Workflow Upgrade: Transitioning to Model Coordination

THOMAS FULDA: All right, I think we're ready to go. Please pardon the obligatory safe harbor statement. So welcome, everyone. We're your speakers for today, and I'll start with introductions. I'm Tom Fulda, originally trained as an architect, but I've worked for several general contractors over the last 20 years as a BIM coordinator, with about 18 jobs under my belt at this point. Currently working as a construction technology manager with the healthcare building group over at Walsh Construction.

SAM GALLOWAY: Thank you, Tom. My name is Sam Galloway. I work at Autodesk. I'm a technical solution engineer. I've been here for a little bit over three years, and I come from a background of construction and architecture.

BRENDA COLIN: Hi, everyone. My name is Brenda, Brenda Colin. I am a technical solution executive at Autodesk. I have a bachelor in architecture, and I've been working in Autodesk as a technical solution executive for six years at this point. Prior to joining Autodesk, I worked as a contract specialist at Parsons, then was a project manager for the new airport in Mexico City. Before that, I had some experience on BIM modeling as part of my work at KMD Architects as project leader, where I helped to coordinate the design from the concept phase to the issue for construction for mixed use buildings. So happy to be here today in this session.

THOMAS FULDA: This session will cover the bare bones setup of a central file sharing site for [INAUDIBLE] BIM coordination. Builder's construction technology manager-- that's going to be me. I play for green team-- will show you how teams that still favor Navisworks Manage can use Autodesk Construction Cloud or ACC, as we'll just call it from this point on, to run clash detection between a mix of trade partners working both on and off the cloud.

SAM GALLOWAY: And then Brenda and myself are going to go ahead and we're going to go into the Autodesk Construction Cloud environment, and we're going to show you how to set up projects. We're going to look at Revit Cloud Worksharing, and then we're going to look at some of the features that are new to many of you that are in the Autodesk Construction Cloud model coordination and how it can replace Glue. And then we're going to go into Navisworks and I'm going to give you a-- I'm going to show you how to use it.

THOMAS FULDA: So as mentioned in the introduction, I'm Tom Fulda, and I've been doing CAD and BIM and VDC work for about 20 years now. And like most of you out there, I've been to a lot of these BIM coordination meetings. And the challenge of these meetings is the same now as it's really always been, which is how do we get all these people, software, networks, technology to work with one another? And like many of us, I started out with the organized software training. Got up to speed with class reporting and status tracking, really just like the rest of you, and just like we were all supposed to.

But I got out into the real world, and what I learned was that coordination was never going to be as sequential or predictable as I wanted it to be or as I'd been told. Organized chaos is really the best term for it, and construction was a place where I had to deal with constant and repeated changes to plan, scope, budget, schedule, and intention. We never had enough time to do things the proper way that we were taught in all those software tutorials.

So after getting my head knocked around on a couple of jobs, I realized I needed a workflow that was a lot more rugged than the one I'd been taught. I needed something that was resilient, that could survive repeated changes. Customizable, because we always had special conditions on every job. Fast, because I was always under pressure to deliver quickly. Open, so I could share the issues we found with people outside the department.

Connected, so I could plug them right into our existing workflows. Simple, because my collaborators-- well, they were all very interested in what I was doing. They didn't have the benefit of years of design technology training like I had. And lean, because we had small budgets and really limited resources to work with.

But what I'm going to do now is run a short 20-minute clinic on my current Navisworks-based workflow, and it's one that was developed in response to all these pressures. We're going to use it as sort of a baseline reference for performance before I hand off in the second half of the presentation to my partners here at Autodesk. And that's the part where they're going to showcase the next generation of products and how they might offer my team a workflow upgrade.

But before we started, I thought it was important that you hear and understand the values that I brought with me when I started building out our current workflow, because these are the same values we take with us when we consider adopting any new tool like ACC. We're by no means the only ones in the industry to use this method. It also gets called the heatmap workflow, or the curated viewpoints approach by those who do know. But it's a little different than what you're usually taught in the seminars, and the strengths of doing it this way are what I'd be giving up if I were to adopt a new tool.

The core metaphor used for my coordination setup is the spider web that you see on the screen right now. If you notice, spiders never get caught in their own webs, and that's because they start by building out a series of non-sticky strands from the center, and then infill with all the sticky strands later that that they use for catching prey. And that's exactly what I do with my Navisworks file. I start out with a network of safe viewpoints. These will let me move quickly through the model, but they'll also serve as a jumping off point later on to flag and tag issues with a set of curated viewpoints, permanently saved within the file that will let me catch issues just like that sticky webbing you see on the web here.

For our basic fundamentals, we're going to do two things first. Putting together a comprehensive set of smart searches is the most important. That's because the linked content, always going to change in the background. I need to set up and save a collection of shortcuts within the file that lets me quickly pick anything I need without fail or need to update.

Second thing we need to do is to start color coding everything. Selection and recognition are really the two most important things at the beginning. Navisworks has an appearance profiler utility built into the home toolbar if you're looking for it. Need saved searches to work, but it lets you set color overrides for objects that can be refreshed anytime with just the click of a button.

And now that I can see and recognize everything by color, the next step is just to start building out the navigation web of viewpoints. But before you start trying this at home, you want to check your global settings in Navisworks. Otherwise, you'll have to fix each viewpoint manually later on. Two most important settings are going to be to enable Save Hide Required Attributes and to disable Override Appearance. And that's because doing it this way will let you run Navisworks.

Turning different parts of the model on or off consistently as you go from viewpoint to viewpoint. We're going to disable a second one because if it saves color overrides with each and every viewpoint, the model's going to get really unusable really fast because of all the data points it's trying to save. The other ones don't matter as much. Just don't change them after you get started, or you'll have to redo everything about what you're doing next.

So the first few views I create are visibility views, and these work just like Revit View Templates. I'm really asking everyone to just remember the visibility state. This is a good example. I've started by selecting my smart set for structural design models, then I hide unselected for everything else. And then I hid the infill demolition work in the interior courtyard, and that'll show the finished state of the building, just the structure. I can come back to it any time I want. Just click on the structure viewpoints. The dark red view you see here is that first color override, with making structure dark red, and then the second pass was the pink, where I'm showing new construction phase.

A second tier of views I created are going to be my bread slice views. These work just like Revit section boxes. I'm asking Navisworks to remember the location of each section plane. For high rises, I usually cut the building floor by floor. For healthcare, it's usually sheet or department. But every project is going to be a little different.

Using the bread slice views as my jumping off point, I then create the dollhouse views. Top section cut here has taken an 1/8 of an inch below bottom of deck, looking down. So graphically, this resembles the RCP drawing the team is working from. Bottom plane is cut a couple of feet below the floor plan to see the structural framing below. And then I spent a lot of time making this the most useful starting view to work with on each and every floor. Keep cleaning out all the junk and superfluous data you'll get from the design models by clicking Update, Update, Update on the viewpoint.

Design MEP usually starts out visible in the views. As coordination content starts to populate, we start to hide it with a quick Control-H to toggle visibility on or off. Bring it back as a reference later on if we need to see what the original design looked like. And these dollhouse views are the ones I use the most. This is really the backbone of the spiderweb, one for each floor.

In addition to the dollhouse views, I also build target views for anything else we're going to check frequently. The idea here is just take the time to do it right, as far as setting up all the viewpoints that first time, and then come back to it later whenever we need to. The examples here you're seeing are some site utility work underground. A quick slice to check placement of concrete sleeves.

Here I've brought in CAD linework for the site plan and all the paving patterns. Navisworks will remember whether linework is visible or hidden as part of these viewpoints. So that's sort of a nice trick for bringing in CAD information, like the last example, where interiors was working in CAD, even though the architect was working in 3D.

Last view are going to be my stepping stone views. These aren't really necessary if you've got a small floor plate, but if you've got a large one, sometimes it's nice to have transitional navigation points. Here, we'd be going from the entire floor point to Suite 1601 to a specific room in that residency unit. It's all about moving quickly and knowing what you need to get there.

And with that, the web is really almost complete. The last step is to finish building out a folder structure for all these views. I start out with a top level coordination folder and then subdivide by major area, minor area, and so on. Keep it tight. Don't go past the bottom of the dialog box. And these folders are going to be the future home of all the sticky viewpoints that we're going to use to tag and track clashes. OK?

So now the web is built. How do we catch some flies? Like I said earlier, the tutorials taught us to tackle trade conflict system by system using a clash matrix, and I'll publish right of way or priority services, as it sometimes also gets called. And that method worked well for open areas, but it really falls apart for congested zones like mechanical rooms. If we let everyone lay out the work naturally here on a level like this in turn, we wind up 8 feet below the ceilings.

So for dense spaces like these, we really did need to look and work and decide on things as a team, with each trade helping one another succeed. And to do that, I really needed to set up an all trades clash report because jumping back and forth between all those compartmentalized clash reports wasn't doing anybody any favors. So if you look on the screen right now, you'll see the red sprinkler, the blue plumbing, yellow duct, green electrical, all saved into one single clash view. And honestly, getting this heatmap view of the clashes to look good, that's why I'd spend so much time with the color coordination up front.

And having it done that way to solve the congested spaces, I really started doing it for all the spaces I was coordinated, once we had the settings figured out. And this is the biggest change that this mess will make from what we were taught in all those training seminars. I keep using the Clash Detective to find hits between systems, but I abandon it when it comes time to group and sort and track clashes.

And then the other change is that we're going to run all versus all clash reports instead of doing it trade by trade, and then just dump all the clash results that we get in one big group. Don't even separate it by floor. And we can get away with doing it that way because of all those saved viewpoints that we just built out in the previous slides. Those viewpoints, they're going to be the tools we use to do the hard work of filtering for us using that combination of section planes and color overrides to render the results as a trade responsibility heatmap.

So here's how to set up. There we go. So here's how to set up the clash rules. If you're new to Navisworks, feel free to spend more time with this in the handout, or ask questions to me at the end of the session. I also have some models loaded up here on my laptop, if you wanted to see a live demonstration. Tags 2, 3, and 7 are the important ones. Use the pull-down really to pick your smart search set for all the primary trades in both columns, and then you're going to want to go to the Rules tab to toss out results from the same file. Otherwise, your clash report will just explode.

That'll get you started when you approach your dollhouse view again. And then I just do a quick Control-F2, which is the convenient keyboard shortcut needed to bring up the Clash Detective module to set up that color coded heatmap I was showing you earlier. To get the display to work like this, again, we'll demonstrate. We're not going to be grouping or assigning or sorting, so you can ignore these. The ones to pay attention to are on the right.

For item 4, we're going to disable the default red/green highlighting toggles for items. We're going to use item colors instead in this pull-down. And that gets the Clash Detective to render things using the color overrides we used earlier. Items 5 and 6, we'll explain the next slide, and item 7, by setting this viewpoint option to Manual, it's going to stop the camera from jumping around when you pick a new clash report or toggle. Back to normal view, I find that having that consistent viewpoint really helpful for navigating.

And then item 8, I sort of lied. We do actually use grouping, but it's not to separate by trade. It's really to group like-minded clashes, like all the [INAUDIBLE] hits, or all the hangar hits, put them in a special bucket together, and that's achieved using the inclusive/exclusive filters. Again, feel free to ask questions at the end of the session, if any of that's new to you.

And when reviewing clashes during a meeting, like most of you, I'm sure, I spend most of my time rotating between these four view types. Lower right is going to be my dollhouse view, showing the essential geometry on a level. Upper left is what happens when Highlight all clashes, Dim Other, and Transparent Dimming are all checked up at the same time. That gives you that trade ownership heatmap. Lower left is same setup. I've just unchecked Transparent Dimming. And then top right is what happens when I toggle on Hide Other. Really useful for just seeing the extent and scope of your clashes.

So at this point, I'm very pleased with the web I've built. Navisworks is showing me exactly what I want to see in exactly the way I want it seen. So now how do I share all these juicy clashes with the rest of the project team? So as far as issue trackers go, it's a pretty crowded market right now, and there are a lot of products out there. But to be honest with you guys, I've always been skeptical of adding any fancy add-ons I don't need. My reasoning's pretty simple-- they usually create more problems than they solve.

So my solution is what you see here, and it's really not an uncommon one. It's a curated viewpoint that's been marked up in red to bring focus to the issue. It's got a view angle that works in both the clash view and the normal view. Gets numbered with a unique tag, and gives a short, clear call to action. Besides ball in court with that little responsibility suffix letter there at the end. So instead of relying on Navisworks to hold my hand and walk me from clash to clash, I start in that dollhouse view of the floor, and then I review the coordination area just like a superintendent walking the floor, or like you're cleaning a bathroom, working from top to bottom, left to right.

Each issue will get its own separate viewpoint. Sort them by the room or zone they occur in, and then you drag them into the closed folder the next week, when you confirm that the subcontractors have picked up the changes needed. A nice thing about this approach is that it also works to catalog issues that don't necessarily have a geometric hook to tag onto the nonclash clashes, so this AV point really becomes this basic atom of the universe of coordination issues.

Basic philosophy is really just to keep it simple, silly, and put all the information needed to solve the issue in one obvious place, the viewpoint name. And that makes it customizable, flexible, easy to find. So I find typing out shorthand notes to be easier than working with multiple pull-downs for an interface. It's better for mental recall, too. And it lets you move really fast and sloppy when you're trying to take on the fly meeting minutes or run the coordination meeting while taking notes. Just clean it up later when you get the chance.

And for the report, I'll send out a weekly archival NWD. No separate PDF or Excel reports. And that's really the great thing about saving all these custom viewpoints, is that even if the PM I've been working with has no experience in Navisworks, all I really need to do is teach him first how to install Navisworks, two, how to open the NWD file I just sent him, three, how to get the save viewpoints dialog box to open, and then from that point on, it's just really a BIM PowerPoint presentation of issues that apply to his modeler.

So he just has to skim, look for anything that ends in the responsibility letter, whether it's E for electrician or F for fire protection. And then in addition to doing the reporting for me, that folder of weekly NWD files becomes sort of a de facto revision history. That's useful to have if we ever need to run forensics on a model problem or put together a BIM audit later on when resolving claims.

And really, as helpful as Navisworks has become, at this point, it's essentially one great big scrapbook of all the problems we've dealt with. We don't rely on the model for absolutely everything. We still use repeating agendas and meeting minutes to give direction and to track really the big picture issues. The agendas start out simple, like you just saw, and then they keep expanding as the job goes on. It becomes a nice little container for all the issues. Keep reviewing week after week.

This approach was easier years ago when it was just an informal Word document. But as my responsibilities have sort of escalated to more of a PM level, it's important to have an official record of meeting minutes, especially if you've got the design team on for the first 15 minutes, which we do, and you need to get their comments into the project record somehow when they're giving you direction. Procore meeting module here has been pretty helpful for that, even if the editing is really cumbersome. It lets my meeting notes live in the same space that the PMs work and live in every single day.

And that's how we do things. If I had to wrap it up in a nutshell on a single PowerPoint slide for my friends at Autodesk when they ask how I actually use their products, this is how I explain it. First we set up searches for everything, color coding as we go. Then we build a navigation web of all the helper viewpoints. Third step is to set up a series of all versus all clash reports. And then fourth, we tinker with the Clash Detective settings to render these ghosted trade ownership heatmaps.

And at that point, it's like a four cylinder engine. Every piece of it's working together. And we use that engine to power our core practice, which is the constant capture of all our coordination issues with those curated viewpoints. Best practices for the viewpoints, like I said, are to tag everything with the trade responsibility, make a clear call to action. Second, keep revisions to that system really quick and easy. And then last, make access to that library of problems really intuitive with a low barrier of access for anybody you happen to be working with. And last but not least, don't use the model for everything. Just keep using your existing set of helper tools.

It's by no means a perfect method, and it does have several weaknesses, especially when it comes to automation. You can read all about them in the accompanying handout. But it's worked really well for me over the last few years after repeated stress tests. And at the heart of it, you're really just replacing a tabular automated process with a color coded heatmap, and using your expertise as a master builder to flag priority issues after doing a mostly visual review. The goal is always to keep it simple and keep it quick.

So that's the first half of the process, how we set up models and run coordination. For the last few years, the second part of our workflow has been something totally separate, which is really just how do you share files online. But as these new solutions come along, they increasingly favor the common data environment, the CDE approach, and that's increasingly something that's getting merged, even with our existing practices, with the clash reporting tools.

I've been coordinating for over 15 years now, so I've seen a lot of things tried over the years. Back in 2007, all you really had was an FTP site, and I miss the simplicity of that-- nothing else about it. And that's why in 2013, Mortenson had sent me to co-locate in the trailer, work collectively with the subcontractors out there.

In 2016, at CannonDesign, this was a very nice setup. We had no local PCs. It was just virtual machines that you could access remotely in cloud. And since we were an integrated design firm, we could actually just link all our Revit models for every single discipline to the same drive letter from anywhere in the country. Fabulous setup.

Lost access to that in 2017. Made a good effort at Glue, but it was just-- for the projects I was doing, which were high rise projects, it didn't scale up particularly well. So we eventually had to abandon it. Fell back to really what a lot of GCs do, which is a lot of point solutions rather than one common platform solution to manage all our data. In 2020, went back to Cannon for the nice setup. Saw the rest of the industry, because of COVID, really adapt BIM 360 on an emergency basis, which was great to get the industry on a common approach to sharing data online.

And I saw the benefits for construction, so I got back into it. I did, actually, a Revizto pilot with Graycor before most recently rejoining Walsh Construction, having seen it all, basically, pros and cons of each approach. And now what I deal with is a problem that I think most of you have, which is something I call the uncommon data environment. It's not a city by any means. It's really, you were just working daily with an aggregate mix of all the previous solutions that you've tried that have just sort of built up over the years.

And there's frustration and waste in that, of course. A lot of flexibility comes with it, too. For example, right now the Procore viewer works with our form in the best reviewing off tablets, but we can jump back to BIM 360 if we need to. And likewise, if Procore Sync gets godfathered out in the future like it did, we can run back to ACC for file sharing. And then we can also pivot back to older tools if there's proven need, or we can consider young up and comers like Revizto if they offer something that the incumbents cannot.

But the truth is that when it comes to picking the best method to share files, a lot of it is actually driven by what our subs are willing to do and are capable of doing. Reaching out to them today, most are comfortable with Navisworks as a clash reporting tool. A little disappointed with product development over the last few years. And many are familiar with what was first marketed to me as Collaboration for Revit. It's had a lot of names since then, but basically, it's taking the Revit central file and moving it up to the cloud.

So that approach has worked great for a lot of people with sharing web links. Why not just build Collaboration for Navisworks and sync NWC clash files with one another constantly in the background, using those ACC and BIM 360 servers? So we didn't get that product, but this is how you fake it. I call it the Hack/Sync workflow because we're using the Docs module of ACC as a backdoor to continuous online syncing. It's a little finicky and it has its quirks, but it satisfies for now.

So ACC supports three linking methods. The first two require the [INAUDIBLE] coordination module to be enabled, and they utilize the publish/consume workflow that Sam and Brenda will explain to us here in a few minutes. Third only needs the Docs module to be turned down, and that's what we're currently using. It lets us take advantage of something ACC does really, really well, which is manage granular or very precise file permissions for each working folder. That's something it does better, really, than that entire stack of solutions I showed you earlier.

So first tip is to plan your folder structure in advance because Documents does not make it easy to add or copy folders or move them around later on in groups. We're going to want all our users to have view only permissions to anything, really, in the Models folder. It's there for sharing. So this one's a little quirky. We literally just type the word "everyone" into the dialog bar just to give everyone on the job default read only options.

And then, as you can see here, you can assign folder permissions to either users, companies, or roles. Blue progress bar shows you how much access everybody has. These are my power users. But each company can also get an assignment. So if you're using the company permissions for the folder, it becomes very easy to manage groups of users as they naturally add or lose members over the course of the job by hovering over the folder and clicking on this vertical ellipses button. That's the trick is knowing how to hover.

I don't want to give members of the plumbers' company, for example, the file rights needed to edit and modify their own files, but give everyone else besides those super users the view only rights. Which is great for sharing [INAUDIBLE] with friends who want to be able to see your files, but you don't want them to be able to edit anything.

For sign-off folders, we usually give everybody slightly less powerful create permissions so they can put digital signatures on PDF sign-off sets going into my division. And anyone really not part of those companies still inherits those view only rights. Docs is flexible in that the roles can be given permissions to folders as well.

In this case, it's actually wrong right now on the slide, but I'm about to change permission levels so the project engineers on my own team, they'll no longer be able to edit these Navisworks helper files that I've loaded. But the other Walsh BIM managers and anyone else on the job with BIM manager as their role, regardless of the company they're working for, would be able to access and to add to my appearance profile settings, so search sets, the global settings file, all that, et cetera. So smart management can really get you excellent results.

So here's what it looks like when it gets to your desktop. Docs module shows up really just like any other library in Windows Explorer. Just be aware that it's a ghost library. These files exist on the server, but they only get pulled onto your local drive by demand, even if it looks like they're sitting on your C drive. This little icon legend shows you what's active and what's not. Right now I'm working in the laundry area, which is the green check marks. My coworkers are coordinating the medical center, which is why it's all blue clouds.

So this is how it works. At project start, each user on each machine will have to manually right-click to sync the files, just to kick start things. If you try to open your NWF without syncing all those NWC files, you're going to get this error message, which looks like a broken link. Nothing wrong with the link-- you just don't have a local copy of that file. After the initial sync, Navisworks remembers to go looking for that file in the future. And when it finds an updated version, you'll see that little green progress bar to confirm that it is downloading something new.

Other trick is that in addition to the files being pulled only, so is the file index, so sometimes you need to right-click really just to see any new files that your teams loaded in the last few days. And the ramification here is that the lead coordinator is no longer the gatekeeper for all the updates to content, and you're going to be working in an environment where everybody is updating everything all the time and the team will really need to adapt to that new reality if it's not something that they're used to.

For our subs, these are the five quick tips we have for people is that update files at least twice a day, if not more often, to let people know where you are. Always take ownership and run your own clashes. Because we're streaming new content live, we want you to clash live. Third is to pay attention to the default right of way and try to obey it where you can. That'll save everybody a lot of rework. And if you do run into problems, that's what item 4 here, those weekly all-trade meetings, are for, is to discuss exceptions to the role. Becomes more of an executive planning session than those all-day work sessions that you might be used to from the older methods.

And then 5, last but not least, is to always get what we talked about this week done before the next call. That's sort of a concern with most coordination efforts, because lag is the enemy of success, but it really gets amplified with this constant updating approach. And it is sort of also worth noting that this default approach that we use with the color coded heatmap, all trades in one view, works really well for this rapid churn of background updates.

So what's next for us? What I've shown you today is going to be a workflow that, when it was developed, we felt it was best in line with these core values that I communicated to you at the beginning of the talk. If I had to grade myself on how we're doing with that current tool set, this is how I do it with these traffic light colors. Green is good, yellow is just OK, red, yeah, we do need to do better. And you can read it through all this in Hanna, but maybe it's just easier to see it right now with pictures.

When it comes down to it, we take good care of our core responsibilities, which are the coordination drawings and models. If we need to roll back models in time or craft better, easier to digest clash reports, we'd like better help than we get, but we've developed a few clever workarounds. Democratizing BIM and sharing the models online with a just click here version of the building, that's been a lot easier with all these web-based viewers in the recent years.

For reality capture, we wish it was easier, and we know how to massage the data when we get it. It's just a lot of information to process and get back out to the field. Likewise with field controls and virtual layouts. Wish I wasn't having the same conversations with my surveyor and superintendent about control points all the time, but we can usually make it work. And really, for all those other things on our wish list, generally speaking, well, we always want to do it better and we always want things to get easier for us. We can do everything well enough right now. What we see in the model is what's going to make it out into the field.

But what we can never really do well enough ever is to take care of these guys you see on the screen right now. When I first started doing BIM coordination, I thought it was my job to boss these guys around. But what I've learned doing this for a decade is that the best thing I can do, really, is just get out of their way. They've all forgotten more about the trade than I know. They just need me to remove obstacles from their path and to act as a traffic cop every now and again when everybody's moving in the same area.

And that's why I will tolerate all sorts of complications to my own workflow. If it makes these guys' tasks even a little bit easier, that's why we always bend over backwards to help them out, because we know that everybody's going to succeed or fail as a team. There's really no other option. So when we look at new products like ACC or buy new tools, it's going to be this coordination meeting and these workflows that I'm going to worry about the most. And that's why they were coded red in that status report I just showed you.

And that's really also why I wanted to partner with Brenda and Sam over at Autodesk today, so they can demonstrate for us how this new line of product offerings they have could take all those digital means and methods I just showed you and upgrade it to the next level, with the best interests of the whole team you see here, not just me, in mind. So with that, I'm going to hand off to Sam Galloway and Brenda Colin, our technical solutions experts from Autodesk. They're much more skilled with the ACC tools than I am and true believers, so they're much better presenters for this next part. So without further ado.

BRENDA COLIN: Thank you, Tom, for the insight and for sharing the clash detection method you have perfected after participating in these projects. What I could get from your experience is that best practices in training handbooks did not reflect your problem-solving attitude and make technology work to accomplish the needs of your team.

So now that we've talked about the existing clash detection process with Navisworks, in this section, we will discuss how new cloud solutions can help to democratize the clash detection process and expand the BIM knowledge to all of the project stakeholders, not just the Navisworks-savvy experts. Why? Because we are increasingly encountering project owners, executive PMs, PEs requiring comprehensive information to enable data-driven decisions to avoid overrunning time and cost.

Before we start explaining the new cloud functionality, let's talk about the evolution of the Autodesk construction solutions and clarify changes in functionalities and names. Well, the first release that we have was BIM 360, and it was launched in 2012. It was meant to connect multiple stakeholders, and we had BIM 360 Team, BIM 360 Glue, BIM 360 Field, and one of the main products. And this enabled the Revit cloud collaboration, the coordination of multidisciplinary 3D models, and also bringing all that information to the construction site.

[INAUDIBLE] solutions were disconnected and siloed. That's why in 2020-- 2018, sorry-- BIM 360 Next Gen was launched. And this platform has the best functionalities from BIM 360 Team, BIM 360 Glue, and BIM 360 Field, but with the constant thread from the design phase to the construction phase, where communication-- sorry, data was the constant thread of this. There was no need to upload or download models from different products to take advantage of the functionalities, and existing BIM 360 users now had access at that time to BIM 360 Next Gen as part of their license entitlement.

And now in November of 2020, we release-- or we launch, Autodesk launched the Autodesk Construction Cloud after acquiring multiple companies that complemented the Autodesk design software, to manage information and workflows from the design phase, preconstruction, construction, commissioning, and operation and maintenance. The Autodesk Construction Cloud is unique because it connects multiple project phases, companies, project stakeholders, project management processes, and design information in a single location so we can harness this data and move business decisions from reactive to predictive. And again, existing BIM 360 Next Gen users now had access to the Autodesk Construction Cloud as part of their licensing entitlement.

And now let's talk about BIM 360 Glue, the product of BIM 360 that helps us to that coordination process. And this product, it was a desktop product, but also a cloud product that enabled that multidisciplinary coordination and have different models aggregated in the same location. BIM 360 Glue allowed teams to detect and resolve clashes between different systems and disciplines early in the design process. And additionally, it had a Revit integration to resolve existing clashes in the model and access also to these models through the mobile app.

Go to the next one. Yeah. So now after almost 11 years, we have model coordination. And during these 11 years, we have improved this model coordination functionality in ACC. And it includes now everything that was in BIM 360 Glue. Functionality-- model coordination is a functionality part of the Autodesk Construction Cloud, and some of the main functionalities of model coordination are, first, the unlimited storage. In here, we can host all of our project information. The automatic clash detection from RVT, IFC, NWC, and DWG files, so we can identify those clashes between these file formats.

We have the federated model functionality that allows to aggregate multiple models from different sources in a single project model. We talk about the automatic clash detection. The meeting minutes, so we can manage our coordination meetings and meeting minutes in a centralized cloud solution so we can connect our coordination issues, but also those project models from where the coordination issues are created.

We have a Revit and Navisworks integration so we can identify Navisworks, the issues-- we can identify that in the cloud, but also throughout our integration with Navisworks. And we have this Revit integration so we can resolve those issues in the model. We have the issue management functionality that helps us to manage all these different clashes and all these different issues in the project, track them until its resolution.

So in summary, model coordination in the Autodesk Construction Cloud enhance the collaboration between trades, helps to centralize the project models in a single platform, and makes coordination process more efficient. So now I will pass it over to Sam to start with the first part of this technical demo.

SAM GALLOWAY: Thank you, Brenda, for giving us the history of Autodesk Glue and where we are now with model coordination. I'm going to be actually in product because I think that is going to be the most important way, the most descriptive way to show you how to get the project started. So if we come up here, what we're going to see is that we have the login page for the ACC. This is the first thing that you're going to see when you try to go to your account.

This is going to be your Autodesk login, so it's probably your company email address and then whatever password you have. Once you log in, you're going to be brought to this Welcome page. This page is going to show you all of the projects that you are currently working in or that you are a member. So you can look under Account and this will tell you what hub that project is on. And that will let you know that it's on your hub or someone else's.

The other thing I did want to point out before creating a project is this little B that's down here. That means that that project's on BIM 360. So if you click on that, it's going to take you out of acc.autodesk and take you back to the BIM 360 site. So just be aware that there is something that can notify you under the Type portion of the columns.

To create a project, we're just going to go right here. We're going to get a new dialog. There's three asterisks on here. If you don't know what that means, that's going to mean that we need to have these things figured out and filled out if we want the Create Project button to light up at the bottom. It's three things. It's not a lot. And if that's all you want to share, that's fine.

But just know that when you put in the address, it is going to give visibility into your weather, so maybe if you're having a lot of rain days and your APM is out of town, they can actually go in and they can see what the weather is like in your area. The other thing we're going to have is a start date and end date. I like this because we're able to track where issues are at in regards to when the project is supposed to be done.