Workflows to Successfully Implement BIM 360 Ops and Capitalize on BIM Visualization

MIKE ZEPPIERI: Hi, so good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us in what is without a doubt the worst time slot at AU, 8:00 AM on the last day, the morning after the after party. So thank you for joining us. And to those of you who were on the webcast, thank you for logging in.

This is our class. I'm not going to bother reading the title, because I'm probably going to trip over it and it's just going to throw off my pacing. So this is what we're going to be talking about today. So before we introduce ourselves, I'd like to get a sense for who's in the audience. So how many owners or owners reps do we have? A show of hands. Any owners or owners reps? OK. Any architects?

LISA NEAL: Wow.

MIKE ZEPPIERI: Great. OK. Engineers or trades? All right, Skanska people in the house?

LISA NEAL: Thanks, guys.

MIKE ZEPPIERI: All right, how many people were at the '80s cover band at the bowling alley last night? Excellent. All right. So if my pacing is a little bit off this morning and if I lose my train of thought, it's because I sustained a couple of injuries on the dance floor.

So I have a splitting headache on this side of my head because during the safety dance, this guy next to me just got way too excited and threw his hand up and just elbowed me in the side of the head. And then when Bon Jovi came on, there was this guy behind me that just started screaming irrationally. He had to have been from New Jersey because only people from New Jersey are that irrationally fanatical about Bon Jovi. So I can't hear out of this ear and I've got a headache on this side. But we'll get through this.

All right, so this is me. My name is Mike Zeppieri. I work within the Innovative Construction Solutions group and Skanska USA building. We are a group of innovators and change agents within HCM firm, which is a pretty exciting place to be. The core of our group and the legacy of our group is BIM and VDC, so most of the folks who are in our group come from architecture or engineering backgrounds and are fluent in the Autodesk suite. So they're Revit users, they're Navisworks users.

But there's also people in our group who are atypical to the construction industry. And if you look at my background, my background is very atypical to the construction industry, as is Lisa's. So I've been with Skanska for five years. I've been in the industry for five years. This is my fifth AU. My third year speaking. And what our group has focused on in the last two or three years is to grow beyond that BIM and VDC core.

So focusing more on the I in BIM and recognizing that there are ways to deliver value to our clients and our customers beyond the traditional CM model. And BIM 360 Ops is one of the tools that we've gravitated to as a way to deliver value to our clients beyond the traditional CM model. So that's what we're going to be talking to you about today. Before I dive deeper into the course today, I'm going to let Lisa introduce herself.

LISA NEAL: Thanks, Mike. Hi, everybody. Thanks for coming out this morning. I'm Lisa Neal, VDC engineer with Skanska USA building. I've been with the company for almost five years. It'll be five years in February, and I've been using Autodesk tools for about two years, but I use them regularly. So it was a quick dive in and it's been nonstop since then.

I'm part of the Innovative Construction Solutions group, as Mike said. So our focus is on all the cool stuff. We get to play with drones and AR, VR, laser scanning, and other forms of reality capture. So it's really cool. But what Mike and I do is we kind of tailor those cool tools to value add services that the client can use.

MIKE ZEPPIERI: And we also want to take the time to introduce someone who didn't have an opportunity to join us but for good reason. Danielle just welcomed her first born son. So she is presently enjoying maternity leave. But unlike Lisa and I, Danielle actually does have a traditional [? AC ?] background. She's a fluent BIM user and was really the brains behind the operation in terms of delivering these workflows. So Danielle, if you're watching from home, good morning from Las Vegas, and we just want to take the time to recognize Danielle even though she couldn't join us today.

OK, so course objectives. So what you're going to hear today are the workflows that we developed to implement BIM 360 Ops recognizing that we did not go into this under optimal conditions. So this was very much a react mode implementation. How many of you have attended some of the other BIM 360 Ops classes this week, especially the Arkansas Children's Hospital? OK, so not many.

So for those of you that haven't, the Arkansas Children's Hospital case study is a great case study to see the optimal conditions and terms of implementing BIM 360 Ops. Our class is more around what happens when you're in react mode, which is what most people typically find themselves in. So we're going to show you the workflows we did. Now, recognizing that they're not optimal workflows.

So when we get to the Q&A portion of the presentation at the end, I'm sure someone else will try to stump the chump and say, well, you should have done it this way, and we're like, yeah, we agree with you. We should have done it that way. But we're going to show you how you could still successfully implement ops if you find yourself in a react mode scenario.

OK, so some of you have probably seen this slide before. I don't need to speak to it. It's pretty self-explanatory. Given that we're on the webcast, if anyone knows who this guy is, can you send me an email and let me know? I've been using this picture for so long, I feel I should buy this guy a drink. And at the very least, I want to ask him the question why he is smiling given the situation that he finds himself in.

So if this was a picture representative of manufacturing, you could easily say, oh, that was reality 20, 30 years ago. But for our industry, this picture could've been taken yesterday. The paradigm really has not changed all that much. When I first joined Skanska, in my first six months, I went to a conference down in Washington, DC. It was a BIM conference. And the focus of the BIM conference was on asset management and this idea of information exchanges. The idea of taking data that is aggregated during construction and pushing it into a work order or space management system.

And some of you are probably familiar with the acronym COBie, the COBie standard of information exchange. Four or five years ago, there was a lot of conversation around how to get the data from construction tools and processes from Revit models into work order management systems. But you needed a separate platform. You needed a secret decoder ring. You needed outside consultants.

And from a CM perspective, we were like, how can we deliver value to our clients by delivering that capability without the need of third party software, without the need of outside consultants? Because most of those implementations from the perspective of the owner, they don't realize the benefits until weeks or months after the implementation.

So we as the CM firm, we hand over the data. We go away. The client brings in a consultant to implement their work order management system. That consultant now needs to go dumpster diving. And all the turnover data, it takes weeks, if not months, to implement those systems. In the meantime, the poor facility manager is setting up spreadsheet systems or other systems in the interim because they need that capability on day one.

So from a CM perspective, we were trying to figure out how do we solve this problem? And we gravitated to BIM 360 Ops. Some people use the easy button. I'm a child of the '80s, so I use Ren and Stimpy. But this was the appeal of BIM 360 Ops. So we got introduced to BIM 360 Ops when it was unveiled about two years ago. And what we like most about this solution was that we could manage the data and the systems that we're most comfortable with as a CM.

So the Autodesk suite, BIM 360 Field, Revit, and Glue. We can aggregate that data, and with the simplicity of an extraction code or an export code, we could dump that data into a mobile first work order management system that delivers incredible value to the facility manager, and we could do it almost instantaneously. So this idea of day one operational readiness was now a reality. So right after that AU, we got pretty excited about it. We set up in an instance and we started to play with just pushing data into ops.

And once we got comfortable with the workflow, we said, well, let's find a building, an actual project to do this on. And the one that we selected was a luxury residential tower in Boston that our commercial development group developed. So at Skanska, we have a commercial development business unit. The way it works is Skanska seeds money to the CD group. They find opportunities to develop and then they hire Skanska back to build the building.

So this was a perfect project for us, because Skanska was the builder and also the owner. So we had a higher degree of communication with the architect, with the trades. It was a good project to pilot for our BIM 360 Ops implementation. And beyond that is a project like this is in the sweet spot of what BIM 360 Ops does well. Just enough complexity where the facility manager would benefit from having a mobile first work order management system. They needed something better than spreadsheets but not so complicated that it pushed the boundaries or the limitations of what the tool does well.

So the first thing we did was we sat down with the property management company that Skanska hired for this project and we asked them some questions. What are some of the problems that you're dealing with in managing not just this building but any building? And he shared with us some pretty keen insights. So the first problem he had is that he has to manage his building using multiple systems. Actually three. So the first system they called the concierge service.

So this was the application that the tenants use. They used it to order dry cleaning, order food, check to see if they had mail in the mailroom, reserve the common area spaces for a party, and they also could submit work order tickets to the facility manager. The facility manager lived in a completely different system. He had a work order management system that he primarily used for preventative maintenance.

And then there was a third system that he used just to manage the checklists for his audits and his quarterly and biannual and annual required checks that this particular property management company had said is best practices. The question he asked us is, could you simplify my environment where I only have to deal with one system? And the answer was with Ops, you can do that.

The second problem he had is that audit and checklist system that I mentioned, he couldn't customize it. So let's say he wanted to add an additional check or two on one of the checklists that was specific to his property. In order to do that, he would have to contact the software vendor and pay the money just to customize the checklist for his building where in BIM 360 Ops, as the user, you can customize checklists at the portfolio and at the building level. A lot higher degree of flexibility.

You're dealing with three systems that exist in silos. You don't have the integration between those systems. And as you've seen from the keynotes this week, the future of our industry and of property management is going to be around data integration. So I have a work order management system. A work order ticket in and of itself is indicative of a problem. Something wrong with the stove. Something wrong with my dryer. My door won't lock.

But trends over time could be indicative of other problems. So if I'm getting multiple tickets on one appliance, maybe that's a warranty issue. If I have multiple tickets to a unit, maybe it's a tenant issue. But if the systems aren't talking to each other, you can't get the data insights that allow you to gravitate to gaining some really truly significant efficiencies in maintaining your buildings.

My O&M manuals are not easily accessible. They're sitting in a binder in my office. And there's actually a pretty funny anecdotal story that this property manager told us after we implemented BIM 360 Ops. So in the common area of the building, this is a luxury residential tower, they did an art installation.

So they had a big unveiling ceremony, cocktail hour to unveil the art installation. And the facility manager went up to the room about 15 minutes before they were about to start the party and the room was too warm. So he went to the temperature control on the wall to change the temperature, and it was locked out, and he didn't know how to unlock it.

Status quo, if he hadn't have BIM 360 Ops, he would have had to have gone up to his office, find the O&M manual, go back down to the common area space, turn to the page that instructs him how to change the control, log in and change the temperature. He probably would not have done that in time for when the party would have started and he was going to get a lot of tenant complaints.

Because he had it on BIM 360 Ops, he literally pulled out his phone, searched for the asset, pulled up the O&M manual, saw the instruction for getting into the temperature control, and was able to change the temperature before the tenants even showed up. Again, not changing the world. We're not boiling the ocean here. But it's the little things that increase efficiencies that over time have some meaningful impacts.

Earlier in the week we heard at the keynote that the nature of work is changing. People are scared of automation, the idea that these tools are going to replace people. Well, you still need a facility manager to maintain the building. But by gaining these efficiencies, the facility manager can actually focus on more important things as opposed to wasting time diving for O&M manuals or having to access data across different systems or having to run up to his office to access a system where he could just have the data in the convenience of a mobile device in his hand, which goes to really the real benefit of all of this.

So I spent some time in manufacturing. I have a little bit of a Lean background. For those of you that are familiar with Lean and the Toyota production system, there's this idea of delivering value to the ultimate customer. And you achieve value so that you deliver value to the ultimate customer by a focus on quality. Well, the ultimate customer of a building is the tenant.

So what better way to deliver value and quality to the tenant than having a system that's more responsive to the ultimate customer of your building, who is the tenants? You'll notice that despite all of the problems the facility manager articulated, he did not once say that he wanted a BIM model. I'm that seed now, because we're going to revisit it later.

So this is the ideal state. So if we had gotten into the beginning of the project, this is what we would have done. This idea that information accumulates over the life of the project, that the information that's of interest to a facility manager actually accumulates at different parts of the project. So there are decisions being made in design, data that's being basically integrated into the model or determined, things like space naming conventions, asset naming conventions, things like that.

Those things are happening in design. During construction through the submittal and procurement and commissioning process, you're aggregating additional data that's of interest to the facility manager. And then post turnover, this still needs to be a living, breathing system. Owners change their spaces. They change their routines, their maintenance protocols based off of what they're learning as they get more familiar with their building. So this is the ideal state. This is what happens to most people.

Any Lord of the Rings fans that understand the reference of Gandalf? When he faces the Balrog, what does he say at that point of the movie? Does anyone know? You shall not pass. So Lisa when I first unveiled this slide, she said, why are we doing a Harry Potter reference?

LISA NEAL: Sorry, guys. Sorry.

MIKE ZEPPIERI: You're fired. So data exists in silos typically. The design team is not talking to the CM team from the perspective of the facility manager. And this construction team, all they care about is the turnover package. Contractually, we're required to hand over the turnover package, but we're not necessarily structuring the data in a way that's usable to the facility manager.

And this is not a knock at this particular product team. Skanska gets a lot of industry recognition for how we use BIM, and we're very disciplined in how we use BIM for traditional purposes. Trade coordination, clash detection, [INAUDIBLE] sequencing. We're good at BIM. But if you're not thinking about BIM from the perspective of the facility manager, you're not going to be able to deliver BIM as a value proposition post construction. That's not something you could think about at the end of the project and hope for the best.

That's a conversation that needs to start during design, which actually say I'm glad there's so many architects in the room, because this is a question you should be asking owners and you should be thinking about and you should be talking to the CM about is how do we deliver this additional value to the owner beyond MEP, beyond architectural, beyond structural? This notion of a BIM model that exists for facility management purposes. Because the facility manager doesn't need shop level drawings, doesn't need fabrication level detail. They just need to know where things they are and how they're connected.

So this is what we face coming into this project. Not ideal but typical. We came in at the end of the project. So we were largely at the mercy of the quality of the data that the project team was able to aggregate and the quality of the model that the architect delivered. Fortunately for us, the model was pretty solid. On our CD jobs, they hired top tier architects, and those top tier architects deliver really good models. So we were fortunate in that the model was actually pretty good.

And we also were fortunate that the operations team on this particular project did a fabulous job using BIM 360 Field and Bluebeam and other tools to manage their documents. So Michelle and Rochelle, if you're watching from Boston, I'm talking about you. Thank you. Not FM specific. So really solid BIM XP but not written from the perspective of how to use the model for facility management. No contract exhibits in place to compel the trades that deliver the information. Asset information.

So when I talk about asset information, I'm talking about the attributes, the warranty information, serial number, make, model, things like that. Without contract exhibits in place, I really can't go back to the sub and say, hey, I've got some gaps in my spreadsheet. Can you provide that information? And none of it was really informed by the facility manager. We mentioned we came in at the end and we talked to him. So not ideal but not atypical.

If you talk about the ideal state, there's some owners that get that. A lot of the airports now are starting to write BIM XP plans, because they're thinking about [INAUDIBLE] implementations at the end of the job. Health care, higher education, pharmaceutical, biotech, data centers. Those owners get it. The more sophisticated, the more complex clients. But your [INAUDIBLE] office buildings, your residential towers, your K through 12, some of your local government municipalities. They don't have the staff or the people or the bandwidth to be thinking about BIM. They are not digital natives. So that is the situation you're going to find if you're working in those market segments.

So now what we're going to do is we're going to share with you how you can implement Ops if you find yourself in that position. So Lisa's now going to walk you through, because she's the one that did all the real work. I'm done talking now. She's going to walk you through the workflow that she implemented. So data conditioning, how she took all the data from all these different systems and conditioned it for an FM application.

Model conditioning, the things we had to do to the model to use the Model Viewer and BIM 360 Ops. The integration of all that data. You've got tabulated data in the form of asset data. You've got PDF and flat data in the form of O&M manuals. And then you've got the actual as built model itself. How we integrated all of that and then delivered it into Ops and then did a little bit of cleanup at the tail end to hand it over to the facility manager. So that's the context of the product and what we did. I'm now going to turn it over to Lisa, and she's going to walk you through the different phases.

LISA NEAL: Thanks, Mike. So yeah, I'm going to dive a little bit deeper into the technical stuff and give you guys some tips and tricks that I learned along the way. So Stage A, data conditioning. This is really data collection and conditioning.

So first and foremost, check in with your project teams and ask what kind of document control strategy they were using. Maybe they put everything in one location, and that's great, but maybe they're putting things in half a dozen different locations. So we like to cast a really wide net. Pull in more than what realistically might make the final cut, because there are going to be several iterations with the owner and the facility manager where we talk about what they need and what they don't need, what they want and what they don't want.

But examples of things that we're typically going to consider as critical to our asset management collection is going to be any form of well-developed equipment schedules. That's usually the first place that I go when I know nothing about a project. I like to get my hands on the schedules and really understand the guts of the building that MEP and the FP.

So I'll start there. We'll collect specifications. Something that captures as built conditions, whether it's red lines or drawings or CAD models from subs. Submittals so that we can access product data and possibly photographs of samples if that's something that the owner wants. And close out documents like oh O&M and warranty.

Conditioning the data really just means organizing it. We used Bluebeam in this particular instance so that we could just translate our markups, export them, and then recondition that for import into BIM 360 Field. By the way, if you haven't done an import in Field, they have an import template which is perfect. You can just make sure-- you can be sure this way that all of your data is going to live in Field and it'll import properly.

So I created this Field funnel. That's what I call it. So this is kind of indicative of what stuff you might want to funnel through into field. What needs to live in Ops? That's what needs to go through Field. And what doesn't need to live in Ops? You might still need a physical record of it somewhere, but it doesn't necessarily belong in Ops.

So the examples that we are going to push to Field. Warranty letters, operation and maintenance materials, and as built conditions. Stuff you might not need are things like punch list sign offs, inventory reports, third party inspection lists. Of course, you want to save that information and put that somewhere, but it doesn't help a facility manager with their day to day operation of a building.

Stage B, model conditioning. And we spent a lot of time doing this. Now, we were very lucky that the project team did a great job of organizing the models, and we had easy access to them. But because we weren't able to get involved early and influence the model standards, we had to add a lot of information for the purposes of having livable data in Ops.

So there were some challenges. Missing parameters. So data that didn't exist in the objects at the tier that it needed to be in order to talk to Field. Missing geometry or just geometry that's located incorrectly based on as built conditions. So for example, I spent three hours looking for an exhaust fan once. And I had found all the eight other exhaust fans. I was looking for the ninth one and I could not for the life of me find it. I spent so many hours looking for it just to find out after overlaying drawings and digging through documents and getting second and third opinions from experts that it just wasn't ever modeled.

So long story short, you might be surprised at what the model looks like for your needs. You might have to do a lot of manual work to get more information added to your model and searching for missing objects. So you feel when you're doing this like you're just constantly behind. You're just fighting fires. And I'll tell you something. It is endlessly frustrating. This is me, by the way, looking for that exhaust fan after the third hour. Legitimately lost my mind. It's fine. I'm not bitter.

OK, so in all seriousness, we did spend so much time manipulating the model just to get it to the condition that it needed to be for Ops views. So I'm going to show you this video. This is how we manually added data. We did this in Navisworks. I know you can do some of this and BIM 360 Glue. We were more comfortable in Navis at the time, so that's the only reason we chose to do this.

So this is a video where this is a heat pump. The highlighted blue object is a heat pump and all the other similar objects in orange are heat pumps. So we had to manually add a unique object specific ID for every heat pump in the building. There were 290 of them. Excuse me. So we didn't want to rely solely on the GUID. That's why we had to add this new object specific identifier.

So here I'm showing you from the Properties panel, you can right click. You'll add your property. We just wanted it to be a name. We knew that all of our asset names were unique in this case, so we were fine to just call it a name. When you edit that property, that's where you can tag your asset, essentially. Whatever you want to call it, or whatever unique code that you have for that object can go there. So that's really quick. That took 20 seconds to do this one piece of data entry. But like I said, we had to do this for a lot of different heat pumps.

So we're going to do some math really quick. It's mostly so that you guys can commiserate with me. So 20 seconds per object per entry. 290 requirements. So when we do the math, we are talking about 5,800 seconds, which is 97 minutes, which is 1.6 hours of doing the same thing over and over and over again. Mind you, that's if you can find every object immediately. That's if you can drill down into the selection tree and find the level that speaks to Field right away. It's no typos. It's no bathroom breaks. So realistically, you're looking at several hours of work just manually inputting data into the field to get it to the condition that it would require for the Ops viewer.

So now we get to talk a little bit about the workflow. And I was thinking about this last night. It's really a complete Autodesk endorsement, because we touched every Autodesk product. We started in CAD. I know Danielle did a lot of work with the subcontractor CAD as built conditions. And we worked in Revit. We did Navis. We worked in BIM 360 Glue, BIM 360 Field, and then lastly BIM 360 Ops. So our workflow includes the entire Autodesk suite.

So in Revit, we were just doing some federated models and cleaning things up a little bit. The Revit model represents design conditions as designed. Subcontractors typically aren't modeling their as built stuff in Revit. So we had to work with our as built conditions in Navisworks, which came from subcontractor CAD files.

So once we pushed from Revit to Navisworks, we did a lot of our model manipulation in Navis. Like I said, you can do a lot of this stuff in BIM 360 Glue if that's your preference. We just chose to work in Navisworks. So what we did there was manually adding data that was missing, creating equipment sets. So for intuitive export and mapping in field. And from there we imported that to BIM 360 Glue. We really only needed Glue, in this case, to translate the model to Field. So we didn't do anything in Glue apart from just move it to Field.

Once it's in Field, we get to the next set of our workflow, which is really about mapping equipment and also setting up your Field portfolio. So there is some setup that happens before you import any data. So the location hierarchy, that needs to be established. In this case, we're talking about a 17 story building with hundreds of apartment units. So we were lucky to have a design model.

We pulled the room schedule from the Revit model, which was massively helpful, and then we just tweaked it based on the field import template so that we could get a list of all the rooms really quickly. If you're working on a smaller project, it might not be so bad to just manually transcribe the data from the drawings. But in this case, we were really lucky to have access to the room schedule from Revit. So that's how we built our location hierarchy.

There's some other setup you do in the equipment module in Field. So making sure that you have categories and equipment types representing everything that you think you'll want an equipment record for. So for example, your types might be-- or excuse me, your categories might be mechanical, electrical, plumbing, fire protection, things like that, appliances, specialties.

And then your categories are basically your types are subcategories, essentially. So under mechanical, you're going to probably have some air handling units or in this case energy recovery units, heat pumps, things like that. So making sure that you have a space set aside for all of these things, for all these records to live in.

And then lastly, properties. We did add some custom properties. I will say that the standard properties are probably sufficient a lot of times. They have great stuff like serial numbers and warranty data. We just added a couple custom properties of manufacturer name and model number, and that's just based on the owner and facility manager requirements.

So once you've got your Field profile set up, you can start import. You can import your model and start mapping your equipment. So mapping the equipment is what allows the 3D view to exist in Ops. So we had over 3,000 assets but 650 pieces of mapped equipment, because not every asset is going to require a 3D view. Things like doors and flooring and certain finishes. So keep that in mind.

One other tip that's something that we learned along the way is to do your mapping before you import any other data. The reason being that when you map a piece of equipment, it creates a unique equipment record with its own BIM ID. And if you import your data first and then map equipment, you'll be duplicating the equipment. So then it becomes hard to tell what has the model link and what was just from the import. So I recommend mapping equipment first, comparing that list to whatever other import data you have, scrubbing that up before you import the rest of it, just so you avoid this duplication.

So this video walks you through the process of mapping a piece of equipment in Field. It's not too hard to do, but this is a little bit unique in the sense that we are mapping to the data that we added manually. So we do have to go into a little bit of an advanced search. But I'll walk you through that right now.

So you're going to select the object that you want to map. And I'm scrolling through 649 other objects that I have already mapped here. So then you are going to route it to the type. In this case, it's a heat pump. And here's where we have to go-- we have to stray a little bit from the standard. So we manually added that name.

So we're going to look for our user data and select the name. That's what we've added. And we're going to map it to the name. In this case, that's the unique identifier, so that's what we're mapping. But you'll see in Field that there are a lot of other options. If you want it to be a description of the asset or the GUID, you can map to any of those things.

Also I did let this recording run so that you could get a sense for processing time. By the 650th piece of equipment that you're mapping, it takes a little bit of time. Field is really fast, but we really put it to the test with this one. So you can see 650th piece of equipment is mapping right now. Hopefully you can see the processing wheel moving. And in a minute here, it will show the record. So you can also scroll down and see the history of other equipment that you've mapped.

Another tip if you're dealing with really large volumes of the same type of equipment would be to sort and filter that before you map. So you still do have to map every piece of equipment so that it can have its own individual view in Ops. But as a sanity check, you could say just show me all the heat pumps and then you could move through all the heat pumps in one go. So you don't lose your place, and you don't have to search for other heat pumps. So I do recommend that if you're dealing with a set that maybe is larger than 10 or 20 objects.

So this leads us to Stage D, BIM 360 Ops. And this is really where we do a lot of customization. We're asking a lot of questions of the owner and the facility manager, trying to understand what they want and what they need. So one of the first conversations we have is what do you consider an asset? And I tend to even oversimplify it as MEP systems or major equipment. But the truth is that almost anything could be an asset.

So I just wanted to see if you guys could-- how many assets you guys think are in this room or could be an asset. So we've got about 10. We've got 10 in this room that you can see, by the way, with the naked eye. So it doesn't even include load centers or ventilation or things like that. So you've got a lot of your appliances, lighting. You've got these things that look like cabinetry or there's a fridge there and a garbage disposal.

So this just gives you an understanding of how prevalent assets are in a building and why it's important to have a strategy to manage them. There's 10 assets in this one room of one apartment unit. So expand that to every unit in the building plus the mechanical spaces and the non-residential parts of the building. So it's really important to have a way to manage information on all of these assets. And that's really what Ops is for.

So one of the things that we do in Ops, we start from scratch every time. This is the environment that the owner and the facility manager are going to look at every single day. So it needs to be tailor made for them. So we're asking them questions. Do you have any existing checklists that we should import into Ops?

Do you have-- should we test some tasks and some issues and make sure that everything works? What attachments do you want to your asset data? What assets need a 3D view? As I said, things like doors and flooring and other finishes might not require a 3D view but major equipment might.

So in this case, I think this is a condensing boiler that I'm showing here. So this gives you an idea of what the navigation and the interface looks like. The 3D view in Ops is a little bit different from Glue and from Navisworks, and that's because it automatically isolates the object. I think that's perfect for what a facility manager or an owner would want, because you're only looking at one object at a time. So ask these kinds of questions.

And more importantly, when you have your portfolio set up in Ops, test a few things at random. Obviously when you have thousands of records, you don't need to test them all. But test a few attachments. If you've got external links like URLs to warranty letters from a manufacturer or a website or something, test those. Test photograph attachments and test your 3D views.

A word of warning, though. We were working with a model that was LOD 500, I think, and massive file size. So the initial view time, the load time for a view was know like two or three minutes. So I think I would recommend if you're going to do 3D views in Ops, maybe stripped the model down a little bit. Maybe work with LOD 300.

Take out things that are little that don't add much in the way of context or detail. So if you're looking at structural stuff, take away the nuts and the bolts. And if you're looking at piping, take away the hangers just so that you have a more reasonable file size in LOD and then your views will generate much quicker in Ops.

And also ask the owner what they truly need a view of in Ops. That's one of the other things that we probably would do different going ahead. We just got really excited about this and we said, we're going to give you a view of everything, and it was so much work. So ask, what do you really need to see? Maybe it's only a mechanical space or maybe it's just equipment on the roof. Maybe it doesn't need to be equipment from apartment units, because they're all typical. So ask those questions and be selective.

We wanted to give you an idea of how much time we spent in each of these stages. Again, I will remind you that this was a reactive project, meeting it's post construction. None of us who worked on this deliverable were actually part of the project team. So we were unfamiliar with the project and we were working with a model that we didn't really know where everything was, and we didn't have influence over the model standards. So we had to add a lot of information.

That being said, for phase one data conditioning, data collection and conditioning, we spent about 10% of our time on that, just because it does take time to make sure that you're looking at everything. You're not missing anything. Pull it all in. Chop it up. Organize it. Reformat it for Field. All of this stuff takes a little bit of time.

Stage two, your model conditioning. Now, because we didn't influence the model, this is why we really spent 45% of our time on it. We had to add all that data manually for all of those heat pumps. So we spent hours and hours doing that and redoing it, because we needed to make sure that we were drilling to the exact object in the selection tree. So we did spend a lot of time here. This is probably an atypical amount of time, I would say, that you're spending doing the model conditioning.

Stage three, integration. We did spend a lot of time in this too, and that's because of the equipment mapping in Field. Another reason to be selective with what you are going to offer a 3D view of. So there's no way around it. If you want a 3D view, a unique 3D view for any specific object, it has to be mapped in Field. So that's what this 40% of our time was. It's great to tag team it too. I think we had up to three people just mapping these heat pumps at a time just to try to knock them out.

And then lastly, the easiest part is honestly that push button, like Mike was showing, the Ren and Stimpy thing. You just push a button. You generate your export code from the building tile in Ops and then you push all of your data into Ops. Once it's organized and once your model is conditioned, everything's ready, and it's just about getting it into Ops and then testing a few views and attachments at random. So with that said, I'm going to turn it back over to Mike to talk about our lessons learned.

MIKE ZEPPIERI: All right. Thanks, Lisa. So before I dive into lessons learned, I do want to take the time to acknowledge the BIM 360 Ops team. So if you don't know Katie Murff, she's sitting here in the front. She's the product manager. And then Adrian over in the other corner, who's the lead developer. Absolutely phenomenal partners who helped us throughout this project. So thank you to the Ops team. This was definitely a fun pilot for us to implement. And we learned a couple of things.

So I mentioned earlier in the presentation that the facility manager didn't ask for the BIM model. We're change agents. We're innovators. When we come to the things like Autodesk University and we see, hey, you could do a model view or integration in the BIM 360 Ops, we get excited. Here is a technology integration that is exciting. We get excited about it. We talk to other geeks and nerds and they get excited about it and we all geek out and then we say, let's do it. And we did it, and this is what the facility manager did. I mean, literally Luke Skywalker with the lightsaber. That's great, but I'm not going to use that.