Description
Key Learnings
- Implement ACC Build for subcontractor, consultant's and client's collaboration.
- Create and understand project workflows for Reviews, Transmittals, RFIs, Submittals, Meeting Minutes and Correspondence.
- Understand the benefits of implementing a structured Common Data Environment (CDE).
Speaker
- DBDerek BourkeA mechanical engineer by profession, Derek has over 15 years experience in the construction industry, with the last 7 years spent working in The United Arab Emirates, on a number of large-scale projects. Derek is currently responsible for BIM implementation and digital construction for Khansaheb Civil Engineering. His expertise includes the integration of digital technology to enhance project efficiency, reduce costs, and improve collaboration among multidisciplinary teams. Derek has a proven track record in successfully delivering complex projects, leveraging his deep understanding of BIM implementation, electronic document management systems/ common data environments, construction processes, and digital technologies to drive innovation in the industry.
DEREK BOURKE: Thanks for joining this case study on Khansaheb Civil Engineering. We're a tier 1 contractor based in Dubai operating in the United Arab Emirates. And today, we will be discussing how we've implemented Autodesk Construction Cloud and its tool set in ACC Build on the Dubai's iconic Palm Jumeirah.
So I'm Derek Bourke, Digital Construction and BIM manager for Khansaheb Civil Engineering. Khansaheb Civil Engineering is 89-year-old company celebrating its 90th year in operation next year. So we have based ourselves as one of the largest and leading contractors in the UAE.
We provide a whole life sustainability solution for our clients in the building and infrastructure projects. We have five key business sectors. We provide a range of integrated services. So as the construction division and as a main contractor, we'll also provide our interiors fitouts, joinery, MEP, and roads and infrastructure.
Some fitout projects, our interiors division would be a main contractor, but also we will come with our own MEP division and joinery division. So it's a business solution that has resulted in benefit to our clients, giving them satisfaction that we can deliver the full project for our customers.
So those projects range from five star hotels, shopping malls, residential towers, commercial buildings to roads, interchanges, and cycle tracks. So we have a wide portfolio of projects covering almost all parts of the market. I'll just share some samples there now.
This is the iconic Atlantis the Palm, the Palm Jumeirah in Dubai where we completed the Aquaventure Waterpark delivering in 2021. University of Birmingham that was delivered in 2022. And notably, that was a full asset information as built BIM project deliverable for the client.
Current project coming to a close is Dorchester Hotel and Residence. It's coming to a finish after being awarded some several additional fitout works that is in Business Bay here in Dubai. Another project coming to a finish is Private Villa on the Dubai's Palm Jumeirah where on this project we've used ACC as the project common data environment or CDE. So this project value of $23 million has over 20 companies and over 100 users on ACC.
Just one of our historical projects, again, is a Serena residence on the Palm Jumeirah that was completed in 2018. The reason I've added in this is we are currently 50% through a new project for the same developer. The new project is called Serena Living.
The reason I mentioned the previous project is client has asked us new development, do the same did for us on the previous job, but bring a digital common data environment with you this time. So we presented Autodesk Construction Cloud as our solution. And this project now, again, is both 50% through it's life cycle as well. So this is $245 million residence with currently about 46 companies and over 280 active users on ACC using the full build tools that ACC has to offer.
Just down the road from Serena Living on the Palm, we have another development called Blue Haven by Blue Haven Real Estate. This is 24 luxury villas and a clubhouse. So that would be 25 high end buildings. And again, Khansaheb have lifecycle or business as main contractor, interior fitouts, MEP services, and our roads and infrastructure division plus our joinery, all the visions in one project, which the client is pretty happy with that we're able to provide them. So this project at the moment has about 30 companies on ACC. That's about over 230 users using the full suite of ACC.
Just kicked off this week is Dubai Exhibition Center extension. So we have a north and a south hall extension. Currently, the Serena Living was the largest project we've done. This now is going to be the largest project the company has ever procured.
And this has a client common data environment, which is Oracle's connects. What we might talk about later is the integration with ACC, as we will still use ACC as our common data environment where we are hosting our information and using third party tool to integrate with the client CDE. So I'll speak about that later on.
Just to give a little background on how this works as a business or a business with our size, and we're looking to have a very good IT department that works across the business. So when it comes to looking after our infrastructure or data security, we are 100% cloud-based business. That means we have no more on-site footprint for data storage or servers.
What that means to the business is once you're signed in as a user, you will have a username and user password. You will need two sources to identifications of your sign into your laptop or any of the applications. Every so often you will need to use an authenticator app to register into these platforms.
What that allows us to do is once people are signed into these platforms, if somebody leaves the business or moves on, it's a one-click stop to remove them from all the applications. So it secures the business so that people leaving you don't have to remove their access for every platform.
So we use Microsoft Azure platform for single sign on. That gives you access to the business applications that you need, Office 365, our ERP system, Autodesk tools whereas you're ordering tools, whether it's AutoCAD, Revit, any of the EEC collection, and also ACC single sign on.
And we have OpenSpace, which is kind of a partner of Autodesk. They allow us to use Autodesk Construction Cloud as the sign in tool for OpenSpace. And again, Oracle uses the same single sign on tool. So it keeps our security, and it keeps our data secure when anyone leaves the business. It's working very well for us.
Just going to back to the journey, we say before 2019, we were using BIM 360. And probably most of our site processes were manually paper based. This was engineers going to site with mounds of paper, getting each person to sign their piece of work off, going back to the office. Somebody has to scan that information, store in either a OneDrive or a SharePoint.
And so we were finding it very hard to secure our information, find things when we need it. And of course, we were wasting a lot of time on site. And every site then there was something slightly different about their processes. And so standardizing our projects was an issue for any design coordinator or engineer that was moving from one site to the next. So that was also a problem for us.
For our file sharing practices highlighted there on line 3. And again, that was a huge concern for us. A lot of our users were using WeTransfer, sending stuff as they could if on email using USB sticks. It was just finding information, finding who you sent the information to. It just wasn't being tracked properly. So a lot of time wasted. And then with time wasted, we realized we needed to increase our efficiency.
And so in those investigations, we partnered up with Accienta who partnered with Autodesk. They're reseller for Autodesk. We then investigated our process. And we found out through the market, through information we received from Autodesk and Accienta that 63% of our teams were using three to six applications, storing a drone in one place, storing RFI information in another, using Excel tools.
We wanted one-stop shop for all our information for our project teams. And that that's why Autodesk Construction Cloud seemed the solution for us because-- I don't want to get ahead of myself with the presentation. But having that one-stop shop, that one true source of information, ACC was the only real tool out there that we could see that had all the applications we needed.
So we found our design team were struggling to find a way to identify issues. So when they found something wrong, whether it was in a drawing or whether it was on site, they found it very hard to raise that issue. Who do they raise it with? How do they track that it gets resolved? Through the old way of sending emails or through what came very common in the last few years is WhatsApp as a tool. It's an app for sending messages. So we wanted to fix that.
We found most of our team were transferring data manually, whether, again, emails. But mostly every site team just loves spreadsheets and tracking whether something is done by opening a spreadsheet, taking off the time and date it was done. We lost a lot of accountability.
When you're using manual signatures as well, there's no way of tracking who that scribble is. If somebody's signature, you cannot read the name from that signature. So accountability was a huge issue for us. Again project close out. If you're sharing files through emails, you're sharing files through USB sticks, sharing your information through WhatsApps, you're not going to be able to gather that information, especially if somebody leaves, moves on to a new project, that information is lost.
This was the most staggering-- staggering results of our investigation was the time lost. So 35% time wasted. That's not time lost due to rework on site or time lost waiting for materials to deliver. This is time lost dealing with wrong information and conflict resolution. The most staggering is 5.5 hours per week looking for project information.
That is going to someone asking them for a drawing and then having to go through emails, go through a SharePoint site or OneDrive or even any other common data environment. So it's a staggering waste of time for any engineer, design coordinator, or design manager, or project manager. And the value starts to stack up there when you put a monetary value on that 5.5 hours per week.
The capital expenditure then for us to invest in a common data environment pays for itself back then when you start saving time. And the reason I picked the title of this case study about going green, it's the sustainability. It's saving time. It saves money, not just about saving trees when we're not printing anymore. We're using mobile apps, but we're also saving time, which if those engineers are wasting time looking for information, they're not all on site solving problems.
The design coordinators are not resolving design issues before it goes to site because it's 20 times cheaper to resolve an issue in the office than it is on site. So then if you're costing less on rework, costing less on material, we are becoming more sustainable. So we realized that we needed to make things better. We needed to make everything easier for our site teams and our project teams and to avoid costly rework.
So the solution, which was Autodesk Construction Cloud, obviously, formerly BIM 360 and before that BIM 360 Field. But the introduction of Autodesk build as well as docs had a full solution for us. But it wasn't that we have rolled it out in one day. We had to train our staff. We had to change the mindset of our staff. We had to just generational change where some of our staff have been working with the company.
I think we have 40% of our staff are over 20 years with the company. So there is a real change to be brought on to our processes. But also it gave us the opportunity then to standardize our operational procedures across all our projects and across our divisions.
So it allowed our engineers to stay out on site longer and not having to do paperwork back in the office. And it increased the accountability. When you are using these tools, an action is assigned to someone. It's open until it's closed. And this is a significant increase in accountability.
So not only that training, there's a lot of training involved. Anyone newcomer that comes in needs to be trained. Client team needs to be trained if they're using our tools as well. And all our subcontractors need to be trained. So it's not just, let's purchase some licenses. All of these steps have to be completed before you have the realization of your goals. And again, I'll share some of those tips and tricks as we go through ACC. But training is a big one and generational change.
So that will resulted in us with our CDE, common data environment, which has allowed us to integrate our estimating department, which is our pre-construction team or our tendering team. So now information flows from pre-construction into our project team using ACC.
Because not only did we get our project teams working on ACC, we now have our tendering teams working on ACC as well. So all the information is stored in one platform and then can be easily transferred from one ACC project to another using bridge or using third party tools. We now found it very seamless to add our subcontractors. We have a digital tool for training our subcontractors as well. And as you would imagine, hundreds of subcontractors coming on board on new projects.
But also we found that our consultants, our client representatives, the clients themselves, and sometimes their facilities managers all working on the one platform throughout the lifecycle of the project. Now, how does that work then when we go to a handover to project to an owner?
We have used third party tool with ACC Connect and some recipes called Workato where we can transfer all our information from ACC to an owner's platform. In the Serena Living situation, we are transferring all the information to their business SharePoint. We wouldn't recommend use of business SharePoint, but that's tool they've used.
Blue Haven also, they've used a business OneDrive. And we're transferring all the information there. So the data security for our clients is being met as well so that if we switched off, it connects in the morning, or if something happened-- sorry, ACC in the morning, they would be still a record for the client. And they have that security as well.
So to give again how the industry works here in the UAE is although the main contractor is responsible for the deliverable of the project, there is also an ownership on the engineers, which is the client's representative, the resident engineer, to sign off on all the work. So every shop drawing that we produce, every material that we procure, every work plan that's done on site, all has to be signed off by the client's representative.
So the tools we use on site for ACC is for work inspections, material inspections. We also use it for handover of work areas from main contractor, subcontractor, or from one subcontractor to another. And before, again, all these processes were done on paper based processes.
And we also have introduced, which mainly BIM 360, we originally used it for snagging, but now obviously it continues as a snagging tool, and submittals, and RFIs. So I'll show you those when we jump onto ACC.
Again, those tools are the mobile application, docs for our file storage structure, docs also for sharing files, issues tools for issues management, photos for one stop place for photos. And for any site engineer that was or planner that was taking regular photographs where to save these photographs and how to access these photographs was a nightmare.
Now we have one area in ACC that we can store all our photographs. And with the mobile app, you can take a photograph, and it's already uploaded instantly. We can add tags to those photographs. It's georeferenced and it's controlled by date and time.
Huge advantage. I'm sorry if I'm speaking too quickly. I just know myself the amount of tools that are available in the ACC. There's a lot to get through, but automated reporting and dashboards. We now can set up automated issue reports to be sent daily or weekly to subcontractors.
We can use the ACC data connector tool for automated dashboards, which I'm going to show you some examples of later. I'm using Power BI as well. Correspondence is a new tool for ACC and this has a huge advantage for storing your project correspondence. So some commercial teams that close out projects find it very hard to find information. So now we have a place to store those project correspondence, reviews, submittals, RFIs.
And schedules tool allows us to upload the contract program. Whereas in the past the planners are sharing a PDF file, which sometimes gets very large and very hard to search through as well. So the schedule tool is a huge advantage to us on ACC to be able to use the actual, let's say, P6 program. And again the new work plan tool as well is something that we've started to investigate.
And of course model coordination. I think all the other tools, it could be a topic on itself. So I won't dive too deep into model or BIM coordination, but we now no longer have to store our 3D models on a server or on somebody's machine. It's live in the cloud, and that's a huge advantage for-- I really thought it was probably a more advantage for the design teams, but now as a main contractor, it's a huge advantage for us to collaborate with our subcontractors as well.
So how does all that time saved I spoke about look at. Well, we looked at a small project, I think it's about, let's say, a $40 million project, which was about 50% completed. And we spoke to our engineers on the previous processes. We looked at the old way of working, which they said it took them 60 minutes to create a work inspection and that had reduced to 18 minutes using ACC. So that's a 70% reduction in raising inspection requests.
But also we were able to see that we had a reduction in response time, about 30% to 40% reduction in response time back from those inspections from the client. And the same is true for submittals. We found a big reduction. So it meant it's easier for our teams and quicker to raise inspections. But it's also found that it's easier and quicker for our engineers or our clients representatives to respond to those inspections.
So on that project that cost $40 million project has included material inspections and work inspections, currently 54% through the program, we have over 12,500 inspections. And if you're saving 42 minutes per inspection for an engineer per inspection, that's equivalent to over 9,000 hours saved on a project. And that's only 50% complete. So it was a huge, huge time saver on our projects.
So I promised to show you some live projects. So bear with me now. To make it easier, I've opened some of our several projects. But just to give you an overview on ACC project admin or account admin. So here, we have all our projects. Some of them now you can see need to be archived. So we have a bit of housekeeping to do.
But over the entire history for Khansaheb with ACC and we see some BIM 360 projects. We built 32 projects. Currently on ACC members, you can see your active members on ACC, which we have over 1,132 active members. And again, these are all managed by our digital team.
Now, unfortunately, we don't have a solution agreed with Autodesk yet on how to add our users. We are adding them manually, but I think we do having the ability to track our users and assign their roles based on their job requirements as well is an advantage to us. So I would encourage anybody looking into starting up ACC assigning roles is essential on these tools as I go through them.
So companies-wise, we have over 183 companies. Not all of them are active. Maybe we leave them on because we do a lot of repeat work. So there's no point removing a company and then adding them a year later. It was very important for all our work sets that we can create roles with, the ability to create roles as we see fit, but we try and standardize them for our projects.
Project templates is a key tool for setting up your folder structure to standardize across projects. So as you can see, we're already on version 2. So where we rolled out the original file structure after year, assessed them with all the sites, took the feedback and created a version 2 of our project templates.
Libraries I won't go into. Again, obviously, Autodesk have many partners and there's many integrations that have been used. Our CAD integrations are with ACC Connect, OpenSpace and PowerSearch. But also we have now started investigating with BIMLauncher, who are a provider for connecting ACC to other CDEs like I spoke about the DEC project.
And again, if we jump to another project. So this is the Blue Haven project. You can see the folder structure is set up for our submittals. So on shop drawings, we have included PDFs, DWGs. Description is key for any search tool, revision, version, control, discipline, document type. All these custom attributes that we've found are very valuable for our site teams.
And specifications in the process of investigating it, a new feature on tools reviews we're using for our downstream reviews. So where our subcontractors before we submit to the client, we're using the reviews tool. And again, for our own design team, our ordering tools or draftsmen create a review for our design team to review and comment before we submit to the client. We're very happy with that tool.
Transmittals. Key tool for tracking what we issue to our subcontractors or also what our clients issue to us. So RFI issue for construction information is sent through transmittals. But anything about transmittals, it's a one way system. It's not back and forth correspondence. It's the date this was sent to you is tracked and what was sent and who it was sent to. So it's a key tool for tracking project information and who it was sent to.
Of course, our issues tool is widely used, like I said, for all our site processes. So if I just filter for a type and we call for a work inspection, the quality. We can see we have over 3,874 WORs there at the moment. And this tool has advanced as well. There's new permissions after being entered. And you can now add attachments, which we'll talk about later as well.
Reporting. And again, members and bridge, all these tools are being used by generating reports that go out every week to subcontractors. Anyone can generate a report now. It used to be the only people that were able to set reports are project admin. Auditors have changed that anyone can set a report.
Now to jump to build, which I guess takes a long time to open. I've opened the Serena Living project, which again straight away gives you a view of the project, of the project program, and tasks that are open in the project. Sheets at the moment on this project, we haven't used sheets because there's over 4,000 locations.
We have used it on other projects. And we may use sheets later on in this project, but currently not on Serena Living. Obviously, the files, so the structure should look the same and feel the same as Blue Haven, issues very same as Blue Haven.
Forms. Again, there's some more development that we need to do in forms, but we're using it for design team creating forms to issue to our engineers to let them know of changes to certain areas and certain jobs. Photographs might take a second to open there, but have one open here for the DCE project is just started on site.
You now have project managers and site teams recording the photographs. So very easy for somebody to explain to subcontractor what's going on currently on the site. For example, if we take any one of these should be georeferenced to the location. And a little auto tag AI and integration into ACC, it picks up that it's a site. And that allows you then to filter photographs.
If we jump back to Serena, you can see how that's progressed the project. And AI has picked up on the ductwork, fire protection. Even though that's this photograph was sent to someone through WhatsApp, it's AI inside. And ACC has picked it. But you can see also the person who has uploaded this drone has added the location. And location is key as well if they want to search for drawings but for other applications as well.
RFIs. I want to show you too many of the RFIs, but it's a request for information which we're using the RFI types. Also this has just been added custom fields. Permissioning. So permissioning of RFI is who is allowed to answer the RFI, who is the RFI manager.
You can see here these are assigned individually. But in this case, the client themselves, anyone in the client is a reviewer. And roles is probably the best tool. So [INAUDIBLE] is a consultant. DC is for document controller. They have the role as reviewer as well. A very same thing for submittals.
The only difference between RFI and submittals is the answer. RFI is answers. Submittals gets a status. And that's why Autodesk have divided those two tools. So again, it uses the same permissions and types as an RFI. And we can create templates as well. Predefine what is filled in into these tools.
Meetings is next on the list. And I'll jump to another project where I have open already is the meetings. Currently, I'm using these meetings for my BIM coordination meetings. If you can see here, MEP BIM coordination meeting.
The last one was yesterday, which I actually didn't attend, but I assign that to somebody else that needs to now change those meeting minutes from agenda to minutes but with the full minutes tracked here. But also what Autodesk have introduced is meeting templates. So you can predefine meeting templates, which we're going to use for DCE project for all our kickoff meetings.
Next on the tool correspondence. So let me jump back to Serena Living, which now you can see correspondence is being populated, which you have general correspondence. But also we've created some correspondence types, which we have created, which the project team then will be able to check by type.
Schedule tool might take some time to open. And again, there we go. I knew something would go wrong on a live demo. But if we jump open assets as well. So you can see schedule tool was loaded. This schedule hasn't been loaded for some time now since March. And it probably goes to show we're not currently using this tool, but we are investigating it now because of the new create new workplan tool. We see that it has great value for our team.
Assets again, this project is actually a BIM project as well. So we have generated our assets from the 3D models, which we are going to start populating with asset information like manufacturer information, warranty start date, warranty end date, inspection, Installation date, all the information that that's required for the facilities management team.
We will populate in ACC and using another-- add in tool for Revit, take it out of ACC and push it back up to our Revit model. So the integration of Autodesk Construction Cloud with your Revit, which are 3D models, your Revit models is really valuable to us as well on BIM projects. But again, I do think that is a separate topic to be covered.
And as you can see, Reports and bridging are the last two. But reports templates are scheduled to be sent out on this occasion. The snagging list is scheduled to be sent out every week on Monday at 8:00 AM. And that's for all our subcontractors. And then we have other coordination issues are scheduled to send out. Very handy tool to automate reminders or schedules to our team.
And that's pretty much covering the tool set. What I did say I would also demonstrate is insight. And that is our dashboards. So let's quickly, hopefully, some of these insights will open up pretty quickly. And I'll change one of these projects because DEC has only started. We have a hotel project that is coming to a close as well. So let's see. Hopefully, Insight will open quickly.
Now so on our Serena Living project, we have several quality dashboards. And now I will need to sign in at the end using our Microsoft single sign on to sign into these Power BI dashboards. And I'd only sign into one of the snagging ones.
Now see, this information populates our work inspections that we can track. It was loading. Now you can see this was last refreshed yesterday 10:30. So this is actually due to refresh every morning at 6:00 AM. So I need to investigate that. But you can start seeing how many open WORs there are on this project, which is actually Blue Haven project.
So 128 of them have B status. And that means there's an action there for one of our engineers to complete. Eight of them approved. And that may have been approved lately yesterday. And our engineer now can close that inspection. 42 of them revised and resubmit. Of course, one rejected.
So based on those figures, 42 C status is not an unusual. 235 under review. That means it's open with the consultant or the resident engineer. So that figure is more worrying than any other figure. But also we can check how our subcontractors are doing, even our own team. So our MEP division how are they doing.
They have the majority of the C statuses. If there was 44 in total, 33 of them were MEP department. Not unusual for MEP department to have C status work inspections, really healthy.
We then search by issue, by creators who's responsible for those 33 C statuses. We can dive into them using our dashboards. Also, this is a hotel project which are currently snagging at the moment. Final area inspection requests are using submittals. So we can track that with a dashboard, see how many are still open or have yet to be closed, snags them.
Again, I didn't really talk too much about locations, but locations is key for any of our inspections, especially snagging. So when we populate locations in ACC, they are used then for snagging. So you can see here now we can track snagging by location, by particular, whether it's the end user or the consultant themselves, how many are still open and what location they're open to, and who they are with.
Dashboards. So the main part for settings is our locations. We can see here on the Serena Living project, we have tier 1, which is, on this occasion is a tower. Tier 2 is the level. And then tier 3 is room. And that's true for each tower, tower 1, 2, 3 and 4.
These are key for us tracking all those inspections all the way down to-- sorry, we have an extra tier because these are common rooms. And then we have apartments, which are called units 301 has their rooms as well.
But when we're probably-- actually presentation I'm doing tomorrow is on snagging. We hope to snag per unit, not per room in the unit. The ACC locations have been already set. And it's very important to us. So that is how ACC looks in Khansaheb to some of our projects.
But the key benefits and the key values that we see is multiple stakeholders can access the project information according to their permissions. Now, I probably didn't show you too much on the permissions, but permissions for stakeholders is usually based on company or role.
So some roles in their company may have more permissions levels than other members of the company. So the company has a dedicated document controller. They will get added rights to the folders, whereas somebody just may have a view download if you're an engineer as a subcontractor.
So permissioning and roles is very beneficial. It requires a little bit of work and a little bit of thinking. But once you do it for every time you're signing somebody, adding someone to a project, then they have the permission based on their role or their company.
Again, naming standards can be applied. We didn't show you any examples of that, but you can set naming standards. So that the project documents that they're uploading mostly meet the requirements of the naming standards, or they go into a holding area.
And version control we showed didn't show you an example of document compare, but it's a very valuable tool of how you can compare 2D, CAD files, or PDFs, and 3D models. Very useful tool for comparing versions. We have the full history of the document, who uploaded it, who viewed it, who downloaded it. No longer have the argument of I didn't see that. I didn't receive it. You can actually see who viewed it and who downloaded it.
Transparency is there with the document, history and activity log. And also we use that activity log to export the data. And there's one dashboard I didn't show you that it's a work in progress. It's already there. But we have a complete shop drawing dashboard where we can track a drawing from the day it was uploaded, when it was put into a review workflow, what the status of it is in that review workflow, when it was added to a submittal workflow and then the status of it as it goes through each step.
So a lot of moving parts there. We have so many very clever, dedicated to creating those dashboards for us to be able to automate our document logs. Currently, these document logs are being updated on a daily basis, maybe twice a day or three times a day manually on Excel. So we're trying to automate that document register. And again these are all the tools that are available to us using ACC Connect and the Forge platform. Under dashboards which we had looked at.
So just to finish up, I did briefly talk about the apps that are integrated in ACC but also ACC development since January last year to current. These are some, if not all of the updates that we've ACC has received. And a lot of these are very-- I could go down to this list and tell you how welcome these are because we have been submitting some development requests where we need some things changed or added. But a lot of these are very welcome.
Some are very surprising and most welcome. But there is others to come. And that's probably why I've shown this slide. I'm saying for us we feel comfortable that we've backed the right horse when we say ACC is our common data environment because Autodesk are not standing still.
They are developing this tool. It's not polished. It's not done. They're developing it all the time with their development team. And so that's most welcome. And for us as well, there is a few other things that we do want them to change that need to change. And they have promised some changes. And I could pick out any one of these and tell you the advantage it is to us to have it changed.
But they have the new tools, the new correspondents, new work planning tools, the new specifications tool, the new model viewer on mobile. It looks like the Autodesk have finally got it right with the model viewer, something that they've been missing for years. I've tested it out on one of our projects and it seems very stable. So very happy with that. The
Submittals tool needs some work-- photographs needs some work. We would like Autodesk to action on that where we can set permissions to photograph. So at the moment, anybody that has access to build license can view all the photographs or promise that they'll fix this and provide some permissioning which you have done with issues.
Now there is a workaround with photographs that you can remove people's access to photographs which we may consider doing on our new DEC project, but we haven't done it on our existing projects. The issues extra permissioning was very welcome.
They do have some work to do on adding company or watchers or company or roles to watchers because of the new permissions level. You only have visibility of if you are a watcher or assigned to if you have the lesser permissions level that we usually give to our consultants or clients representatives.
Maybe if auditors were able to introduce permission by type, it would fix that. But currently, we're very happy that it is in development. The new permissions is very welcome, but also the introduction of adding attachments to issues is going to be a huge time saver for our site team that are doing simple markups or simple PDF markups.
They don't want to give it an official document name or they don't have to now upload it to a holding area on to add it as an issue. They can now just add an attachment from their desktop or from mobile app, which is good.
OK. Looking forward to answering some questions, so feel free to add your questions in the Q&A area. And I'd be happy to further discuss the information or ACC. Thanks very much.