Rethinking BIM

BRIAN SKRIPAC: Good morning. Everybody hear us OK? You on?

LIZ PRICE: I am now. I'm good.

BRIAN SKRIPAC: All right. Good morning. My name's Brian Skripac. I'm a Vice President and the Director of Virtual Design and Construction at CannonDesign.

LIZ PRICE: And I'm Liz Price, Digital Asset Manager and the part two of our duo for VDC team, core team member there.

BRIAN SKRIPAC: Thank you all for being here at 8:00 in the morning. Fortunately this isn't Thursday. I wouldn't expect to see this many people, but it's great to see a good turnout for us. We appreciate it. And looking forward to sharing our adventure that we've got on at CannonDesign and really this evolution of rethinking BIM and really changing our approach to how we evolve our content, our standards, our templates, our workflows, and really broadening the scope to be much more of a virtual design and construction perspective, and thinking long-term about the work that we're doing. Not so much just focused on design, but looking at it from a construction, turnover, and operations perspective.

And I'll pre-apologize for my voice. Out of how many years of coming to AU, this is the first time I've had a cold. So bear with me. I've got lots of water. Sorry about that.

LIZ PRICE: So today, we're going to be focusing on, as Brian mentioned, how are we developing our VDC content and what is the mindset in which we're approaching that? So we want to make sure that our content, all the way from the base being the content itself, our templates, our workflows, have that whole VDC mindset so that we are able to support the entire design, construct, and operation continuum.

One of our other objectives that we're going to be talking about is how we're using that content to drive consistency amongst our design deliverables, and we really want to share with you how we want teams to understand, plan, and execute those deliverables. And then also, how can they work together and collaborate to accomplish these?

I'm going the wrong way here.

BRIAN SKRIPAC: So practice integration at CannonDesign is really a foundational element. We want to set the stage from how we've evolved from where we started to where we're at and understand that practice integration is one of eight areas that all of our executive directors have a component for.

And for us, practice integration is really about advancing how we do our work, and it's being focused on being innovative and providing these innovative design solutions but also looking at how we work more efficiently, how we deliver our projects at a higher level of quality, and how we do it profitably. So all of those components together are really the initiative that VDC is a core component of moving forward.

LIZ PRICE: So who are we, when we talk about practice integration, and how are we doing this? There are three core things that we're doing as part of the practice integration group, and the first is that we want to continually share all of our best practices, the knowledge, the insights that we learn as our teams with not only ourselves, within our individual teams, but also with the rest of the firm and all those that integrate with us at practice integration.

We also make sure that we're enabling our teams with the proper tools, the proper latest technologies, the workflows, and all the procedures that we're doing that keep that VDC mindset.

And then the last thing that we're doing is innovate. We want to be continuously improving. We want to be looking for the latest, the newest innovation that's out there, and that's what we're doing as part of the practice integration team.

Kind of honing in or getting a little bit more focused when we talk about practice integration, there's four key areas that really make up that practice integration group, and the first is digital practice. And we'll be talking about this a little bit more in depth and how VDC kind of derived or started the digital practice. But their main focus is on design technologies and making sure that we're leveraging those design technologies within our workflows to help meet the goals of VDC in our project deliveries.

The second VDC, obviously, we're going to be in depth a little bit more, but as he mentioned, this is our focus on workflows, protocols. We'll be discussing that further.

Technical quality-- we integrate very closely with technical quality. When it comes to developing these workflows, working with our content, we want to make sure that we are focused on having that highly-technically coordinated design documents throughout the entire lifecycle of process and this includes all disciplines, all phases.

And then lastly, the fourth component of practice integration is going to be our construction and administration teams. And they are actually the ones who are kind of monitoring these processes where there's protocols that we're doing during that construction phase to make sure that we are meeting our interests as well as our clients' and that we are able to maximize a profit at the end of our projects.

BRIAN SKRIPAC: And part of VDC is not really only being limited to those four key areas. While those are the major collaborators we have, there's a lot of different areas across the firm that we find ourselves working more and more closely with and expanding that conversation beyond just technology.

So some of the affiliated areas that you see there are really that expansion beyond design, working with our business strategies and our business management teams to understand how we procure and contract work, how our proposals go out, what are we going to deliver, and understanding some of those items.

[CLEARS THROAT] Excuse me.

Another big one is risk management. We spend a lot of time working with our legal team, advancing their knowledge about what BIM really means, what that contract language means, what are we setting expectations to do, and how do we make sure that we have a balance from a risk management standpoint and an adherence to the standards that we're creating moving forward?

Another big component is the fact that Cannon has evolved into a construction firm as well. We're not only architecture engineering, but we also have a construction group. We'll serve as a design builder, as a single source delivery model. Being able to accurately and succinctly develop our building information models to work with our construction group is a really key component to making sure that that's a successful endeavor, and that's something that we'll talk a little bit more later.

So continuing from design to construct to operate, we're also working more and more closely with our facility optimization team. They're a team that performs building assessments and does lifecycle tracking for the owner to really be able to set the stage. What are their five-year plans? What are their 10-year plans? What are their 15 and beyond?

How do we start to integrate a building information model delivery from that design information, construction information to a component that's able to be turned over and usable by that group as well? So we're really seeing an expansion of what VDC is and the role that it's playing in the firm.

So to further that, we want to understand where we really came from. And a little bit of a chronological lesson-- in 2014, 2015, one of our predecessors really worked to start what was called a digital practice group. It was trying to formalize some of the BIM team members, some of the other design technology team members, and really understand all the tools and processes that were being used across the firm.

And the core initiative there was to advance what we were doing-- and as you see with the more and less being crossed out-- be able to do more with less time, less resources, and really advance our work. Really the same sort of initiative that we talked about with practice integration.

We built up a team. He worked to create office leaders and really started a framework of communication around the firm. One of the challenges that we saw with that, though, was it was extremely diversified and while there was a wide breadth of knowledge there, we wanted to focus a little bit more on depth of knowledge as it related to our project deliverables and some of these other key areas.

As digital practice advanced to where we're at now, which we'll show you how we spun off from that, this is really their mission statement. In 2017, as part of our business plan, this is how they were approaching the work that they were doing. And they talked about advancing processes and leveraging digital design technologies but also having a component of research and development, where they were looking at different scenarios across the firm, what people were doing in their localized offices, being able to share that, test, and validate what some of those new tools and technologies might be.

And ultimately, that formalized itself into these four categories. Design visualization-- not only renderings, animations, but how are we taking a more detailed look at AR and VR?

Performance analysis-- how would that go out to help the sustainability teams? What tools and technologies are in place so that they can be looking at whole building energy performance and being able to drive those more sustainable design outcomes in adherence with the 2030 challenge that we're signed up for?

How do we spread the knowledge about computational design and scripting, not just from a form generation standpoint but also one from an automation standpoint, and working to help teams reduce those mundane tasks that we have to do over and over through automation?

And then starting to look at data visualization, being able to track what we're doing. How do we start breaking down, look for inefficiencies, and find more proactive measures to solve the challenges that we may be having and, in many cases, we don't even realize that we're having but being able to look at that data and start to pick out some things and find innovative solutions?

So these are all extremely important categories to be exploring, but one of the things that we really found as we were within that group-- this was a group that I led for a year-- was there wasn't really a focus on our deliverables. What's our project delivery plan? How are we approaching our deliverables? What are we turning over? And that's really where VDC served to spin off from Digital Practice as a larger group.

This is our mission statement that we came up with. This was kind of our charter originally, as we sold leadership on this idea and this need to have this deeper focus across the firm.

Again, I apologize for my voice.

And it's really this focus on a BIM-enabled VDC delivery process. And I think one of the big things that we've looked at is, is this evolution? When we talk about that, we look at Revit as a core technology that we use for model authoring. That's the tool. It creates a deliverable.

The building information model, we tend to talk about in the context of a noun and virtual design and construction being the process of how we create that building information model to solve preconstruction and construction issues virtually before they get in the field.

And ultimately, we want to be able to drive a certainty of outcome in the work we're doing. So all the standards, the processes, the content, the templates, these all become the building blocks that stitch together for this larger outcome that we're striving for. And ultimately, and I have to read this very directly because it's very succinct, but it is a mouthful. It's about driving that certainty of outcome in accordance with the prescribed level of reliability being focused on our multi-disciplinary BIM deliverables.

And that's another real big key expansion that we have. We are an ACE company. We have engineers. We have mechanical engineers, plumbing engineers, electrical engineers, technology, structure. We want to make sure that we're collaborating holistically across all of those disciplines.

And then, again, we see this idea of the design-construct-operate continuum, being focused on how that's going to be used by the next participant. We're very fortunate to have that construction group and an operations team that we can start to plan long-term for our models, much farther of a use case beyond just the delivery of our contract documents.

So when we look at that, there's really these four key enhanced values. We just talked about certainty of outcome. Having an improved coordination-- we're in a disciplinary firm. We better have a solid foundation for how we're coordinating and working together.

Driving and adherence to budget and scope, that becomes critical on our construction side, where we're going to look for a minimization of change orders and RFIs. Being able to sell that as a component, where we're going to have no E&O change orders on a project.

And then reduce the total cost of operations. That speaks to that operate phase of the continuum. We've had the opportunity to work with multiple owners across the country and think about how they can have a project delivery standard that takes advantage of all these components. How do we turn information over to them and work more closely with them and build a relationship?

With a lot of institutional clients, health care, higher ed, this is a key component. There's a lot of construction. There's a lot of renovation on those campuses, and we want to be a partner with them and have a solution that drives all of those phases.

And as Liz talked about earlier and she'll talk about more here shortly it's really this intersection here between virtual design and construction and technical quality that drives this our standard operating procedures across the firm. And again, that has become very holistic across all the disciplines and that's that key foundation that we want to drive and work with the other groups and practice integration across the firm to make sure that we're successful at it.

Looking forward, now that we've built this team out, right? Now you're looking at the team. We're lean. So we're a two-person wrecking crew. We're very proud of that. But from a business planning strategy at our firm, we've kind of changed up and gone from the annual business cycle, look out to a three- to five-year plan.

And these are the targets that we set forth for what we want to accomplish and how we want to help drive CannonDesign forward in the future. From a baseline perspective, it's about standardizing our delivery process, which we're going to talk about more.

It's about being engaged with our project managers and client leaders. This was a huge point of education for the firm to make sure that those individuals who very often are not the ones-- it's not very often. They're not the ones down in the weeds constructing these models. Nor do they always have a solid understanding of what those team members are doing and how that aligns with the project goals that they've set forth, that they've interviewed on and said, we'll do BIM. Have some of those conversations. What are they really saying? What do they know? What are we delivering? How do they make sure that they're accountable for what their project teams are doing that they're leading?

Improving our technical model quality, having a review process that's more engaged with our QA/QC team and the technical quality group that Liz will talk about more.

Advancing our design-led construction through Cannon Construction Services, that's a big component and then furthering our initiatives with our owners.

At the end of the presentation, we kind of have these as five big buckets and ideas. We'll kind of show how some of our current activities are leading toward this, and then we'll talk about some of the key performance metrics that we have at the end, that we're starting to define and set goals for ourselves to make sure that we're accountable in achieving what we're setting out to do.

LIZ PRICE: So how are we taking all these awesome, I'm going to say awesome, but all these great new initiatives and bringing it out to the firm? Because we are just a duo of two, team of two, we need to have that help and buy-in and leadership from basically our VDC leaders across the entire firm.

So we have 17 North America office locations, two international, and amongst all those locations, we have office leaders that represent all disciplines. They represent different roles, responsibilities within project teams, and they are the ones that are actively engaged in helping to bring this awareness and bring this education to their local offices.

So I want to say they are a volunteer army, because they are. They volunteer. They help us out, but they are the ones that are on the grounds helping us get this message to the rest of the firm.

And I think something kind of cool to note is that-- I want to make sure I'm flipping the right way-- they do have a dedicated eight hours per week to assist us in these initiatives. And so that's, I think, speaks highly of how the firm sees that this has value and that there is a dedication to get this done. And that also kind of helps us, because we are just a team of two, to help get some of these initiatives underway. Especially when I start talking about how we're trying to look at our workflows, be more holistic, revamping, and maybe even setting workflows into play that never quite existed, getting that content that supports that, that's very important because we can't do that all ourselves.

Some of the key roles and responsibilities that these office leaders are doing is that they're really, as I mentioned, they're helping to implement the standard operating procedures that we are developing. The other thing is that they are actively contributing to the development of these workflows.

We have a biweekly meeting where all the VDC leaders are calling in. We're having discussions on topics. We're talking about what are the critical areas we need to address first? We're voting. We're working together. We're sharing workflows, and we are, together, working to define what our standards are.

So it's not a top-down approach. It's having that input and buy-in. And they are that conduit with the rest of their local firms or their local offices as well. So if they hear things that are going on in their offices, they're bringing it back to us, so that we are collectively, as a team, discussing these items and coming up with the best procedures, best practices to push out to the rest of the firm.

Some of the other things that they're helping to do and lead are monthly local trainings. And this is great because this is where they're sharing those items that we've mentioned back to the firm. But then they're also doing some training that might be more specialized or localized to their office. Amongst the different offices, we might have different groups that specialize in certain markets or certain project delivery styles. So this is a way for them to help continue that training and be a little bit more focused on the needs of their actual office.

We also have, across this group of awesome leaders, those that specialize with a discipline. So their meetings may not just be local to their office. They might be speaking to the other mechanical designers across the firm, and they might be speaking to the other electrical, architectural. So it's neat to have that cross-discipline and cross-expertise of people within our team.

They're also helping to lead our new hire orientations in onboarding, to bring them up to speed of here's VDC. Here's what we do. Here's our procedures. Here's where you go to find out information. Here's where you can find the workflows. So they're helping with that training as well.

And also serving as mentors to their peers, they're helping the project teams go through and initiate kick-off meetings, helping to walk through what are those standard virtual design and construction planning strategy sessions? And training them, helping them, lead them through their first one, and then, hopefully, getting our other team members to understand what they need to do to start projects. So they're growing that knowledge and depth.

Yes?

AUDIENCE: Eight hours of the week is dedicated to just those tasks. The rest of the time are they just doing production and stuff?

LIZ PRICE: Correct. Yes. I mean, they are actively on production. They're on projects. They're in the weeds. And then eight hours a week, they have dedicated to spending time helping us further push our initiatives and our goals through the firm.

AUDIENCE: Is it enough?

LIZ PRICE: Well, I would love to say, yes, we'd love more, but there's also that caveat of-- you may mention this too-- but we do strive for that. This is a dedicated time that they have but sometimes that isn't always the reality when push comes to shove. And projects will take precedence with deadlines and due dates and everything that comes into play there. But that is what we strive for, yes.

BRIAN SKRIPAC: Yeah, I think the important thing is, as Liz said, these are project architects, interior designers, and project engineers. But it was a big step for CannonDesign as a whole-- that one's mine.

LIZ PRICE: I'm stealing his coffee.

BRIAN SKRIPAC: Teamwork. I've got your back, Liz.

LIZ PRICE: That would not have tasted good when I'm expecting tea.

BRIAN SKRIPAC: I think it was a big thing for the executive directors to be able to go into Deltek, put in our VDC project number and block out eight hours a week in people's plan. And as Liz said-- your question, is that enough time? If everybody spent eight hours a week, it probably would be, but the reality is everybody's got their ups and downs. And their contributions are there, but from a project management and planning standpoint, it's able to identify them as individuals who have a larger role in the organization in that office.

AUDIENCE: Do other folks provide BIM or IT support separate from these leaders, who have a different leadership role?

BRIAN SKRIPAC: Yeah. There is an IT team and a Digital Practice team that have-- our IT team is far more robust of full-time employees that are dedicated to that. That's an entire separate segment. But Digital Practice has a group that they're working with that focuses on those other tasks as well, as well as support, direct support, installations, and maintenance and things like that.

LIZ PRICE: Yeah. That was like scripted. Great question. Thank you.

So other ways that we are helping to push the message out, yes, we have those VDC leaders. And as I mentioned, their roles, responsibilities, how they're doing the training sessions, getting that information out through the biweekly calls. We have other methods as well to kind of help bridge that across the firm.

I'm going to continue to talk just a minute or two more about the VDC leaders and our biweekly calls. We have a Trello board that is shared amongst the leaders, and it's a great place for us to be able to capture our discussions, progress of all those initiatives, things that we have going on, assign responsibilities, who's focusing on what. It's a good way to keep that conversation going as we kind of step away, maybe for two weeks or sometimes we're not in communication between our meetings, to make sure that things are continuing to move forward.

We also have, as I mentioned, besides that mentorship and those tailored training sessions that they're leading, we have Jive, which is our internal internet, where-- and it's the green over here on the left-- where we are capturing all of our workflows, all the things that we're doing. And this is what's being announced and published out to the rest of the firm so that they can see, hear the things that are going on. Here's where you can go to find our best practices, standard procedures, workflows, guidelines, and everything is posted here so that we can share that out.

We also have what's called as kind of like our bimonthly recap, and this is a great way-- it's an email blast. It's a campaign that goes out to the firm that helps them know within the past months, here are the key things that you need to know. So it's the important information, the big successes that we've had as a VDC team.

We might be focusing on some of our individual office leaders and what are some of the sessions that they've done that have been very successful? What have they shared with their teams? Because sometimes, different offices will hear, oh, wow, we did this really awesome class in Boston. We focused on details and what's the proper procedures and best practices for that. And then they'll talk with that office leader and maybe bring that training to their office as well. So it's a great way to share that communication out to the rest of the firm is what we're doing, our successes, our wins, and what's going on.

We also have Keynote Academy Classes, which is our kind of ongoing learning through the firm, where we can host classes that are opened up to all offices. Brian just did one recently on level development, which is great. It's a great way to kind of get those classes out there. We can record attendance, see who's there, and also be able to track those learning initiatives as well.

So switching gears just a little bit, we're going to start talking about setting those foundations for successful VDC firm integration. Besides just the communication, now we're going to switch gears and focus on when it comes to the content, the workflow. What is it that we are doing?

And to kind of help us, especially with the start of VDC, we are still a young group in our infancy, but we've had a big impact so far. We really wanted to step back and understand what is it? What is our business? What are we doing? Who do we need to serve within our firm to make sure that we are meeting our project goals and we're meeting the aspirations of our clients?

So we really needed to understand what are those key markets and core services that we serve? We have our health care team, science and technology, corporate/commercial, civic, sports and recreation, and education. So that obviously means we're going to have to be able to have a robust library to be able to support all of these different project types.

Core services, besides doing kind of more of that traditional architecture and engineering, as we mentioned, we've now become a construction firm as well. So we're going to be taking on a lot of those services that we'll tailor around that, the construction services.

Facility optimization solutions-- that's a mouthful, so I'm probably going to call it FOS for now on because that's just what I normally refer to it as. But those are other services that we need to make sure that we're keeping in the forefront of our mind as we're developing our content. We want to make sure that we can streamline what it is that we're doing and be able to support that side of the business.

And we also have a very diverse global project portfolio, diverse client base with different aspirations, different needs, different requirements. And this is just a smidgen of some of our projects that span the globe and just some of the things that we do.

Down here on-- I'm going to brag a little bit because I think this is cool. But on the bottom right-hand side, this is what we refer to as CHUM-- and I know I'm going to butcher this translation-- University of Montreal Central Hospital. And this is currently the largest construction project going on in North America, and it is 772 single-bed patient rooms over 3,500,000 square feet of space.

And I really wish that I had been with Cannon when this had started because it's really cool to see all the collaboration that has gone on with this project. And there's a lot of lessons learned through just collaborating through Revit and some of the cool things and workflows that we have been able to achieve. And as I mentioned, lessons learned from this project has been pretty neat.

And all of our projects, we have a varying size and scale and scope of what it is that we do. So we need to make sure that we are servicing, as I mentioned, our architects, engineers, quality leaders, spec teams to help them achieve the best outcomes for their projects.

So taking all that into account, as I mentioned, our markets, our services, our diverse global portfolio, our client base, the international office locations, amongst that, when we start talking about our different offices and our different regional discrepancies and whether it be project delivery, such as like in Canada. They typically might use P3 project delivery, which is going to be different than what we are maybe more familiar with here in North America-- or not North America, excuse me-- in America, standard processes.

We need to recognize where there's regional code differences and requirements for our library. We need to be able to support metric, hard and soft, Imperial, for our templates and workflows. And all of these are things and considerations that we need to take into account and have somewhere on the list of making sure that we can get those items completed and service those teams.

As we talked about a little bit before, we were alluding to that design, construct and operate continuum. These are some of the BIM use cases that we see that we are doing within Cannon. And we want to make sure that we are designing our workflows, templates, and content to be able to be used in this area.

A lot of our content and items, when we start with the typical design process, we want to be able, with our construction services, to be able to do flash detection, to be able to do that model-based scheduling and the sequencing. So that means we want to focus on our objects and content that everything is modeled with a certain level of development so that we can be able to foster and facilitate some of those construct BIM use cases that we are now using.

And then with FOS, or facility optimization solutions, we want to make sure that we can then take that model and when we're working with the owners, be able to deliver something in a way that they can use that. When you look at how might they want to use that model for asset management or in space management, and some of the other BIM use cases that they have.

This is where I have to take a drink of water or tea.

So when it comes to kind of like that baseline of content, templates and workflows, we really need to think about it more holistically. So instead of just focusing on what is it that we need to do to get our documents out the door, we need to step back and look at all the content that we have, the current workflows that are in place, and really study it from the idea of how does it go through that design-construct continuum?

And when I started, it was a great exercise of looking through all of our libraries, all the repositories, and seeing what is the content that we have? Where do we have those great repositories of good content? Where are we lacking? What is it that we need? So it was a good exercise for me to go through and kind of see where were those holes that we needed to work on?

There were a lot of areas that I found had a great start, but they had not been updated or maintained maybe in like four or five years. So it was great content that was developed at the time but just, as our delivery processes have evolved, we realized we haven't even touched that or looked at that.

So we needed to look at those items and be able to say, what is a good workflow that we can do so that we are more streamlined, more efficient? And then how do we need to maybe update that content to fit with that workflow?

So what we are going through and doing is we're kind of taking those key areas, those items that are kind of like the hot topics, what do we want to check off our list first? And look at those and say, how are the architects and engineers really using them?

We want to make sure that we're building our content and our workflows, templates in ways that really address what it is that we need to do as opposed to here's just a library of stuff that got pulled off of varying manufacturers' websites and things that are being different in every office. We really need to be more standardized on those items and those things that we're doing across the board on every single process, or excuse me, every single project.

The other thing that we're doing is we are working very closely with technical quality, and it's not just a OK, I made this content and you go ahead and take a look and give me approval. It's they are in the weeds with us, going through, working with those VDC leaders and helping us develop those processes.

It's awesome because, as I mentioned, the volunteer army, a lot of those quality leaders across the firm are working with myself, with other VDC leaders to collectively for updating content or doing things within their template. They're in there with me. So it's not just a quick approval check and done. As I mentioned, they are in the weeds, which is awesome.

Our integration with specifications-- this is key. So as we're developing a lot of those new workflows, and I'll show you a couple examples, they are right there with us, working with that content, making sure we have correct assembly codes, making sure things are in line with our standard keynoting process so that they are actively in there from the beginning.

And also, the owner needs because we are working and focused more, having that owner operational solutions and services, we want to think about how are our model elements are going to evolve throughout our project process? Are we building content in a way that can develop and can evolve along with that? Are we having content that's flexible enough, has the right parameters, has things in it so that we're not having to, if we get to the construction side and we have to reinvent or redraw or redo things? Or if we're going to hand it over to the owner, oop, now we've got to go back and switch out our content. Let's think about this upfront so that we can be more streamlined in our process.

So this example here, it's nothing that's necessarily astounding. It's not like a, ooh, revolutionary on the idea of content, but it's just the process and just streamlining what it is that we're doing when it comes to our standard details and detailing. And this is that power that I mentioned of working very closely with the quality leaders, working very closely with our specification teams upfront so that we can save time on the project and also drive consistency between our construction drawings and our specifications.

We basically start out with our traditional just detailed components, very simple, very basic pieces of content but yet, they're intelligent because they have those assembly codes. They've been checked and verified by quality, by our specification teams. And we can reuse these on projects.

And it's awesome because we have an entire library that's built with these different components that we can grab when we need to use them. And as I mentioned, each one has their assembly codes, and we have them tied to a master CannonDesign keynote file so that project teams, as they're going through and beginning their projects, the spec leaders are linked together within their project and using Revit to help together build their spec. And we use these specs to do this.

So it's been a great adoption. We still have a ways to go, but it's been very successful for those teams that have really been actively engaged in using this. Our architectural detail library is where we have those heavy repositories of the-- I'm going to say repetitive but those construction details in which we will be using on a lot of our projects.

So we have that repository of egress stair details. We have standard casework details. We have exterior assembly details. Things that have already been vetted, already been done, and it's a repository where we can grab those and reuse those for projects, and it serves as a good baseline. And yes, there will be some modifications, but we're not redrawing these every single project. So it's a good place to start.

And then something else I want to mention is this is examples showing that 2D detail, but we're repeating the process, too, when it comes to our model geometry also.

AUDIENCE: What is your process for creating and vetting and delivering [INAUDIBLE]?

LIZ PRICE: Well, the process starts with we have an expansive list of-- these areas that I have down here are completed areas or areas in process. And then we have the list of we want to get to these, and we have the time to get to them. This comes back to the when can we get those hours from the people to help with that?

But those quality leaders are sitting in on those meetings. We're pulling together those details. We are actively vetting them all together, within a call or if it's a meeting where we're in person. And then we do have the option, which is helpful, to be able to have others kind of help build those, put them together, and have a final check.

I would love to say that this is, oh, we can turn it around very fast, but because we want those team members involved, it sometimes becomes a little bit of a lengthy process because we want them in the initial.

So this right here, I wanted to kind of highlight real quick. There's nothing, I guess, extraordinary about our families to do our workflow for code-required signage. But what I really wanted to kind of highlight was the fact that this is a need that came up within one of our VDC calls, where a leader said, I find that I am always having to recreate all my drawings for code-required signage, and there's not a good repository.

We had, at this time, had a good place to go and grab all those details. So she was spending a lot of time not only redrawing details but hours finding details and then sitting down with the specification writer for that project and vetting it and make sure things were accurate for that project.

So she took the lead on this, and I think this is awesome, because she went through, developed a family that had pre-defined code signage nomenclature, where she worked very closely with the spec writer, who went out to the rest of his spec leaders across the firm to get approval on, OK, this is the nomenclature that we want to use, which is awesome.

So this way, when this shows up on projects, it's not going to be, now, what does that mean? It's already been defined and approved with the spec leaders across the firm. And this was a smart family that will talk to a schedule, which is nice. It just automatically is there. It builds.

But we have, right now, a warehouse file that speaks to all of these details that have already been vetted by quality, by the spec leaders. So therefore, we have details we can pull into projects with guidance notes on when do these apply? When do these not apply?

This VDC leader is currently in California. So she knows that there's going to be a few different requirements and code things that we need to show on her package that may not be the same for other regions. So we actually used those guidance notes to be able to have, here's the California version. I don't want to say, here's the rest of the US version, but here's the standard version. But it's nice because we now have this library that we can pull from a place to start.

Our next kind of steps for this, is we'd love to be able to utilize some of the power from the Digital Practice teams, those who love that scripting-- that I wish I could say it was awesome now but good enough-- to be able to help. How can we make this process a little bit more dynamic? How can we maybe kind of populate those details when something shows up on a project. I might be dreaming, but know I think that would be a cool next step of how could we automate this a little bit more?

But really it's just the power of the VDC leaders coming in and saying what is a good workflow that we can use? And how can we improve what we already have or what we don't have a standard for?

And then here, the last thing I kind of wanted to highlight is our case work. So we had a very robust library of casework when I started at Cannon. And it had a lot of functionality, a lot of cool things with it, but we found that we were still going through, every time that we did casework, what's our naming system going to be for this project? What are we doing with our details? Where are our details? I'll share a little bit more on that. We're still kind of right there too.

But we needed to find a way to really make this process a little bit faster and more standard because casework is standard. We're doing this on every project. We know that we're going to have modifications or unique pieces or no work but what can we do to help get that mundane task a little bit more automated.

So we redid our casework to follow the Architectural Woodwork Standard, second edition. So all of our casework now adheres to those design series and uses the numbers, has the functionality of those series, and that's what we have now is our basic families.

Our philosophy behind this is that in your project, you'll have a legend. And the legend will correlate to, here are, those AWS design series code. So a 101 is always a 101. A 112 is always a 112. And here's the elevation. So this is your standard. Anytime you have a modification, so I can't read this number, so like a 101.2, which happens to have no shelf, and it's open so that you could put a garbage can or something inside there, anytime you have a slight modification, you can go through and we call that with the point system. So that way we know what is it that we started from and then where did we deviate from that original?

When it comes to our tagging and our elevations, we have a standard tag that calls out what is that design series number? Above it, we're going to say, what is that critical dimension that we can't tell from the elevation? And then what is the material type or the overall material type?

And sometimes we will end up having to call out. We might have a couple of different materials there, and then we will handle that and the elevation as well. But it's very simple. Our tag will add an L if it's locked. It will add an S for extra shelf for those pieces of casework that allow for an extra shelf.