Unlock Design Potential Through Quantification: An Architect's Guide to Autodesk Takeoff

MATTHEW PEREZ: OK. Hello, everybody. Welcome. Thank you for being here today. I appreciate you attending this session of AU and on the first day. Hopefully all your sessions are going well and we're getting into the swing of things now.

This is my fifth AU as an attendee and my first time as a speaker, and doing it solo. I had an opportunity to participate in a panel last year and that was a lot of fun. So I decided to come back for some more.

Today, we're talking about Autodesk Takeoff, and today's class, Unlock Design Potential through Quantification, is meant to be an architect's guide to using Autodesk Takeoff. And hopefully the folks in this session have had some experience with Takeoff, or estimating, or are architects who have had to do cost estimates for their project. But again, the intent today is to frame it within the architect's perspective. And hopefully, by the end of this hour, we've had some fun thinking about quantification, or about as much fun as that could be. There's a lot to cover. So let's get going.

I want to start first by introducing myself. My name is Matthew Perez. I am the Director of Digital Practice at MOREgroup. I've had about 15 years or so experience in the AEC industry. Most of that has been in educational architecture, some public architecture, and throughout the majority of it, BIM implementation and digital practice of some shape or form.

As the Director of Digital practice, I have the unique opportunity to lead a team of very talented architects and BIM professionals who are responsible for providing training, support and leading our R&D efforts for our national architecture and engineering firm. Our work focuses on improving design processes and fostering innovation through digital practices.

I have a Bachelor of Science from the University of Texas at Arlington. I then went on to earn my master's in architecture from the Illinois Institute of Technology. I am a licensed architect in the state of Texas and an interior designer as well. And when I'm not working, I enjoy spending time with my family, traveling with them. I'm an avid race fan, and when we can travel as a family to go see a race, that's a perfect day.

So that's a little bit about me. I also want to introduce the organization that I'm representing today. That is an organization I've been a part of for about the last 11 years now, and that is MOREgroup. MOREgroup is a company comprised of a handful of architecture and engineering firms from across the country with a single vision, and that is to be the leader in designing social infrastructures where generations thrive.

MOREgroup focuses on a handful of market sectors, being education, public architecture, and health care. We have over 700 team members nationally. And as you can see from the map there, we've got offices and a presence up and down most of the East Coast, throughout the major metro areas of Texas, and out in the, West with offices in Utah, Nevada, and California.

Now for today's agenda. What I thought we'd start with was a little bit of backstory to help us get a better understanding of where we're coming from as an architecture firm with our cost estimating practices. Then I want to look at what take off has meant for us and how that's changed our approach to cost during the design process. I'll look at some tactics that we found to be successful when using Takeoff and Revit together.

We'll also discuss how Takeoff has entered our ACC environment and continued to boost our collaboration efforts within ACC. Finally, I'll share with you a little bit of information on where I think we're going with Takeoff and what happens next.

Now for these types of conversations, I really like putting together an image before we start to help me set the tone for the topic for today. And usually, these visual aids are-- they're pretty spot on to the topic. And today, it's not.

So if you follow along with me, I promise I'll make an attempt here at getting to a point. But this is what my mind's eye drew up as I started to think about this conversation months ago in developing this AU session. And what we're looking at here on screen is some gameplay images from an app game that my kids play. It's called Subway Surfers.

And in Subway Surfers, the objective here is to take your character, which is bound to these train tracks, all the way down the line as far as you can go, collecting coins all along the way and having to dodge obstacles on your way to the finish line. And the catch to this is that in this game, you're only able to control the character's movements left or right. You don't have any control over the speed that your character is running down the tracks.

And so you're bounding through this rail yard, dodging all these obstacles, collecting coins. But you run into situations here in this game where you bump into obstacles. And if you bump into an obstacle big enough and it slows you down enough, you end up slowing to the point where you're captured by a security guard who's chasing you.

And if the security guard captures you, he'll grab you, he'll take all your money, and he'll drag you back to the starting point. And within the bounds of our conversation for today on Takeoff, I think, again, my mind's eye started to conjure this up, because when I think about our design process, and how we quantify our projects, and the rigor that it takes to keep a careful eye on progressing both, I think that a lot of times, we end up in these situations where we're just running an obstacle course, dodging these things along the way, and trying to just make it to the finish line with as much of our coins as possible so that we can have the opportunity to go on to the next one and do it again.

But oftentimes, when our projects hit major obstacles, especially budget ones, we can really be impacted by having to move back to the starting line again. And so with Takeoff and with cost estimating in general throughout the design process, what we're really trying to do is we're trying to make our cost estimating more of a conversation throughout design so that we're not hit with this dose of reality when that obstacle is confronting us.

And so as I was developing this conversation for today, that's again, the feelings that I was having. And this image started to come out of it. But let's talk more about how we started and how we've implemented Takeoff.

So I want to start with a little bit of a history lesson here. And as we look at our history of our cost estimating practices, we'll start with what our workflow was like and what led us to using Takeoff, and then where we're at with Takeoff use today.

And so in the beginning, this was largely an Excel-driven process. So we might be doing quantification in a handful of ways, but the data itself is ultimately existing just in Excel. On a single project, the goal was you have a single Excel file that you're tracking cost all the way throughout the projects and you have different tabs for your major milestones.

That was the goal, at least. But a lot of times what would happen in this workflow is that as our architectural teams are producing their cost estimates and quantifying their projects, they're dropping them into many different Excel files. Maybe there's options that we need to review and price separately. Maybe it's a phase, or an alternate. But regardless, what starts to happen is you end up with a lot of data to need to manage and doing it all through Excel can be pretty labor intensive.

And of course, at scale, when you look at this across the breadth of an entire firm, you're talking now about many, many hundreds and hundreds of files, potentially, to have to manage. And that inherently creates a lot of difficulties. And I think one at the top is being able to track what's current. And so this definitely was an issue across many projects. And again, due to having a lot of data stored in many different locations.

The other part of this equation is that our process would vary from project team to project team, or even within a single team, from person to person. And so depending on who did your quantity extraction, the outcome could be pretty different. And so we saw inconsistencies in the way that we were calculating things and then saving that data.

And at this point in time, I'd say we also had a pretty limited quality interaction with our data. If you weren't the one who put the Takeoff together, you weren't really aware of what exactly was counted and how. And then what's that relationship, once you get it into that final estimate?

The way that we were quantifying our projects, especially early on, was largely based on 2D PDFs and CAD files, where we would be drawing polygons to represent square footage figures in both CAD, and in Revit, and in PDF softwares. But the issue with this is information gets outdated very quickly. And so it's hard to track over time.

Even when we would do a quantity Takeoff, we might be using outdated information, because from the time that job was printed to where it might be that day could be pretty different. And so difficulty tracking changes over time, I think, is probably the biggest issue with how we were calculating things in 2D.

But looking to 3D, as our Revit experience grew and we got better at understanding what all Revit could do past being just a model development tool, or a documentation tool, we really started to be able to leverage the data that we were putting in in a solid and accurate cost estimate. The data which we would extract out of that model, we began to understand, was true to the design and true to accuracy of the model.

And so we got to enjoy this period of time where we really understood how schedules could work to boost this process. This is a key and critical moment in our understanding as a firm overall in how we leverage that data and how we turn that into estimates. And then, again, of course, track it over time.

And then, if you fast forward a couple of years from that point, we brought on an in-house cost estimator. And this was a huge change to our workflow. And it was a great improvement to the process overall. And to walk you through that, our project teams were still chiefly responsible for the quantification of their own projects. So they would go in and, again, either in 2D or 3D, calculate the values. And then once that information was secured, they would then schedule a coordination effort with our estimator and provide the estimator with the information. And again, here, I'm talking just in terms of the architectural team.

So that architectural team works with the estimator directly, provides them the information. It's then the estimator who compiles that information and compiles our consultant information as well into a single templated Excel file and that produces our final cost estimate report. That report then gets reviewed back with the team so that everybody understands what the final numbers are and can start to use that data moving forward.

However, at this point, I think it's worth noting that we were really reviewing data just in Excel. And so our estimator didn't really have a good idea of the design itself, the building as a building, or what the intent was. Our project teams understood how to quantify the data, but didn't really know what happens after that point. They didn't see it after that point. And this disconnect started to appear within our design process.

Our estimator, at this point in time, too, might have also been doing Takeoffs start to finish on paper. And so furthering the disconnect between current progress in Revit versus what he understood to be ready for an estimate.

And it was at this point in time a few years ago that we started to really think about, well, how do we improve this process? So we asked ourselves this question. How can we improve the process of quantifying our projects and develop a better relationship with the cost data throughout design?

This question led us to an evaluation period where we were looking for softwares that were available on the marketplace that could help us bridge the gap between our estimates, our building design, and improve that process overall, and strengthen that relationship to the data.

And so as we were looking at different tools around the marketplace, we started to rate them and categorize them in these three key areas, these buckets here. And that was implementation, impact, and ecosystem. And when we were evaluating these things, what we were really looking at was what is the effort to get something implemented? What's the potential impact it has on our current process? And then within the ecosystem of things that we had in play, different softwares we had in play, how does this fit within our current environment?

When we landed on Takeoff, we saw immediately Takeoff was a front runner in these three categories. At this point in time, our estimator had started to work in ACC himself. He took it upon himself to better understand what the design intent was and what these buildings look like by utilizing ACC and he started to equip himself with the tools necessary to understand our Revit files on ACC.

So he did a really good job of digging through parameter data and connecting the dots between what's in the model and what he needed to extract. On the impact side, within the first couple of test projects, we saw the potential was very high to impact the efficiency that we do quantity takeoffs, and our estimating process overall. Because, again, our collaboration could see a boost in effectiveness as it's done through ACC using Takeoff.

Finally, our ecosystem of softwares. Takeoff fits perfectly within our already flourishing ACC culture. We are an ACC shop, and before that, BIM 360, and before that, Teams and Docs. And so we've been along this Autodesk cloud product train ride for quite some time. And so fitting this in within our existing ACC environment meant that we had a bolt-on solution that just worked well with everything else that was already happening.

Now Takeoff was selected, and I can say that today, we're really enjoying using Takeoff as a solution for what, just a short time ago, really amounted to issues for us. Maybe they're not considerable on every project, but the process overall needs to be improved and Takeoff really assisted with that.

The workflow itself saw drastic changes immediately and I think maybe the biggest thing to note here was that our quantification efforts shifted from our project teams doing all of the quantification of their projects to now our estimation team doing it, because they're doing it in Takeoff. And so the burden on the team to have to stop what they're doing in progress to do a cost estimate doesn't exist with take off anymore. And our estimation team is able to take on that workload because they can do it so effectively and efficiently using Takeoff.

All these things combine to reduce our overall lead time in completing estimates. Our estimators typically start Takeoff the same day that they would get a published, updated model. And so they're able to get the information quickly, they're able to turn it around quickly. This all leads to an increased awareness overall of cost during design. Again, because we're using more up to date information. It's just a few clicks away.

Training our estimators was an easy process, I'd say, because again, we already had a well-established culture of using ACC and our estimator had pushed himself to get in there and really better understand how he could leverage it. So that prior knowledge of ACC on our estimator's part was key to the success of implementing Takeoff.

Our architecture and estimation teams are now both working in ACC, coordinating across the same information. And finally, I think one major change that we've seen with Takeoff, it's been interesting to see, is that Takeoff is acting as a silent partner in how we progress our Revit chops and our Revit models, and the quality and consistency with which we produce models.

We'll talk more about that later. But I think that's an interesting byproduct of Takeoff use. So let's look now at Takeoff in practice.

To date, we've completed around 30 projects or so where we've gone start to finish all the way in Takeoff. And anecdotally, my cost estimator-- our lead cost estimator tells me that he thinks we've saved between 50% and 75% worth of the time he would have taken to produce that same cost estimate before, either on paper or by receiving information from our project teams.

That right there, I think, has been the single biggest change to our process overall and has definitely made the biggest difference to our lead estimator and how he does his work. He's taken on a lot more volume because of this. And he's even told me recently that despite that volume increase, our accuracy continues to get closer and closer to our general contractors numbers or our construction managers numbers, even telling me that on some recent projects, we've gotten within 1% of our GC's numbers. So for us, that equates to a high level of accuracy, which has been great.

There's another interesting thing to see as an architecture firm looking at how general contractors have started using Revit models. Maybe they're using Takeoff or something else. But regardless, using the same data sets to produce the same information in mostly the same way, it's been an interesting thing to watch. And I hope that accuracy continues to get more and more developed with our GC partners who are now using Takeoff as well, and we get closer to being 100% accurate with them.

Finally, I can say that our estimation team has grown from the last time I got to talk about Takeoff at AU. It's grown by 100% We've doubled. Now we have two people. So I can say that we have an estimation team and not just an estimation guy. So that's been a great change with Takeoff now.

I'll leave you with a quote here from our lead estimator, Jake Patton. He said, after about three months of using Takeoff, with Takeoff, the estimation process is drastically shorter. What used to take me four days now takes me less than a day to complete.

Well, I think that's pretty profound statement from a guy who's made his career doing takeoffs on building projects to now be able to use a tool that has cut his time that drastically. That was great to hear, and after only such a short amount of time. So let's shift gears now and talk about Takeoff and the design process.

First, I want to start with looking at how we approach quantification throughout design. We'll look at how we do 2D quantification through Takeoff and then how we start our 3D quantification with Takeoff. We'll also look at how we found it best to use Takeoff when evaluating options. And so we'll have a look at what that means for both 2D and 3D.

But first, I want to start here and give you an idea for where quantification was within our design process. And so just like all good buildings, we try to start with a concept. And at the beginning of your conceptual design phase, maybe you have a fuzzy idea of a budget number you're trying to hit. Maybe it's not totally solidified yet, but you have some awareness of it.

However, I'd say at this early point, cost is not really a major player in this effort. Nobody is sketching and calculating it as they're drawing. That doesn't come in until we get just a little further down stream and we start to see hard line drawings and plan diagrams.

And so this is in our schematic design phase, early schematic design phase. We start to get these plan diagrams that we can actually utilize to view as a building. And so we start to see that these diagrams relate to a building footprint.

And it's at this point in time that we'll do our first opinion of probable cost, or OPC. And here, we're primarily relying on square footage values to do our Takeoffs. And so for both the architecture and the consultant disciplines, we might heavily rely on that early on.

Leading now into Revit development, and certainly getting towards further developed models, we start to see a shift in our approach to quantification in this design process. And what we're looking at here now is model quantities, element quantities, not solely just square footage.

And so this is maybe still in SD getting into our design development phase. We're looking at individual elements in the relationship to the whole. But maybe we're still not 100% there on what we can calculate. Maybe there's still some things that we have to fill in the gaps on. But here, we'll do our second OPC.

And when we review that second one, so we're getting ready to share that information with the owner, as can often happen, sometimes a dose of reality hits. And what we're faced with is a VE exercise that takes us back to the drawing board and sees us redesign the project to some degree. Maybe this is a reduction in square footage. Maybe it's isolating alternates that could be priced differently.

Maybe it's phasing the project out. But regardless, when we've developed this much and we get to this point in the process, to have to contend with this obstacle now, this budget obstacle can be pretty detrimental to the project, to the team, and the process of design development overall. And so what we're attempting to do with Takeoff here is we're trying to bring cost earlier into the conversation.

And so we're able to use more of that early on collateral to do our cost estimates. And we're also able to utilize Takeoff as a temperature check more frequently throughout the design process. And so especially where we see in VE a lot of that model development happening, we can start to leverage Takeoff to check ourselves as we're moving along in this process.

And so let me give you an example of what that looks like as a 2D drawing. And so what you see here on screen is a program of spaces which have been laid out and their adjacencies have been studied. And what we start to get out of this is the foundations for what could be a building footprint. And it's a pretty straightforward workflow in Takeoff to draw a polygon around this thing and set that footprint as a square foot element.

It's very similar to a process that you would have seen in CAD or in Revit with drawing polygons over the same thing, or filled regions, or areas even. But in Takeoff, the difference here is that we're now able to visualize the design in relationship to the cost. And we do that by applying a Takeoff type to our footprint here.

And that Takeoff type can then relate to us what square footage we're dealing with overall. And then if we apply a cost per square foot value to that, we can start to see what the relationship of dollar is to design.

And so in this way, what we've done here is we've done a Takeoff for each of our two floors in this project. And we can see the overall square footage and we can see the overall estimate based on the square foot per-- or cost per square foot value that we've entered. And this right here, I think, is such an effective method of viewing this information, because again, we're capitalizing on the ability to visualize all of this information together.

We're looking at the square footage. We're seeing the design layout on screen and we're seeing the inventory of it. And it's all right here and it's all accessible.

The other great thing about this is that as we've started to set up these Takeoff types recently, we started to set cost per square footage numbers based on regional figures from around the state of Texas. And so regional numbers based on building type is something that our estimation team tracks regularly. They look at historical data to see what buildings had been costing and then they used that information to predict what it may cost.

And what we figured out how to do here is how to leverage that information with our estimation team directly as a Takeoff type so that it can be used across any project in our ACC environment. And so this is extremely helpful in making sure that we have consistent and up to date cost per square foot values. So applying it in 2D really helps to start to paint that full picture for you.

Now as we move into 3D, the design process and the quantification process shifts. As I said, we're looking now more at elements within the model. But early on, it might still be a little undercooked, let's say.

And so what do we do as we're just starting our Takeoff workflow using the 3D model? Well, we calculate what we can. And then we fill in the gaps where we need to. So if there's been assumptions that we need to make because we're missing information, we try to limit the amount of assumptions we have to make and leverage more of the model. But of course, with Takeoff, there's still opportunities to quantify the project in a way that gets the information in the spot that we need it and pulls out accurately what is available.

At this point in time, we might still be remaining-- or still be focused on cost per square foot values. But now we're utilizing the actual modeled floor plates. So just dialing in that little bit more of accuracy.

The great thing about this, of course, is that all of our in-progress Revit models are accessible in near real time to our estimation team. So if they need to do an estimate on an option on Monday, and Tuesday, and Wednesday, they can-- they can do a publish each day and do a new estimate. So really tracking changes over time, I think, is the key to this early starting point, just getting the information in there.

And this becomes very useful tool for checking design options early in this process over time. And so I've seen us use it for evaluating difference in materials, evaluating alternates, and again, phasing a project out. What does it look like if you have to split it up into different packages?

And on the topic of evaluating our options, I'll start here by explaining how we do it in 2D. What you'll find with Takeoff is a very familiar comparison tool when using your sheets to do a comparison. It's similar to what you'll find in Build and Docs, but basically we overlay two versions of a design and we're able to see quite clearly, with them overlaid, what the difference is, clearly represented between the two different colors.

And then, of course, we can also pull up the inventory to see what that means cost-wise. And so you can look at them in the same screen and you're able to get all that information up front. And again, I think this is one of those simple things, but very effective to be able to have a conversation now showing your design progress in relation to cost in this way.

And so here's an example of looking at those two different options. So what we have here is-- in this case, we have a single package. We've got two different versions of this plan uploaded. And the exercise here was to try and reduce square footage in option two and understand better how does that get us closer to our budget number. And so it's simple, but effective.

Now when we look at evaluating options with Takeoff in 3D, it changes a little bit here, because our options are somewhat limited. We do not have the native comparison tool like we have over in 2D for a 3D model in Takeoff just yet. Maybe that changes in the future, but for right now, we've had to figure out some ways to work around this. And what we found works best for us, again, to try and keep it as simple as possible, we'll produce snapshots of different options or different progressions throughout time, different versions of the model.

And we'll just simply review them up on screen, side by side. And it's a bit of a manual process to get it all set up, but it's effective. And certainly, when you're looking at that as a project team with all the information there, it really helps to illuminate what are the potential options and how do we move forward.

And so I think it's still a very valuable method for reviewing information in this way. The Takeoff data that we would include within these different options, or different packages can also be extracted out at this point and dropped into our OPC report. And maybe what we're looking at is everything all together, including our consultant numbers for the rest of our-- for the rest of our divisions.

In this particular example, what we're looking at here on the left is maybe option one. It's a smallish size building with a meeting space in the center of it. And in that option, you can see that there's three large openings here, so three bays within that one space. And because this project hit a little bit of a budget challenge, we were forced to look at options for reducing square footage.

And on the right-hand side, you can see here, we've now gone down to only two bays. And this is a simple example, but again, being able to reference this on the same screen, and again, with that inventory information, makes it helpful for the team to be able to see what their options are and make a decision on progressing the project.

Let's pivot now and look at Takeoff and Revit together. And with Takeoff and Revit, I want to explain how we've been able to work with both of them in Tandem and some of the things that we've done to be successful with that. A lot of that has to do with how we've set up our models in Revit and some of the things that we can create in our Revit template. And I also want to talk about how using these two together has really promoted model quality and content around the firm.

And with Takeoff in Revit, I want to fast forward down our design process a little bit and frame this from the perspective of a more developed model. So this is something that, again, might be more in our DD phase, going into our construction documents phase.

And at this point in time when we're doing Takeoff with these developed models, our approach is completely out of cost per square foot and 100% based on elements present within the model. And the goal here is for us to increase the accuracy of our overall estimate, because we're reducing the number of assumptions we have to make.

And so in this way, Takeoff, again, is operating as this shadow figure driving Revit development. Because if our estimation team is doing the quantification of a project, what's in that model when they do their estimate needs to be representative of the intent for design, and the content needs to be present so that it can be all accounted for.

And in this way, I say Takeoff has needs of Revit. It's looking for things at this point to be present, to be labeled a certain way, to be consistent from project to project even. And so I think there are definitely some noteworthy needs of Revit, but in turn, it is promoting our overall Revit capabilities.

And because we have these developed models being scrutinized through Takeoff, it has certainly improved our accuracy. And as I mentioned before, it's got us closer and closer to our GC estimates. Now let me cover some keys to Revit settings that I think have been successful for us.

Before I dive into it, I do want to just say something about Takeoff and how it's working. For those who don't know, Takeoff is relying on 3D views published from the Revit model to ACC to be able to utilize that for quantification. So this is similar to how model coordination relies on published views from Revit to do clash detection.

However, in this case with Takeoff, there is a big difference. And that is that only the default 3D view template-- sorry, 3D view is available for Takeoff. And so when those models are published, if it's not in that default 3D view, it's not going to be visible in Takeoff. And I think in this sense, maybe Takeoff has catered more towards a different workflow. Maybe it's more construction based.

But as an architecture and engineering firm, we had to figure out a way to get around this, because there's more needs for us than just a single 3D view. And so the way that we thought would be the simplest yet most effective way to confront this limitation is to manage that default 3D view in our Revit template. And so we started to tweak it and to create a view template for it. And the objective there was can we get most of our project teams and most of our projects most of the way there, in terms of model setup for Takeoff, by managing it just through that 3D view and a single template?

And we're using it to control visibility across the project. So we're controlling major element categories, work sets, filters, design options, phases, et cetera, et cetera. All of that happens through that view template.

I think it's important here to note, too, that where it's necessary, we definitely encourage the use of creating multiple view templates to manage what's visible in that default 3D view. So because we can't cycle through different views to publish to ACC for Takeoff, we're cycling through different view templates.

It's a bit of a work around right now, but it's working. What we do with them is we'll set a view template for that default view and publish it to ACC. That gets saved in a package. And we'll do the same thing for another option, and then the same thing again for every other option that we need to review in Takeoff. And so it can get a little bit tedious, but that's how we approach quantifying alternates and options.

The other thing that I think is really important to note about how Takeoff is working and what we do with it is that we definitely leverage the ability to do Takeoffs on multiple versions of the same option. And so in this case, we're tracking changes over time, just by updating versions. This is fantastic.

I love the way that this is working for us. Again, we're able to create snapshots where we need to. So should we have to go back in time and review what we did on a previous Takeoff, that option is there. But in this sense, we're tracking costs now over time in a very tangible and highly transparent way.

And so let me put all this together, then, about options and packages. Let's say we have three different design options in our Revit file. Each one of those gets its own view template. And then each one of those, when published, may get its own package.

And let's say one of these is one of these packages gets selected. These design options are selected. Now we can continue tracking from these early on moments, all the way through the rest of the project, just tracking the different versions along the way.

Shifting gears again, let's look at now Takeoff and ACC together. And so with Takeoff and ACC, I want to stress the importance of having our stakeholders in there and the role that Takeoff has played within our ACC environment. We'll look at how we're extracting data and then the final output for our cost estimates from Takeoff.

I'll start here by saying that I mentioned earlier, we're an ACC shop. We've had implemented for about the last 2.5 years or so, so since January of 2022. And all active projects since that time have been produced inside of ACC, which means we have a long-standing history and a culture now that brings all of our project stakeholders together in the one environment, and adding our estimation team to that has really just furthered our ability to coordinate effectively as a larger group of departments within the firm.

ACC, in that sense, for us has really democratized access to Revit data. This might be my favorite thing about implementing ACC over these years. And it's not just the Revit data in this case with Takeoff. It's also the costing practices, or the quantification practices.

So for both our architecture and our estimation teams, it's enhanced the understanding of critical information from both sides of this equation. The integration with ACC has also, again, made it possible for our estimation team to coordinate and to view data in near real time. And our estimators have gotten to the point where they're able to publish models and review them at their discretion.

They know now what kind of conversations to have with their architecture teams on things that either they're needing to see or things that they're seeing in a Takeoff that may need to be calculated or addressed differently. And so in this sense, ACC really has provided a good method for this type of coordination.

Extracting data now. The way that we typically treat our data in Takeoff is we'll do the entire architecture quantification exercise in Takeoff on some projects where we have in-house structure in MEP. We're now starting to look at Takeoff for them as well.

But we take that inventory and we export it out to an Excel format. And then that data is manually transferred over into a single now OPC template. And so we're tracking that same information over phases with still our OPC Excel file. But it's really just compiling all the data, which we've already calculated.

Now, the final output of that. Right now, it's continuing to live on via the Excel spreadsheet. Hopefully in the future, that changes, and we're able to get further out of Excel and more into Takeoff.

But what's nice about this and where we're at today is that you can see within that OPC Excel file the information very clearly and you can come back to the Takeoff, which that information in your OPC came from, you can go back and reference that data whenever you need to. So our review process now has improved because of that. But the final output, ultimately, is still in that same Excel file.

And so I mean, just very simply, the way that that looks in our inventory on the left, we just copy and paste it straight into our Excel file over on the right. And now we can do it by division, instead of having to go in and do it a line item at a time throughout the Excel template.

Finally, I do want to end with where I think we're headed with Takeoff in the future. And so as we look ahead to continue using Takeoff, I think the perennial goal for us is going to be to continue improving our estimates by building upon our capabilities with Revit and building information into our Revit models. If we stay focused on improving the data coming into Takeoff, I think we'll be able to get closer and closer to those accuracy goals, which we ultimately want to hit.

Expanding implementation and use cases of Takeoff to all of MOREgroup. Right now, it's limited in its implementation, but we're working to grow it. And I hope that we continue on this track of being able to expand our estimation team and expand our capabilities and our volume of estimation through Takeoff.

Personally, reporting on Takeoff data would be a huge goal. I know our organization and our estimator would love to see that as well. But just the ability to be able to see active, in-progress cost estimates from across the firm in a dashboard would be fantastic.

But unfortunately, today, that data is not really available in the same way that it is other data that you get out of ACC on the global scale. And so hopefully there's some improvements there from the Autodesk side. That would really help with being able to see this info globally.

Finally, I would love for us to get closer and closer, as I said, to doing all of our takeoffs in ACC. All of our cost-estimating practices happening in this one spot. We'll see how far we can get. We're working towards that now.

We're not quite there yet, but I would love to be able to just hit Print on a Takeoff and there's my whole completed report. So with that, I'll thank everybody for attending the session. I hope you have a great AU and I appreciate your time. Thank you very much.