Using Autodesk Platform Services to Improve Design Management.

SAMIKSHA SIROHI: Hello, everyone. And welcome to our presentation using Autodesk Platform Services, APS, to improve design management. This class, we are going to talk about an automated process we have developed using BIM 360, Autodesk Construction Cloud, Forge, and Power Platform. Before diving into it, I want to introduce myself.

Myself, Samiksha Sirohi. And I'm thrilled to be here today. With over 15 years of experience in the AEC industry, I have had the privilege of serving Mott for the past five years in the role of BIM information management and digital delivery lead. My primary responsibility revolves around spearheading digital initiatives and ensuring their successful implementation within our organization and projects. I would like to acknowledge Pooja Rastogi, Jeanette Astley, Paul Briedis, Digital Lead Europe, and Jay Maniyar, BIM Manager and Digital Lead for our India business. They all have been instrumental in driving our digital initiatives forward.

Let's get into it. Would you like to monitor design progress versus a plan without any manual intervention using a BIM 360-based automation. In traditional design project management, the process involves manual tracking of deliverables and updating schedules using tools like Primavera, Microsoft Project, or Excel.

From this data, key performance indicators are established to monitor and control projects, including metrics like planned versus actual progress, earned value analysis, and revisions. This manual approach requires significant effort from the project management team and demands close collaboration between project and a BIM management team.

Unfortunately, this method can introduce errors into the data and often results in a delay in reflecting the most current information in project trackers. Introducing the BIM 360-based automated system provides a solution that eliminates these bottlenecks. This solution provides a system that seamlessly tracks deliverables based on the data published within the BIM 360 project or Autodesk Construction Cloud platform, streamlining project management process and ensuring real-time accuracy.

Why should you remain in the room? By adding additional attribute information into BIM 360 and applying a workflow to extract process and represent this data, to gain insight into the status of the deliverables, which significantly aided the team to effectively manage the project. We are here to shed lights on the tech stack we have used to unlock time saving by automating the creation of planned deliverable placeholders in BIM 360. Join us as we delve into the power of Autodesk Platform Services in establishing a connection with BIM 360 using Autodesk Forge.

Additionally, we'll show the capabilities of power apps in shaping user-friendly interference and showcase the process of streamlining business logic and automation. We will demonstrate how we have established a power app, defined a folder structure in BIM 360, and set up the Power BI dashboard for tracking deliverables. The key takeaway is that you can apply a similar approach to track and access model-driven data and efficiently manage the process and the progress of information production through a dashboard. That's why staying in the room is essential to learn and leverage these values' insights.

The next section of this class, we will talk about the project that we use an example for what we created. This case study centers around a significant project within the Indian food industry. The mod team overview. Within a mod, from last 15 years, we are providing services to Indian business. Our dedicated team handling Indian projects is referred to as the SMM team. The SMM department specializes in providing advisory services, managing project within the industry in the infrastructure sector.

Our primary responsibilities encompass local project deliveries and extending our expertise to support global projects across various Mott offices. The Indian operations. In India, we maintain a robust presence within a five operational center dedicated to handling Indian projects. These centers are strategically located in the key cities, including Delhi, Ahmedabad, Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Chennai.

About the project. In this project, there is active involvement from approximately 100 engineering staff members, comprising designers, modelers, and project and the BIM information management team. Managing and tracking over 1,500 deliverables for more than 20 structures, each involving more than 10 disciplines, is a challenging job.

For project management team, it is a good example who reflect the collaboration between the project management and the BIM management team. In industrial projects of this nature, typically, multiple structures are involved, such as process plant, social block, canteen, plant rooms, pump rooms, chiller yard, cooling tower, scrap yard, and more.

And multiple services like architecture, civil, MEP, infrastructure, instrumentation, piping, cross-- process and package systems are involved. As a Mott Indian team, we are responsible for basic and detailed design development where the entire manufacturing facility has been developed, along with associated utilities, electrical systems site, and off-site infrastructure.

What made this project difficult? And how and why did you need to be more efficient? Using traditional approach for tracking of deliverables and updating schedules, we would have to employ people just to do this job. The key project challenges are monitoring the deliverables. Not understanding the status of the deliverables made project management very difficult. BIM 360 did not offer any solution for our needs.

Change management. Unexpected changes are our project scope. Adjustments while maintaining projects efficiently can be difficult. Data integration. Managing large amount of data against planned versus actual deliverable. Meeting project deadlines, specifically in industries with strict schedules like construction and manufacturing, can be demanding and require careful planning.

This is what we did to solve the challenges. We know how to solve individual smaller problems. But connecting all of them to make a real difference was something we had to learn. We had to experiment with different workflows, attribute linking, adding additional attribute information in BIM 360 and extracting-- retrieving this data to make informed decision at project management level.

Master information delivery plan integration, which we call as MIDP. Integration with live BIM 365, ensuring seamless access to MIDP. Real-time analysis, obtain real-time analytics for both individual projects in your entire portfolio. Workload schedulings, generate monthly workload schedules as a part of our solution.

The tech stack we have chosen for our project management encompasses several key components. BIM 360, our system is primarily hosted on the BIM 360 environment, which serves as a core platform for managing projects data and collaboration. Forge, Autodesk Forge plays a crucial role. It allows us to extract and update data at regular intervals, enhancing our data management capabilities. It a set of APIs specifically designed for Autodesk BIM 360. We leverage APS to perform various tasks, including generating placeholders, PDFs, within BIM 360, incorporating custom attribute values and extracting these attributes as needed.

Power platforms. Power platforms are integral to our tech stack. We use Power Automate to make REST APIs call through APIs, ensuring seamless data integration. Power Apps are employed for building user-friendly interfaces, simplifying data input and retrieval, while Power BI is harnessed to create interactive dashboards that provide valuable insight into our project data.

SharePoint. SharePoint plays a significant role, serving as a robust data management and a document library platform. It aids in centralizing data storage and facilitating efficient document management together. These components from a cohesive tech stack that empower us to streamline our project management process, enhance data accessibility, and make informed decisions based on the real-time insights.

How we did it. In our system architecture, we have start by creating an Excel template with custom attribute. We then use a power app to upload this template to SharePoint. The system takes this data and generates placeholders with custom attributes in PDF format within a BIM 360. Within BIM 360, we have a setup of folder structure, workflows and custom attributes against each folder structure. To keep everything up-to-date, there is a weekly trigger to fetch information, including attributes from BIM 360 Publish folder, which is then stored on SharePoint. And finally, we have developed a Power BI dashboard to visualize and interact with this data.

Step one, configure BIM 360 and Autodesk Construction Cloud. Configure BIM 360. Building information modeling 360 or Autodesk Construction Cloud involves setting up various component features to suit our specific project needs Power Automate, formerly known as Microsoft Flow, is a powerful workflow automation platform that can be integrated with Autodesk Construction Cloud and BIM 360 to streamline process, automate tasks, and improve project management.

Before integration your data, exchange with Power Automate. First make sure you enable-- install the integration in your Autodesk Construction Cloud account. You need to login with your Autodesk account as an account admin of that project, which you want to integrate with Power Automate. As an account admin, you can find the Power Automate integration in account administration under the Apps tab. Install the integration to add your account.

But in the integration, enabling your Autodesk Construction Cloud account, you can now move over to Power Automate. You create your automated flow. You can start your flow through the Create Template or Connectors tab. Here, we can use existing template, which you can adjust and customize as per the requirement.

Forge app. Autodesk Forge is a cloud-based developer platform. Forge allow end users to design and access engineering data in the cloud in order to automate processes, connect teams and workflows, or visualize data. Applications can be created through Forge APIs. The first step to creating an application that can utilize Forge APIs is the creation of a Forge app. A Forge app allows a developer to securely control the API permission of any application that uses the Forge app.

When an application can-- has a Forge app with the correct API permission for integration with BIM 360, it still cannot allow a user to access their BIM 360 hub. This is because BIM 360 integration has another layer of security called custom integration. Any application that is intended to integrate with BIM 360 must have a Forge app that has been added to the required BIM 360 hub as a custom integration. The addition of custom integration is only possible by BIM 360 hub account admin and developer.

An Autodesk Forge user can create a Forge app for use by application by logging into Autodesk Forge. User can create a Forge app using Create App button. The Forge app should be given an appropriate name and description to distinguish it from other Forge app. The callback URL will vary depending on the environment of the application that will use the Forge app. Only the required APIs for the application should be selected.

Power app can be integrated with BIM 360 to create custom maps, and derive workflows, and enhance the project management and collaboration. Power Automate can streamline and enhance various aspects of project management and collaboration within the BIM 360 environment by automating repetitive tasks, improving data integration and facilitating communication among project stakeholders.

The specific workflows you can create will depend on your project needs and goals. The general process to develop a power app in Autodesk BIM 360 is to refine your requirements, access Autodesk APIs, set up development environment, design your app, integrate with Autodesk BIM 360 and Autodesk Construction Cloud, implement business logic, test your app, deploy your app documentation.

Remember that developing a power app within Autodesk BIM 360 can be complex process. And it may require a good understanding of both Autodesk BIM 360 and the power app platform. Additionally, staying up-to-date with the latest change in both platforms is essential for successful app development. We have developed a power app for creating a placeholder on BIM 360. Power apps serve as a user interface for uploading DCI, document control index, or MIDP, master information delivery plan. Data in Excel format, managing requests, and setting up project for reporting the power app includes the following screens.

To run this power app, we need to create or refer Excel-based standards template for populating attribute information in BIM 360 for generating placeholders. Excel template contains information on design deliverables, along with custom attributes value, like IFA, issued for approval and IFC issued for construction, baseline dates, IFA and IFC forecasts, [INAUDIBLE], publish date, et cetera. These are the mandatory attributes which we need to define to run this application.

Within an app itself, we have created a tab for downloading the custom interview template file, which is created in Excel format and saved in SharePoint. To basically download and upload DCI template from SharePoint, you have one stop page solution is this power app. Step three, BIM 360 folder structure and workflow. Prior to establishing a placeholder on BIM 360 with custom attributes, we have organized a folder structure on BIM 360 and defined custom attributes within BIM 360 in alignment with ISO 19650. And the project specific requirements, particularly considering the involvement of multiple assets.

For creating the placeholder, we have used the Publish folder as a final stand for deliverables. The specific deliverables are placed in the Work in Progress folder. We are tracking all deliverables in our Publish folder, which essentially function as our MIDP or for these deliverables. The proper checking workflow of content and coordination will follow for the files' transition from WIP to the shared folder. We then share approved drawings with the project manager for publishing the drawings into the Publish folder. And placeholders are replaced with the drawing uploaded by the project manager after final check in, including custom attributes.

Checking and approval process. Before publishing the file into a published folder, all deliverables shall be checked before issued. The level of checking will depend on the drawing status and the purpose of the issue and shall be defined in the project plan of work. Checking should be done by team members in the project plan of work.

Verification and validation shall be done by team leader. And this process is also reflected in the common data environment workflow. The deliverable checking sequence defined roles and responsibility-wise. This flow is implemented in the BIM 360 environment. We built a separate workflow for shared publish and shared copy generation. When doc is ready for review, initiators submit it for review, and select the relevant workflow, and specify the share and the publish copy path.

Step four, mandate customer attributes. For tracking and monitoring the progress, we should define some mandate custom attributes for placeholders. These custom attributes' values in BIM 360 will be added by doing content check review submission. And it will be filled up by the user, who will be responsible for developing the document in BIM 360.

To define the review stage specific ownership and to create analytics, we propose to fill up mandate attributes during the review listed below. And as mentioned, these defined attributes should be filled by user while working and sharing the files with reviewer. Below listed mandate attributes should be defined with each deliverable in respective folders. Mandate attribute for work in progress folder are author, checker, status, and revision number. Mandate attribute for shared folder is approver, coordination, review, and revision number. And mandate attributes for publish folder is baseline, forecast, deliverable dates.

In this BIM 360 Autodesk Construction Cloud, as per ISO 19650, we should add all the mandatory attributes as an admin workflow. Then only we can create folder-- create placeholders with defined attributes. To create and manage custom attributes, you should have access of BIM 360 account as an administrator or user with appropriate permissions.

Step five, push the data into a BIM 360. Pushing data from a power app to Autodesk BIM 360 typically involved using the Autodesk Forge API. User interface with power app to push the data. This is what the Power App we have developed to creating a placeholder on BIM 360. After clicking on the play, creating a placeholder, click on Attach File and select the Excel template file, which created based on the mandatory attributes.

Once a DCI Excel file is uploaded, it's saved in the SharePoint document library and a Power Automate flow is triggered. For each row in DCI Excel file, a placeholder is created in respective folder based on the file name. The placeholder is an [INAUDIBLE] PDF file, which is also saved in the document library and is renamed before upload.

Once the placeholders are created, custom attribute values are assigned to them based on the values in the Excel file. The slide shows the placeholder, created in BIM 360, the custom value of placeholders [INAUDIBLE]. If you can look out, there is a PDF created. There is an option updated by. Usually, updated by the users names are reflected, who is responsible for upload the files on BIM 360.

But because we have used a power app, that's the reason it shows BIM 360 system. And the mandatory attributes, as we told, we have used the baseline forecast and deliverable details. These attributes, we are using to extract the data into a Power BI dashboard. The overall workflow for placeholder creation is input preparation, placeholder creation, and the checking status.

Step six, Power BI dashboard. Another Power Automate flow extract the custom attribute values at regular interval and save it in an Excel file, which forms the data source for the Power BI dashboard. We have developed three dashboards as per the project requirement. The first dashboard provide an overview of project progress, comparing planned versus actual progress. The second dashboard offers detailed asset specific progress tracking at a micro level. And the third dashboard tracks progress discipline-wise.

One key feature is the revision control board, which enables reviewers to quickly identify the maximum number of revisions generated for each project, asset, and discipline. Power Automate, where we can add project for reporting and visualize each project added into this Power App. Power Automate flows, scheduled to run every Friday, will extract custom attribute values for all files from BIM 360 for projects that are chosen for reporting, that the data extracted is saved in an Excel file, stored in the SharePoint document library.

Additionally, data pertaining to the app, such as setting project selections, request status, and more is stored across multiple SharePoint list. This is our overall intelligent design progress monitoring system. We're reporting using Power BI, a central space to check all ongoing project progress, get weekly actual versus planned data.

Next dashboard which we have created for admin to monitor the requests, this is dashboard which we have developed for user to monitor the request. The [INAUDIBLE] showing planned versus actual of the portfolio, we have developed a dashboard called the Intelligent Design Progress Monitoring System based on the extracted data.

With the help of this data, each week's update with micro-level detail, asset-wise project weekly progress, daily and on time deliverable count. If you can see in the dashboard, we have on time contractual deliverables, 63, late contractual deliverable, 80. These are the way we can manage and track the project deliverables.

This page showing asset-wise delivery status with discipline-wise workload or local revision control pool. This page showing project and discipline-wise revision status. The solution facilitate rapid project setup, tracking, and corrective action by design management and information management team in the event of deviation from the established baseline. New processes have been implemented for creating placeholders, extracting custom attributes, and generating reports. This dashboard update processes like portfolio creation, data extraction, and the dashboard. The process is working in this manner.

Outcome. When we're talking about the outcome and benefit for this particular development, it's a low-cost solution which uses only known token-consuming APIs in Forge, saving time and eliminating human errors, project and design managers able to complete their job easier, resourcing and program forecasting easier to manage, improved relationship with our client.

The next step for the same development is automatically migrate project from old hub to a new hub. The old hub basically defined a local server. And the new hub is basically defined as an Autodesk platform common data environment, BIM 360 or Autodesk Construction Cloud. Automate project setup process because, in each project, we are talking about the company standard. We have standard folder structures, and some standards, and some templates, everything, which we can use to automate and automatically setup the project into a BIM 360 or an ACC.

Extraction of title block information from models in BIM 360 check for compliance. Again, we are using the Forge APIs and Power Automate to extract the data, which involve-- which entered into a title block, and use those data as a check for compliance. Extraction of model properties in check for compliance.

Again, when we are talking about the model deliverables and model validation tool. So we can have our option with the help of API and the Power Automate. We can extract the model-based attributes and model properties. And we can check against our quality check compliances, linking with baseline and update schedules to perform earned value analysis for project portfolio. Thank you.