, which encompasses maintenance, sustainability, which includes us, and design. So we're all sort of in the same house. We don't have the maintenance folks working in one area, and development in one area, and us in a third shop. We're all sort of collaborative, at least as much as we can be, as a large facility.

So as I said, 17 million square feet of facilities-- we have a good amount of that modeled to a base level in Revit. By base level, I mean probably about LOD 50-- not 150, not 250-- 50. We've got walls and doors, and that's pretty much it, for most of it.

As we're going through our development program, we're adding to that, fleshing it out. Our new hotel and transit center, you can see there at the front, is modeled to a much higher level, probably somewhere in the area of 300 to 350, even up to 400, depending on the particular system. Some of our stuff was actually pretty well as-built by the contractor, and done in Revit, which allowed us to incorporate that into our facilities models.

AUDREY VOORHIES: So our workflow-- we start with a BIM execution plan. And it's always tied back to our contract. And we start this at the kickoff meeting. We'll meet. We'll sit down with the BIM managers and BIM coordinators.

And the reason we do this is it makes everyone accountable. We set this is what you're going to do. You're going to outline who is in charge of which model, who's going to do the mechanical BIM coordination, and kind of outline our asset requirements.

Every year, we're updating our design standard manual, what's been new this year. We'll go over that. Then we'll, at the 60% review process, which is outlined in our BIM Execution Plan, we sit down. We go through the Glue model. And then, we'll just sort of go through what's going on, what needs clean up, some problems we see.

There's a lot of handholding. So this is a good place to start. It's always a good place to have it outlined for everyone and set them accountable.

AUDIENCE: Who offers the plan? You got [INAUDIBLE]?

BRENDAN DILLON: So the question is, who authors the plan. We provide a template to our consultants. It's slimmer than your average BIM Project Execution Plan.

I think the one from Penn State is somewhere in excess of 100 pages. Ours is in the area of 17. And that's largely because we have a lot of what would be, in a typical project execution plan, built into our standards. We don't flex on that stuff.

The stuff that we do keep flex on, or that it's adjustable, we maintain in the Project Execution Plan. And then it's a collaborative back and forth. Designer, contractor, owner working on that document throughout the project process.

So our Project Slice-- this is something I'm actually pretty proud of myself. I recognize a few faces. Some of you may have actually dealt with this on projects.

So as facility owners, or let me ask you guys-- what do you think, as designers, the owner does with your model once you hand it over to them? Probably--

AUDIENCE: Ooh.

BRENDAN DILLON: Yeah, usually nothing. Probably sits on a shelf on a CD or a DVD. It might sit on their network if they're being especially proactive. But it doesn't get a whole lot of use for a lot of owners.

That's not DEN. We are in our models constantly. And I mean constantly. There are very few of the models that we don't touch on at least a monthly basis, and some of our primary models for our terminal and our concourses we're in pretty much daily.

And we're doing this for a number of reasons. We're doing it for gathering information for the Asset Management Program, for maintenance. We get information requests from Denver PD, Denver Fire Department. We get information requests from finance and all over the place.

So for us, these are really living documents. And integrating new projects into that living facility model is a tricky proposition, because what do you do normally? You probably either-- if you're getting a model from an owner before you do your design work, you're either going to work directly in that model, or you might use it as a linked-in background, and do your work in your own model.

Then the end of the project comes, and the owner takes that model. And how do they integrate it back in? Well, previously, you'd have to go through the design, essentially, and delete out anything that was existing, or that was existing to be removed, and link in, and copy, and paste. And it was a really, really messy process. I hated it.

This works much better. So we define the scope of the model for the project up here. So you'll see the project scope there. We put it together in a group.

And we convert that group to a linked model. It's not a tool that you see a whole lot of-- convert group to link model. In fact, in every version of Mastering Autodesk Revit Architecture, the tool does not get a mention. It's not even in the index or appendix. It just doesn't get used.

Well, we're able to use this to create a new project model. When you create that new project model, though, it's essentially empty, aside from what you put in it. There's no standards, no schedules, no nothing outside of exactly what you put in it.

So we then take our project template, link that model slice into the template, bind it using the Bind Link tool-- something else that doesn't get a mention in Mastering Revit Architecture. And that becomes our project model. It stays linked to our facility model.

So anytime somebody goes into that facility model, and they're looking for information or maybe they're going to start a project, they're going to say, oh, hey, wait, there's something going on here. I either can't touch this, or I have to make sure I coordinate with the other folks that are touching it. We can set up the phasing in the facility model and the project model so that we can see how the project or how the facility is going to change over time based on multiple projects.

Most importantly, we can-- that's not quite right. I'm sorry. Apparently, a slide presenter is too complicated for me.

OK, so we get the model slice. This is one of the pilot projects we ran. So this was what we delivered to the consultant. Wrong direction again. This is what they sent us back-- same area, much more highly developed. This was their redeveloped existing conditions with the design.

About four months into the project, another product started up right next door. So we had to pull together another model slice right here. Normally, with our old process, this would have been a huge problem, huge coordination problem. With this process, much, much easier.

Oh, and then we decided to expand the concourses some more. So this became another project slice that was eventually going to have to include this portion. So we were able, later, to integrate this portion and this portion into the other project model.

AUDIENCE: So who manages it?

BRENDAN DILLON: From which perspective?

AUDIENCE: Well, who has the ultimate ownership? I guess that's you?

BRENDAN DILLON: So ultimate ownership is our group. So we pull together the model slices. We distribute them. We make sure that the consultant is getting, to the best of our understanding, the correct scope.

Now, scopes change. Sometimes, this means-- depending on how far along the project is-- we might be able to issue a new slice. But if the project gets pretty far along, that's not going to work. And at that point, you're probably dealing with either copy monitoring content or just making do with it as is. But it's still a huge improvement over what we had previously.

AUDREY VOORHIES: Yeah. We used to just give the consultant the entire Concourse A. And then now we're taking-- so they're doing expansion on the East Side, so we'll slice just the part they're going to touch.

So if they move a wall in that project slice model, then we bring that in. And now we know that wall has moved, or that room has changed, or the bathrooms are updated.

AUDIENCE: Everything is [INAUDIBLE].

AUDREY VOORHIES: Everything is now dynamic. So we have our living facility model that we keep. And then we only give the consultants the slice, or what they need.

BRENDAN DILLON: And another thing that is done for our consultants is in the past, since we provided the concourse as a background, if they wanted to change something that was in the existing conditions, they'd have to go out of their project model, go into the existing model, change what's in the existing model, and go back to their project model.

Now they've got all that existing condition right there. They can change it natively. They can do whatever they want to it, as long as it's correct, I hope.

And it really works much, much better. To be honest, we expected-- I expected some pushback on the new process, just because change is difficult. And there was-- there's been none, at least none that's reached me.

AUDREY VOORHIES: No, they actually really like it. They prefer it.

AUDIENCE: See, that's nice, when you guys are running it, and you're the owner. Lots of times, you're dealing with a construction manager or project manager.

BRENDAN DILLON: Yeah, and that's the challenge. This is obviously sort of a kludged workflow. We had to sort of make do the best we could with the tools that were available.

It's not something that is designed to do this, this way, for this purpose. But I hope that Autodesk will develop tools that will serve that purpose in the future. But for now, this works. And it works a lot better than what we had.

AUDREY VOORHIES: It does.

AUDIENCE: If I have issues with the building systems where you have to sever a continuous building system from one part to the other, and the engineer's working with a separate piece of a larger system.

BRENDAN DILLON: So the question was, what about building systems? What about HVAC and electrical? And you've got to cut off parts of complete systems?

Well, there's good news and there's bad news there. The good news is, we don't have that problem a whole lot, because we don't have a lot of that content modeled.

[LAUGHTER]

That makes things a lot easier. The reason we don't have it modeled is, well, we've got a small staff, even smaller budget. And frankly, we know that if we just started modeling content off of the existing record drawings for the facilities, at least half of it would be really, really wrong.

We know it's not reliable documentation to work off of. Just isn't. Now architecturally, we can do a quick survey. And those surveys have been done, to verify that we're at least close to what we need.

But as far as the systems go, it's too hard at this point. Now, in those situations where we do have that information, we're going to break the system. That's just the way it is.

When we bind the project model back in, we'll reconnect the system. But in the meantime, every time we open up that model, it's going to throw up warnings, and errors, and things like that. Yes.

AUDIENCE: Are your project slices managed with a different phase for each slice, so you coordinate with the main model?

BRENDAN DILLON: Not actively.

AUDREY VOORHIES: No.

BRENDAN DILLON: We do on an as-requested basis, just because, like I said, we have a small staff. And project delivery dates move. So it's something that if we had more demand for, then we know we could manage that, and we know we could do that. But right now, since there isn't demand for it by our customers within the airport, there isn't really a need for doing that at this point.

AUDREY VOORHIES: So when they receive the project slice, they'll do their own phases. So one project had six phases. And they'll do that on their end.

AUDIENCE: Did you say small [INAUDIBLE]?

BRENDAN DILLON: Sorry, what was the question?

AUDIENCE: Did you say small [INAUDIBLE]?

BRENDAN DILLON: Small--

AUDIENCE: Your staff.

BRENDAN DILLON: Oh, so the question is, how small is my staff? Actually, for a facility owner, we have a large staff. But for the scope of work, it's small.

So I have myself. I used to have Audrey. She got stolen.

I have another Facilities BIM Coordinator, Emmie Thammasine. Then I have two Civil BIM Coordinators. And I have essentially a legacy CAD operator, who is slowly learning Revit. And really, you could double my staff, and we'd probably still be up to our ears.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] your slice back from the architect [INAUDIBLE].

BRENDAN DILLON: So the question was, when we get the project slices back, we're going to have probably more content in there than we would use. Do we strip it out or do we keep it in? So the sorts of content you're thinking of is maybe--

AUDIENCE: Well, I was just saying the situation and we do farm out a lot of work. What we get back from that [INAUDIBLE] section, we don't need to [INAUDIBLE]. We have wall types throughout the [INAUDIBLE] wall types, and all we need is [INAUDIBLE].

BRENDAN DILLON: So what that comes down to is standards, model checking, and good communication with consultants. And yes, we do strip out a good amount of information. We don't generally keep furniture, especially mobile furniture in our facilities models, because we just don't need it.

Any people that were dropped in for renderings or things like that. This process also strips out the drawings and details, which those are valuable as a matter of record. But that's what we keep copies of the project models archived for, so that we have access to that.

For the facilities model, we just want exactly what's there for the facility, and the documentation we have set up within the facility model to easily review the information that's in the model. So we should probably move on. And save the rest of the questions for the end.

AUDREY VOORHIES: Yeah. And we have a kit of parts. So we have a container file of the wall types. So they're required to use our wall type.

So BIM 360 Team, we just started using this past year. And we take, then, the project slice, those Revit models that have been sliced. We upload them through collaboration for Revit to BIM 360's site.

And so far, this has worked really great. We're using it on larger projects. We have a boiler replacement project right now, and it's touching all three concourses, the terminal, the central plant. We've sliced every part.

So we take a slice from the Concourse A where it was being touched, and B. We've uploaded them all to BIM 360 Team. And then that is now there for the mechanical engineers. That is their background model. The architect can now take over that project slice if they need to change walls, move it around.

It's becoming faster, because they used to spend half a day uploading to box.com, coordinating, then bringing it back to us. We can now get in, check progress if we want. We don't even have to wait for a submittal time. But we usually do, because they're working towards the end.

We create folders, so we can have a 60% deliverable folder that archives that model in time, even though the models rely-- they're always working on them. We can go back to that 60%, and then do our BIM review. But also, we can add other people outside the Asset Management Group, project managers.

People who are not BIM specialists can get in. They can look at the model, open it in the 3D view, spin around, look at it. It's a nice collaborative system.

BRENDAN DILLON: This is another tool that frankly, I expected more pushback on when we first rolled it out than we have received. And really, the only pushback I've received was folks were a little surprised we were asking them all to work on our team site. Once we explain that we want to have everything in one place, we don't want to jump around, there was no problem with that.

And the way the delivery process works is, if you ever used Team or Collaboration for Revit, within the platform, when you go into Manager Models, you can publish the model. You hit Publish. You let us know, OK, download the published model.

We go in. We download it. And we're done.

One of the really nice things about that is, if I download the electrical model, the way that Team works, when I do that download, it's also going to download any models that are linked into that model, so that I have everything in one place. And it paths everything so it's all just linked in and ready to go as soon as I open it, which is really nice.

Not having to repath everything is really, really nice, especially on a large project. When we did the hotel and transit center, there were somewhere in the area of 20 to 25 design models. And every time you did a deliverable, you had to repath all of those models so that they-- now relative pathing is supposed to work-- emphasis on "supposed to."

And most of the time it does. But every once in a while, for whatever reason, it didn't. Maybe that's something that's been fixed, but at this point, it is not an issue, because we're using this. And it's better.

AUDIENCE: Real quick, I assume you're talking about design consultants who are using that. Have you had any luck getting subcontractors to [INAUDIBLE] Revit?

BRENDAN DILLON: So the question is, have we had any luck getting MEP subcontractors to model natively in Revit on Team? At this point, we haven't required it. We have had a few subcontractors who did do their work natively in Revit using various tools.

It was not done on Team, because Team doesn't work great for just regular CAD. It is something we're exploring for next year. There's a lot of things we want to make changes to. We're trying to bring it in steps to our consultants and our contractors. It's my hope for next year to at least do a pilot project, and then to roll that approach out, depending on the results of the pilot, to larger projects.

AUDREY VOORHIES: And this is a view just from the app from our phone, showing the structural model. Anyone can hop in and look at it, also create markups. We haven't started using that feature, but we hope to have that started with the project managers and the consultants.

Our DEN BIM Review process-- we used to call it DEN BIM Audit. And we've changed the name, just to make it sound nicer. People really thought it was like a tax audit or something. But--

BRENDAN DILLON: Yeah, when the city comes auditing you, it doesn't sound like a really good thing. So--

AUDREY VOORHIES: For this, we are currently using an Excel spreadsheet that we've created. And it lists all the different items that we're looking for. And a lot of our consultants we've worked with before, so they've seen this. Any new consultant at that kickoff meeting, we need to go through and give this form to them, so they know maybe they're modeling too much. We really want the asset data, and kind of a clean model.

BRENDAN DILLON: So the kickoff review might seem a little unusual to folks. Why would you do a model review at kickoff? What's there?

Well, what's there is well, maybe what we sent you, in which case we might not bother with the review. But as I said before, we don't have a whole lot of our MEP and systems modeled. So what we want to do with that kickoff review is make sure that those consultants in particular are using our template, and that they're working on the correct coordinate system.

And that's really it. We're looking at those two items. If you're checking the box for using our template, current template, and using our coordinates, you pass. Congratulations. That's probably the last one you will pass.

And I'm not joking about that last part, unfortunately. So we have 47 total line items. We identify a number of critical items that flat out if you don't do it, you're not passing, period. You could do everything else, and if you don't do this, it isn't going to fly.

We'll go through those items in a minute. And that's two. Those critical items are focused on what we really need for maintenance, for asset management, and for future use in the facilities model. When we started doing these reviews using this format last year, we were somewhere in the area of 60% passing overall, and lower than that on critical items.

So that started in August of '16. Around January, we started mentioning to our subs that we were tracking this data. Within three months, that grade jumped to in the area of 80% overall, and 72% on critical items.

Because our consultants understood that, yes, we're tracking this data. And oh, by the way, the folks who award your contracts are being provided with this data. So they can see which consultants are providing us the information we need to maintain our facility, and which ones aren't.

So these are the items that we go over for critical items on facilities. We really try to keep it simple. And most of the stuff should be freebies.

If you're really conversant on Revit, and using the tool as it should, this stuff should be free. A DEN template used-- freebie. Phasing-- is every model using the same phases-- free.

CAD files must be linked and not imported. That's one of our big ones. And part of that is in the early days, Autodesk was telling people, import your CAD files, don't link them.

Now conceptually, that made sense. You've got all your content in one file-- easy. OK, great. Well, the problem is not only did they make the Revit files larger, but they were introducing instability into the Revit files.

And Autodesk saw over time that this is creating crashes, and people are losing data. So they changed their best practices. But there's still some institutional inertia in the industry with people who think that's still a best practice.

Go back. No exploded DWGs. Again, if you're not importing, that's not going to be a problem-- should be a freebie. Project location on our coordinates-- should be pretty easy. You're going to get that from the architectural model. It's pretty simple to acquire coordinates.

Model all your design elements. Don't cheat. Don't draw lines instead of conduit. It's pretty simple. Just do Revit.

All modeled elements tagged correctly, and by that I mean use tags, not dumb text. It's really unfortunate how often we see content come in that is tagged with just text, text notes. And then the design changes, and they have to go in, and not only change the content, but manually change all of the annotation. Kills me.

Make sure your systems are connected. Now, we understand that based on the scope of a project, your systems aren't going to be fully connected, in the sense that Revit is going to think that there are open ends to it. But we're aware of that, and we want you to just connect the systems as appropriate for your project.

Rooms and spaces named appropriately. Do spatial coordination. Do model reconciliation. That's a reconciliation process between the design model and the construction model, which, depending on how things work with fab parts, we might do away with completely.

Identify assets-- that comes in at the 60% design submittal. And we aren't even expecting everybody to get it right. We expect them just to take a try.

There's no caution on that. There's no 50%. Either you tried-- you didn't have to get it all right, just tried-- you tried, you pass. If you didn't, it's going to be obvious, and you fail.

AUDIENCE: What exactly do you mean by your assets?

BRENDAN DILLON: So assets-- in our design standards, manual we identify a lot of asset types. So an electrical panel is an asset. A light is not.

If you go through the schedules that we have built into our template, you can quickly check the boxes. And you're pretty much done. We're going to take a look at that information, and then tell you either this is stuff that you identified as assets correctly, these ones are incorrect. But you're not going to fail from it. We just want to try.

Then to identify the rest of the asset information, and use schedules that are natively generated in Revit. I've seen so many cheats and work-arounds to using native schedules that honestly must take so much time. And all I can think of is someone just banging their head on their desk as they're drafting a schedule for a couple of hundred pieces of equipment. Why would you do this?

So then we've got our civil requirements. I'm not going to go through these as in-depth. We're behind on our civil standards, in part because we just recently got staff for our civil content. One year ago is when we hired our first guy, and six months ago was our second guy. And they're great, but they're still coming up to speed. There's a lot to do, and a lot of mess to clean up.

AUDREY VOORHIES: OK, assets-- so basically, an easy way to think of how we describe assets is anything that requires regular maintenance, is how I think of it. We have a list, an appendix in the back of our DSM, Design Standard Manual, that will list out for the consultants the electrical panels, VAV boxes, that we need that information.

So at the 60% submittal, we need to have the assets that are in the Revit family. And the reason for this is that we connect it to another database system, Maximo. And we work with our maintenance planners, so then, they have that information, the latest spec or the latest model type of whatever asset that is, is then linked into Maximo. It's for our condition assessments, warranty, and commissioning. This is why we really need this information.

So airfield panels, electrical equipment, a lot of mechanical equipment, fixtures, plumbing types-- we have this listed out for all our consultants. And this was something new in the past, I think, year and a half that we've been implementing. And it's new for even the Revit users.

And basically, how do we locate where that asset is is very crucial. So where is that chiller, that boiler? It's all tied back to the room number.

And that room number is one of the model review checks that we need to have. Is that naming convention our DEN standard, which is very important? And it needs to be in all the Revit disciplines.

So the mechanical model either needs to copy in the rooms or within our schedule that we provide in the template. Place that room number, so we know exactly where that VAV box is, what room number, so we can find. It's an easy way the maintenance planners-- we can find on our end where all the assets are.

And we've made these, the room numbers, associated with a QR code. So a lot of our maintenance planners carry a Panasonic ToughPad. And then they can scan that QR code, and it will bring up within their system in Maximo, it will bring up all the assets and the information. And they actually can also click on an O and M manual, a specification, and bring up data that way.

BRENDAN DILLON: You'll see a lot of empty fields up here. This is the information we're looking for from designers. We try to take the approach of right information at the right time.

Before I came on to work at the airport, I was literally my own consultant. I went from being a second-tier consultant on our hotel transit center project to being my boss's client. So I dealt with the mess that we had created as a consultant, and I dealt with the mess that we, DEN, had created as owners.

So we were being asked for huge amounts of information in a vague manner. The hotel project asked for asset information about assets. That was almost verbatim the requirement-- didn't identify assets. It didn't identify what asset information.

It didn't identify exactly who had to deliver it or when. It was a bit of a mess. And that was one of the first things that I went through and changed, was as a consultant, you're going to know what your piece of equipment is.

You're going to know that's air handler Unit Three or VAV 12, or whatever it is. You're going to know its location. You're going to know it's an air handling unit. And since you're identifying it's an air handling unit, and that directly correlates to what we call the "functional area," we're going to have you identify that, too.

That's in the table at the end of our DSM, so it's really easy to look up. And for the most part, it's intuitive. But based on how things are handled at the airport, as far as how maintenance is divvied up among divisions, it gets a little funny sometimes.

And then you're going to just note that it's designed. We try to keep it pretty simple. And then the contractor is going to come through. And they're going to identify the information that they've got, along with updating any information that may change.

Location of a piece of equipment, such as a VAV may change from one room to another. We need to know that. It's certainly going to update from being designed to installed, or ordered, or whatever it is. We're going to want the manufacturer, the model, the serial number, and all that information. And then the commissioning agent is going to come through, and provide more information about that asset.

AUDIENCE: Excuse me, how are you wiring the BIM model to the Maximo system?

BRENDAN DILLON: So the question is, how are we connecting the BIM model to the Maximo system? Do you work for Microdesk?

AUDIENCE: No.

BRENDAN DILLON: OK. So we're using a tool from Microdesk called "Modelstream." And what that does is it creates a bi-directional data flow between the Revit model and Maximo. And it uses a number of pieces of information, most specifically or most importantly, perhaps, is the name of the family in the model.

And because it uses that, we have to be very strict about how our families are named, and that existing families from our existing kit of parts aren't renamed. Because by having that content mapped, when we connect the model, the connection is already set up. But if that family gets renamed without having a good reason for it, then we're going to lose that connection, and have to redo it.

It's not a huge deal to redo that connection. But every time you add another little step, and another little step, and another little step, it adds up.

AUDIENCE: So as the operations changes as [INAUDIBLE] passing it back to the model [INAUDIBLE].

BRENDAN DILLON: When we need to, yes. It's not an automatic data flow. But when needed, we open it up, and we say, "Pull." It pulls, and voila.

AUDREY VOORHIES: So the 60% submittal mentioned is very crucial. This is when we start looking, and making sure they've added location, the families are named according to our standards, our location is named with our standard type, just starting to have this information in. And then they can go back, fix it.

Sometimes, the consultants have wanted to resubmit an additional BIM 60% review for us. So that's been great. We get the information we need. We get a cleaner model. So far, it's working out really well.

BRENDAN DILLON: We also do interim reviews. I missed touching on that earlier. So if a consultant says, hey, we've got a big deadline coming up, can you just take a quick look at our model? Let us know how it looks.

We'll go in. We'll do that. We'll do a quick look. And we don't track those, because those are really for the consultant's benefit, and it's not a required deliverable. So we don't want to hold them responsible in any sort of way for that.

AUDREY VOORHIES: And using our template, I mean, it will track. I mean, they have to verify just a check box that it is an asset. But it will bring it up into the schedule. So they definitely need to use our template in our asset data schedule, so it makes it easier, faster for the consultant.

BIM 360 Glue-- so we've been using this for about two years. We used to use Navisworks. But now we're using BIM 360 as our clash detection. I'm hoping in the future that, with BIM 360 Team, they'll sort of add in this Glue feature in the 3D world, so it's all in one program.

But at the 60%, we host this on our end. And the consultants get the link. They upload their models where they are.

We have a scheduled meeting with our project manager, the BIM coordinator at the time, anyone involved, the consultants. And we go through clash detections. And it's another good way just to go through anything from the BIM review process.

One of the issues came up, like the rooms were coming in-- I mean, there's a check box not to have it in, since we require the MEP people to have that room information for our locations. So far, we add in our project managers. And they can look at the clashes, too. So it's been very successful.

BRENDAN DILLON: Now, one note is that we love Glue for the design process. We recognize that for contractors, Glue doesn't do everything they necessarily need. So a lot of our contractors will go ahead, and still use Navisworks, use a Navisworks workflow. We just find Glue to be much more useful, and much more user-friendly than Navisworks for during the design process.

So BIM 360 Field-- most of the time, when you're working with Field and with Glue, it's purchased by the contractor, or maybe by the designer. And it might be for a project, or it might be enterprise. We, as facility owners, are enterprise owners for Field, Glue, Team.

And this is so that at the end of the day, we can go back and look across projects, and conduct some analysis, and see how our consultants and contractors and trades are doing over time. Is someone consistently underperforming or overperforming? That would be great.

So we first started using this principally for asset capture. First, we used it on the hotel project. And that worked great.

And then on an institutional level, our emphasis was asset capture, capturing all the equipment information as the contractor was installing it. Not too long after that, we had a conversation with our internal QA team, who essentially said, we've heard about this BIM 360 stuff. Is this something we can try out?

So we set them up with a pilot project. And we conducted the training. The training took all of about an hour. And at the end of the training, they said, was that really it? Yeah, that was it. It was an hour of training.

Within a week, I had inspectors barging through my door demanding the ability to use it on all of their projects, which was pretty cool. But we had to sort of rein them in. Because deploying a new tool in the middle of a project was not necessarily ideal.

The project managers weren't necessarily on board. And we hadn't gone through the entire process with the inspectors for the length of an entire project. And we wanted to make sure we did that before we rolled it out on a larger basis.

But since then, we have rolled it out to all of our projects. We currently have somewhere in the area of 100 active field projects for our active projects at the airport. And we took that another step in using it for warranty tracking.

At the end of the project, we get our one-year warranty on everything, parts and service included. And there wasn't really a good way to track that information, or not a consistent way. Contractor A may prefer using Excel spreadsheet. Contractor B may prefer this proprietary software that they had developed. Contractor C may like this tool that they've got up in the cloud.

And our folks that did the warranty tracking, and our project managers, were finding it kind of tedious to have to pop between different platforms all the time. And we knew stuff was falling through the cracks because of that. So we deployed-- we created a new issue type in Field for warranty.

And off we ran. And everybody has loved it. It's been a real improvement for us.

AUDIENCE: What tool did Field replace for you guys?

BRENDAN DILLON: So the question is, what tool did Field replace for us? You're assuming that we had a tool in place to actually do this.

[LAUGHTER]

So is a pad of paper and a pencil a tool? Because that's what it was. Our QA inspectors were going out in the field.

And they would write their notes. They'd pull out their smartphone or their digital camera, and they'd take pictures. Then they'd go back to the project trailer.

They'd transcribe their notes into a Word document. And they would upload their pictures, pull it all together. And anywhere from half an hour to an hour later, depending on how busy of a day it had been, they'd finally have their notes done.

The new process is they all walk around with their iPad. They see an issue. They take a picture of the issue. They attach it to their QA report.

They keep going. They're filling out their QA report as they're walking around the site. It has saved them a ton of time.

So in order to justify the cost of Field, I told our execs that what it would take would be for our inspectors, every single one of them, to save exactly nine hours for a year. Nine hours-- that's it. That paid for Field for the airport-- all of the users at the airport.

When you consider that those QA inspectors are making in the area of $100 an hour, that a lot of the time they pull overtime, because they're on a busy job site. They've got to get this stuff done. Well, I was supposed to be out here half an hour ago. I guess I'll have to go back and transcribe my notes now.

So not only is it the $100, now they're on overtime. So they're getting a higher rate. It hasn't necessarily saved us time, but it has definitely-- sorry, it hasn't necessarily saved us money, because that can be hard to quantify. Because not everybody is doing overtime, and you just never know.

But it has definitely made our inspectors more productive, because they're not spending the time going back and forth between the trailer and the project, looking for RFIs, looking for drawings, looking for specifications. It's always all right there on the iPad. And they just do the field report while they're looking at everything.

They're attaching hundreds of pictures. The number of pictures that we get is actually turning into a bit of a joke, because we're pretty soon not going to have some place to put it all. So that's the process that it replaced, the tool that it replaced. It replaced Microsoft Word and pencil and paper.

AUDREY VOORHIES: We have the Kit of Parts that we provide to consultants, our templates, families. We have MEP families with our correct naming convention that we send on BIM 360 Team on each project. We just put it in a Kit of Parts folder. It's ready. They have the most up-to-date template.

And just recently, we've created some Dynamo Scripts. So doing the BIM review process, we've created in-house scripts that you have so many in-place families. And that way, you can check off on the BIM review form you have this many.

And a lot of times, so many people are working on the models, when they give it to us, they didn't know they had imported AutoCAD files. So we've created some scripts that we share. It'll go in and delete all those imported AutoCAD files, so they can give us a clean model.

We have a script that will delete the imported line patterns. And just anything we create, we share. So we share with our consultants anything that we have on our end. So that's sort of one of our main philosophies.

AUDIENCE: Will you share that with us?

BRENDAN DILLON: Sure.

AUDREY VOORHIES: Yes.

BRENDAN DILLON: So the question is, will we share with you? Yes.

AUDREY VOORHIES: Yes.

BRENDAN DILLON: Yes, we can post what we've got.

AUDREY VOORHIES: Yes, we can post the Kit of Parts.