Revit Data Mining for Project Health Insights

MIKE BARTYZEL: I'm Mike Bartyzel, and this is my co-speaker, Jose Fandos.

JOSE FANDOS: Hello.

MIKE BARTYZEL: He's always late, but he managed on time this time.

JOSE FANDOS: Yeah. You lied to me. You said it was at 9:00. That's why I made it on time.

MIKE BARTYZEL: Well, yeah. He nearly missed-- what was it? Your mother's birthday, right? And they told you you had to go a day in advance.

JOSE FANDOS: Yeah. They were doing their 25 anniversary wedding, so renewing their vows. And they told me the day before-- that it would be the day before. And I arrived late, and I was all stressed, sweating. No, no, I'm going to change. And everyone is running around the house in pajamas. And I'm thinking, something's wrong. How come you're all so cool? Well, we lied to you. We said it would be a day earlier so you wouldn't be late.

MIKE BARTYZEL: Yeah. That's how we work with Jose. Everything's the wrong time. But when it comes to data, everything's in the right place. Right.

So let's start. Thank you for coming. It's a pleasure to have you all. We have a full room. It's really nice to have that, and I hope you enjoy the presentation. I will upload it today. You will get to download it and any data, and it will be slightly different in the upload.

But we are showing the real deal today. This is how it really works. This is based on real examples that we currently have. And some of the data, I picked up last night. So it's absolutely live as we can see it.

So some of the objectives that you will see. So you will get to hopefully know the tools available to you, or at least what we're using. And you will be able to see how we've developed the plan to bring coding talent into our team, and foster innovation, and convince management. That's the main thing. It was the case with us, we had to convince them really hard to invest in it, and they've seen the results. And you will get to see the insights of other activities on our projects.

So a little bit about me. I'm Mike Bartyzel. I work for the BuroHappold Engineering. I am CIBSE Digital Engineering Steering Group member. I'm a member of Society of Digital Engineering, which is also run by CIBSE. And I organize LRUG-- it's a London Revit User Group-- for the last six or seven years, really, together with Jose. Jose is helping on that, as well, when he turns up on time.

BuroHappold's BIM for Efficiency Focus Group leader, as well. So I've run that for the last nine months or so. And we actually achieved all the goals already. And it was supposed to be a year. Now, a little bit about Jose.

JOSE FANDOS: Yep. I've been working with BuroHappold for over three years now, four years.

MIKE BARTYZEL: Four years.

JOSE FANDOS: I'm also part of the CIBSE BIM Steering Group. Within that, I proposed, back in 2011, what we call the product data templates. It's just like an ingredients list for products from the construction industry being turned into standard. And I do chair, nowadays, the group within CIBSE.

I'm also the founder of Andekan, a company that's been dedicated to Revit content for the last 10 years. And I'm also the head of product-- Product Manager-- of Kinship, which is a tool that we developed, and we'll talk a bit more about it today.

MIKE BARTYZEL: And I think you have a booth down there, right, where you can meet Jose later if you want. Somebody said that you're providing some beers at some stage.

JOSE FANDOS: That's not true. But--

[LAUGHTER]

MIKE BARTYZEL: OK. Right. So this is the title of the presentation, Revit Data Mining for Project Health Insights. And you can see this is one of our projects that actually has been opened last week. So this is the Louvre Museum in Abu Dhabi. And we started this project in 2008, and it was in Revit from the very beginning. And we are-- we've got 21 offices around the world. About 1,800 people work for us in all of these offices.

Pioneers in Digital Design. How we cue BIM we will see a little bit later. We're covering all major engineering disciplines and specialties. So we do everything, apart from architecture. We're not architects. We do all sorts of engineering, and we operate in one collaboration space. So everything is connected. Every office can work with another office.

And so a few of our projects, Olympic Stadium. We've designed the Olympic Stadium a few years back. And then, the middle project is actually-- I don't know-- I was waiting for a message because it's been nominated for Autodesk Global AEC Awards. So I know the result already, but I didn't want to preemptively actually announce anything here.

JOSE FANDOS: It's been announced.

MIKE BARTYZEL: It has been announced. Well, there we go. So it won. This project has won the Autodesk Global AEC Award. And next one is City of Dreams in Macau. You can see these-- we like dealing with the holes, I guess. Someone else's design, obviously. Oh, sorry. We've seen that one.

So a few more. We call them-- we only do TINA projects, where there is no other alternative. And we usually get really complicated projects. As you can see, this is what they are. There's plenty of them. And we sort of-- we're not as big as other huge competitors, like Aecom, Arabs, Adkins. We are probably a niche company, and we like that because we can-- we have a freedom to do slightly different things than others.

So why is data important? We always think about data. For me, data is more important than the software. You will see that a little bit later. So we have been on a path-- on a journey with BIM. And some of you have probably seen this graph in the past.

We, in UK, are still slightly behind US, I would say. But yes, that's where it was. I started in BuroHappold in 2008, and there was that peak of inflated expectations at that time. And then, suddenly, whoa, OK. Yeah, we can do all these projects, but the hardware is not there, the software is not there.

So you go through a downturn, and then you learn. And suddenly, say, whoa, OK, there are few workarounds, and we can use this stuff and do it in that way or that way. And suddenly, you're achieving something that is quite good.

OK. So this is Museum of the Future. You can see some of the modeling that has gone into it. This is only showing MEP. And yes, there is a hole, but it's on purpose I think. You think?

JOSE FANDOS: I think so, yeah.

MIKE BARTYZEL: Yeah. OK. And BIM is the digital medium that allows us to digitize the AECO industry. To rethink our approach, how we use the data, to innovate and reshape the project space, and to transform our industry. Like I mentioned, we do Kill BIM. We want data and digital engineering.

OK. Some people might not like it, but we think that BIM has gone past its sell-by date. Digital engineering is what we do. And the data is the most important thing. And we do use the real data. We design using the real data. The things that we try to do is always about harnessing the data from different sources. And it could be people movement, it could be studying, it could be even the phones that you have in this room so we might know where you move and so on. Everybody knows how it works, and we're just trying to harness that.

So like I said, in short, software is eating the world. You've seen that famous quote. No. It's the data. You said I should quote that.

JOSE FANDOS: Yeah.

[LAUGHTER]

MIKE BARTYZEL: OK. And our mission is to harness the power of digital technology, big data analytics, and the latest data visualization platforms to drive greater efficiency and innovation into our designs. This is exactly what I was saying, and this is what our management actually signed us up to do. And there was always two streams. There was always a delivery on BIM and design analysis. And what we're trying to do is harness that into one integrated digital workflow.

Let's go and talk about the details now. So this is how we actually mine the data. So we have several tools. This list is not exhaustive at all. But these are the major tools that we use. So we use Power BI, which is for visualization. We use Adroit, which is in-house developed software. There's a presentation later, on Thursday, from the creator of Adroit. So if you can sign up to that, please do.

And we also use RF Tools, and this was purchased about six years ago. Yeah. And it's a great tool. I really, really love RF Tools. And we've used that for years now.

And Kinship. Kinship was incubated in BuroHappold, but it is owned by Jose. Jose was the real creator, but we've given him the space--

JOSE FANDOS: A place to-- yeah.

MIKE BARTYZEL: --the space to develop it. And what was the idea? Having all these tools, and then, OK, well, we need to automate. And by automation, we will have all the drawings, all the models, all the schedules, and even linking all of that to our specification. So every model that we use is full of data and it's fully connected with everything. So this is more about Kinship.

JOSE FANDOS: Sure. OK. So all these tools that we've been mentioning, they are all used together with the help of the different teams, including IT, to give us and help us improve the side of the design and development of a project from every possible angle. Because sometimes, we will have-- or you'll see projects where only, say, the design options are being iterated on and improved. But then, it's something like how to make sure that the performance of that project, and all the participants, have the right information about what's going on. That that's as sufficient as it can be. It's not taken care of, or the other way around.

So with this presentation, what we're showing is how we've been able to take care of one of the sides, together with the other, and bring it all together. Kinship is one of the tools-- so Kinship is a cloud-based service that we developed in Andekan my own company. And I joined BuroHappold four years ago, and I brought the beginning of what is nowadays Kinship, and I showed it to Mike. And then he said, sure, we'll give it a try, as long as it's for free.

MIKE BARTYZEL: But it wasn't for free, was it?

JOSE FANDOS: But we'll give you a job.

MIKE BARTYZEL: At all.

[LAUGHTER]

JOSE FANDOS: Well, it was for the very first run, the first couple years, I think. And after that, with the help of all the feedback that we were getting from the users, we started to make improvements. And eventually, I convinced BuroHappold to pay for it, as well. So what is--

MIKE BARTYZEL: Paying from the very beginning.

JOSE FANDOS: OK-- in beers. So what does Kinship do? Well, Kinship, the first thing it does is help with content search. With BuroHappold, several offices, some of them in the same areas or zones, the content was always a problem. Time was being spent creating it, time was being spent improving it. And yet, people weren't using it in projects. Kinship allows you to shorten that time of finding content across the entire organization with just a quick search. And the content is there ready to be placed in a view directly.

Then, it does help with model management. Many times over, people would-- with the content, it would be a question of, what content does need to be developed? What content is being used? Where is it being used?

And the answers to all these questions were always a guesstimate by anyone, because there was no real data. The information was there. It was in the projects. But there was no way to collect it and display it in a way that helped those running the different projects to be able to dedicate the resources to the content that they might need further down the line.

So that's where Kinship comes in. It allows us to see not only how that content is being used, or where it comes from, but also who's having it, who's removing it, and it helps with the upkeep of a model's health throughout its life.

And then, we have project analytics. Now here, the thing is, once you start looking into not just one project, but all the projects-- once you start looking not in one office, but in all the offices-- and start harvesting all this information, well you can imagine what can be done next, which is to start gathering information across the different projects that are related and different metrics, and exposing that information. Again, that was always there, but it wasn't being put to use.

This is what some call dark data. It's information that is in your systems. It's not that it needs to be created, or someone needs to start writing it. It just needs to be collated and exposed in a way that those who are making decisions based on information, they have that actual data coming from what is being generated. Sorry. And yes, this is for all projects and disciplines.

Now, here, we can see--

MIKE BARTYZEL: Keep clicking.

JOSE FANDOS: Oh, right. Sorry. You tell me. OK. Well, you can do the [INAUDIBLE].

MIKE BARTYZEL: OK.

JOSE FANDOS: Because you know.

MIKE BARTYZEL: Yes, I do. I use Kinship every day. Library for managing and storing approved content, as we've mentioned--

JOSE FANDOS: Yeah.

MIKE BARTYZEL: Actually, consider the little video. I don't know why it's not running.

JOSE FANDOS: So yeah, one thing that Kinship allows in order to help with the content search. Of course, finding content is great. But it would be even better if that content is put forward based on some sort of ranking, and that ranking takes into account what you're doing and which project are you on, and what content you've used before.

So the content that's being suggested for you to use on a given moment is always taking into account your context. And in doing so, those suggestions, well, feel like they are reading your mind, if you want, or better than otherwise. It's no different than when you do searches in Google. And the reason why the first results tend to turn something up is because Google is doing a ton of-- looking into a ton of data in the background-- from other searches by other people, to searches that you've done in the past and other information that you might have made available to them for in one way or another. So Kinship uses context data to allow it to provide you with the content that's most suitable.

But one of the things that it does is to allow you to put up a library of approved content, and always gives that content a special-- well, a boost, as it were. You can do this directly from within Revit. So the idea is not to stop people's workflow. Because you're working in an application, even looking into the project browser, scrolling down, expanding the family history, Revit category, and so on. That's breaking, if you want. I mean, anything is breaking into your workflow other than making it appear instantly. But there are ways and ways to help you with that.

So with Kinship, you just call it up with either a keyboard shortcut, or press a button. And you type something, and the results come back ready for you to use them.

In Kinship, you can search for anything, when it comes to content. Basically, you are not limited to the family name. You can search for families with a particular parameter, or a very particular parameter and value. And you can also search for-- or restrict your search to given Revit categories if you want. There are power search features, if you want. But the idea is that any and every piece of content within a family-- any parameter, any content of those, or values on those parameters-- can be searched. So you can find a needle in the haystack, as it were.

Yeah. Well, this is what I was saying before. Yeah, the approved content, the one that you have in the library-- the one that someone has checked and made sure that it is suitable for use directly in projects, that it has the right geometry, levels of detail, 2D, 3D materials, parameters, share parameters-- all of those things that we check on content to call it good content, approved content, or library content, you can now make sure that it's in the library, and that it's put forward to people as they are searching for content before, perhaps, other content. So improving the content that gets used in the projects.

All this happens, obviously, without you even noticing. The idea here is to keep your computer running full-speed to deal with Revit and your other supporting applications. So Kinship tries to make sure that--

MIKE BARTYZEL: That's the key, really. Because it's absolutely in the background. You don't see it whatsoever. But it takes all the data, all the time and puts it on a cloud available to you. The same family that somebody is putting a model in New York can be available in Mumbai within a minute. That's how quick it is.

JOSE FANDOS: Yeah. So you can see there, that's the interface. It does not only component families, but it does also system families, groups. You can put together something like a toilet or a utility room, group it. Make sure that all the content is proper-- is approved content. And you can put that into your library.

Now, I'm sure that no toilet can be used twice in two different projects, or utility room. But if you have a few of those and they are approved, they certainly can be brought into a project with the click of a button, and group and tweak the families. That's going to save you time no matter what. And at BuroHappold, that's something that we've been using. Taking away, perhaps, minutes, if not more, of anyone's task doing those things. So I mentioned fully indexed. Yeah, you have thumbnails of every single one of the different types.

MIKE BARTYZEL: And more detail when you click on it, actually, as well.

JOSE FANDOS: Yes. It has a web-based interface, where you can view all this content, where you can be told about warnings or issues that you might find in your content so they can be dealt with There and then.

Well, yeah, in the web interface, you have, also, tools for people to comment or to discuss. Anything that they might need in terms of content, or in that particular piece of content.

MIKE BARTYZEL: So how we actually use those tools, this is really important. So we've mentioned Kinship, and you can see, we have a better content straightway on our projects, and it's giving you that insight into the data that you have on those projects. And we have, like I said, 1,800 people in BuroHappold, and currently, we have 1,164 users of Kinship.

Well, it wasn't by choice. Actually, we did try the easy way-- guys, can you go install it? And we got to, like, 250 users. And I felt, no, sod that. I'll just get everybody-- IT to just force-install it on every machine. Because I wanted the insights of the data from every machine. And yeah, there you go. So anybody that's got Revit installed has got Kinship installed.

And now, we have every project that's tracked everywhere in the world. And we can see the Project Health Insights, as well. And so on a couple of those graphs, you can see the little black dots. These are the syncs with central that are a little bit longer than normal. I think this is-- what's that? 10 minutes, I think?

JOSE FANDOS: Yeah, it is.

MIKE BARTYZEL: Yeah, 10 minutes. And the black line across shows you who was saving when, and the size of the project, how it varies through time. Another tool, like we've mentioned, is Adroit. That one is developed fully in-house. And it's add-in, similar way to what Kinship is. But it hasn't got the browser capability. It's just a normal add-in to Revit. It's got Installer, and accesses the database, as well.

So everybody who has Adroit installed, we will collect quite a few things that they do. So we can monitor which, actually, functions in that add-in is used the most. We can see who is actually using it more. And we can then go in and see, well, OK, that little tool that we've developed in the actual Adroit is not being used at all.

So we can target people, and explain to them the functionality of that tool a little bit more. So that gives us the insights to this. And you can see we also dashboard all of those, so it's available to all the management at the same time, and everybody else.

JOSE FANDOS: Yeah, with Power BI, we use it to access different data sets that would never come together. So it's grabbing live data from Revit. It's grabbing live data from the other different tools, from different teams, like mixing HR data, financial data. And of course, this is perhaps some of them, not for everyone. But then, it's allowing the teams to mix the data together and present it to management in ways that can inform decisions being made later.

MIKE BARTYZEL: Absolutely. You can see at the bottom-left here, this is which version of Adroit is used a little bit more or a little bit less. Well, 2018 doesn't seem to be used very much yet, which is strange. I thought we were all in 2018 now.

OK. So a few more things that Adroit can do, as well, for example, Model Checker. Like I mentioned at the very beginning, we do not have architecture in house. We do not employ architects. So we need to work with everybody else.

And what we can do-- we normally try to agree on a BIM execution plan. Could you guys tell us where you actually have changed in a model from the previous one? And sometimes, they do say, well, we've changed this and this. And then, when you actually look at the model, it's much more that's been changed.

And you say, well, OK. Now we can actually go back and tell you what you've changed. And so this is harnessing that data, comparing two models very quick and easy. You can do it in Dynamo. It's not a big deal. I'm sure many of you are doing things like that already.

And the other use of Adroit is in something what we called a single analysis model. So it's something that we've developed in-house, as well. And this is looking at analysis of the project. So early stages, when we get the first geometry from the architect, and we actually look at what the cooling loads, heating loads might be. What's the best orientation of the building, towards the sun or whatever.

All of those analysis, we put together and we transfer it completely live. So even BREEAM assessments that you do in US, or many others. This is all automated in that sense. And this is just to show you a little workflow of single analysis model.

So we can take the architectural engineering models. We actually rebuild the model ourselves using scripts, and using the data. Because we found that, very often, architectural models are built for a different purpose, let's say. Let's put it this way. They are not built for analysis. They are built for a different purpose.

So we need to-- we're using model laundry, which is a nice name, probably. And we clean up those things that we don't need. We need really straight walls. We need spaces that we can look at, and add those parameters that we will need later, after the analysis, to use for our engineering purposes to design the HVAC, to design lighting, and so on and so on.

So yeah. You can see how we're doing it. So this is not necessarily with just one tool. It's several tools put together, but we're calling it a single analysis model. But it is several workflows that work together. And this is more about numbers, and this is-- like I said, this is real. This is not taken from somewhere.

What we also do in BuroHappold, we have decided to divide our BIM projects into stages. And those stages will have different requirements. So BIM Stage 0, we're not using BIM. It could be just analysis projects, or quick reports or something like that. You don't need to do any BIM on this. So BIM stage 1 is we're actually using BIM, but only internally. Architect is not using it, or whoever else-- client doesn't want it. So we will still go ahead and do it ourselves.

And BIM stage 2 is collaboration. So this is where we actually work with all the other parties and protocols in place. And in those cases, we actually assign project BIM needs to every project. We also assign discipline coordinators-- discipline BIM coordinators-- and we track every project in every region. As you can see, this is live, pretty much.

We have, actually, just one project that is not classified currently. And it's in LA office. But we also have something which we call BIM stage 3, and this is not exactly the same thing as the UK BIM stages, as some of you might have heard. The BIM stage 3, for us, is we're using data as consumable.

So the client might ask us for the data, and we need to deliver that data within our models, one way or the other. And we do. This could be for quantity take-offs, for asset targeting. Whatever is needed, it's always there. And full analysis are always included within our models at this stage.

So another graph. A few other things that we're tracking with the data is, OK, how are we actually doing Revit versus AutoCAD? Is AutoCAD still available?

JOSE FANDOS: I thought we uninstalled it.

MIKE BARTYZEL: Yeah. Well, apparently, we're still using it. Yes. But I don't mind if it's cities using it because I don't think Revit works with cities and infrastructure. They probably have-- was a called Civil 3D? And that is AutoCAD-based.

So we do still use, in some cases, AutoCAD. Don't know why, but we still do. But you can see, this is total Revit hours by discipline, total AutoCAD hours by discipline on two different graphs. And this is in UK. So this is not for the whole of BuroHappold. I've seen similar graph for US, and they actually uninstalled AutoCAD on every machine, so there is no account.

OK. Another one. Yes, the Revit adoption. And you can see by office, in this instance. Building environments, so this is building services, MEP, and structures. And one other thing that we felt would be quite good-- you guys have a good IT. Our IT tells you something and does completely different thing altogether.

So we've decided to actually track what they do. Well, you guys telling us you're going to give us the best machines there are. And this is in our policy that you need to give us that the top spec machines for those Revit users. So we actually took one of the projects. We looked at the data, and this is all live, as well. And we've looked at-- well, some of them only have 16 gigs. Some of machines, they are not compatible with our policy.

So those ones in red were not so good. So was it the graphics card that was below the spec, or RAM was not enough, and or even a processor was just not adequate for the job. And yes, they did order those new machines eventually.

A few other things. So this is-- I thought it would be quite interesting. It's happened only three weeks ago, so I thought I will include this. I'm not going to mention the project name, as you can understand. But it's quite a large project.

We had a few problems in that. So nobody could really work. You probably know that from some of your projects. Long saving times, long opening times. We had 99 models altogether that we had to manage. Total size of all these models was 5.4 gigabytes. And we had 61 team members working constantly on this project.

Actual number, now, is 90. So it's a little bit more. I've checked yesterday. And project was also worked on by several offices. We're using Revit server between, so we're not using C4R. We're using Revit server for collaborative working between offices. So it is still all live.

And you can see a little graph down there, so there were saving times for some of the models. So most of them had few problems. And they've asked me to look at it. So I said, OK. So I've organized the call every day.

And I said, OK. So this is what we need to do. We need to do re-hosting regularly. Some of you-- I don't if you know or not. Revit does, over time, keep a lot of data that's completely unnecessary. And it designs balloons of the models and the support files and the backup files. So regular re-hosting should be done every week, or every 200 saves. And that's what I would recommend.

46% of the content was not purged in those models. So because we have access to all of that data, I could do all of those analysis-- all of them that you can see here-- within 20 minutes. I didn't even have to open any model. And frequency of saves. So you can see those ones with the red, those ones here.

So people were saving to central every three minutes. If it's so many of you, and the average save takes about two minutes, you're just going to clog up the whole system. And so yes, we've looked at that. Individual sizes were slightly too big. We recommend not going over 350 megabytes per model. It's just our recommendation. Revit server actually can't handle anything above the 800. It will throw problems if you have something like that.

And Revit links were pointing to the local servers, rather than the Revit server. We had CAD links within the models. System calculations were on. We were not actually using calculations on those projects, and the systems were-- all of them were on. If you turn them off, it will speed up your project very quickly.

Family sizes were too big. Some of the families were 11 megabytes, which is far too big. And number of warnings were excessive. And schedule opening was not actually used in any of the offices.

AUDIENCE: Is re-hosting a Revit server term?

MIKE BARTYZEL: No. You can do re-hosting on any project. So it means just completely detaching the model, and deleting the old one and saving over. So all your history is gone. All of the garbage that carried over will completely be gone from your project.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MIKE BARTYZEL: Sorry. I can't hear that.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MIKE BARTYZEL: Yes, it clears all the journal files. Exactly. So these were solutions. So you can see re-hosting done every week. That black line that you can see going up and down, this is every week, file size going down to 0, being completely re-hosted. The red line, I believe, is the project-- is number of families.

And you can see that, in the schedule down there, it's all green. Everything has been resolved. Purge was done daily. Individuals saved it to central only once an hour. That's what we recommended. Save locally, not a problem at all. You're not going to lose anything. Obviously, if you really, really need to sync with central more often, please do. But be considerate of others.

Individual model sizes were limited to 350. Once the purge was done, that was easy. We've created a ghost model for CAD links. I don't know if you're familiar with that term. So what it does, it fools Revit. Revit doesn't look for any CAD files anymore.

It goes into another Revit model, where you're actually hosting all those CAD links. And you're only saving it by view. So you're referencing that view from ghost model if you want to show it in your model. What other things we've done. Yeah, all the Revit links pointing to Revit server. System calculations of families were curated. Number of warnings was dropped to 2%. 2%-- I mean number of instances and number of warnings.

We've created a little tool that clears all the duplicate mark values. Just click a button. All the warnings are mostly gone. And we've used RTV Exporter Pro to schedule the opening of the model. So for example, if Mumbai was the first online in the morning, they could just schedule the opening for the time when they were coming to work. So the models would open in front of them when they came into work.

OK. So how we integrate new tools and help with the adoption. So like I've mentioned, you need to have a good plan. And I don't if you're familiar with that face. Some of you might know him. We needed to have a plan.

And one of the ingredients of that was to create something which we called Computational Collective. So you can see everybody-- there's several people in there-- are all connected. And it shows what they actually-- what's the relationship between different people, and what they work on together. Could it be a project, could it be something else that they're working on together?

JOSE FANDOS: You can use the tool to search for a particular area of interest, and it will show you who, in the company, within BuroHappold, is working on that.

MIKE BARTYZEL: And you can go and contact them directly, if you don't know them already. And yes. So how we build a plan. Digitize first, right? Embed BIM. In any company, that's a must, and we've done that.

Then, once you have that, try to automate things. Embed the coding skills within your company. Once you have that, you start transforming the design into computational engineering, or digital design, whatever we're going to call it. And then you're transforming the outcomes, something we call forward integration. Some of you, I'm sure, is very familiar with that term.

But obviously, to get there requires this, relies on, and started with. So that's how our plan works. And in summary, what we-- having that good plan is make mining data business as usual. Once you have that, you can move on with things. And start with one project, right? Just one will show what they can bring to the management. So I call it win hearts and minds because you will do that.

And launch some initiatives. So data policy, like I've mentioned to you, and that we had. Around people, what will these people contribute to your company, and how you can harness that to your needs. And create the processes. How are you going to do it. And don't forget about technology. Without some of the tools that you need to have, you will not go far. And measure and track progress. That's as simple as that.

So I've got one more graph for you. Remember, we've showed those stages that we have. So yellow is stage 3. So most of our projects is now in BuroHappold BIM stage 3.

And I thought I'll show you a little bit more what we can do with the data. But I'm not sure. These are all videos, so they're not really running, unfortunately. I apologize for that. I don't know why. But that was just to show you how we're using that data in real life, as well, where we can prototype several different options from the very beginning.

Once we have all of those options, we can explode and choose the one that is the best for us. Don't know why the videos are not working, but this is all constant changing of data, and using the data to design. And this is it from us. Thank you very much for coming, and please, any questions.

[APPLAUSE]

AUDIENCE: Will you be [INAUDIBLE]?

MIKE BARTYZEL: Yes, absolutely. I've mentioned that. We will upload everything. I run out, a little bit, of time. Because I was just-- like you see, changing this at the last minute to include the most up-to-date data.

AUDIENCE: The file size is, as you said, limited to 350 megabytes.

MIKE BARTYZEL: Yes.

AUDIENCE: But how did you pare that back, or split them all apart? Because you said they were 5.6--

MIKE BARTYZEL: Well, most-- yeah, all of them. 99 of them combined to 5.4 gigabytes. Most of them were around 400 mark. So once you purged them, once you re-hosted them, the size dropped massively.

Then one interesting thing, the warnings. We've noticed that-- we had a project that had about 3,000 warnings, and it was 400 meg. We've cleared the warnings. It dropped to 250 meg. Unbelievable.

AUDIENCE: And you found all the-- you addressed all the warnings?

MIKE BARTYZEL: Most of them. Most of them were duplicate mark value, and those ones are very easy to fix. You can just use RF Tools or-- well, now, we have-- in Adroit, we have just a button that looks at every category, and just clears-- it gives it a new mark, basically.

AUDIENCE: You said warnings under 2%. What was that 2% of?

MIKE BARTYZEL: So 2%-- what I was saying is if you have 50,000 instances of families, then 2%, I compare that to that number.

AUDIENCE: In your last slide, you mentioned that most of your projects are now in BIM stage 3.

MIKE BARTYZEL: Yes.

AUDIENCE: But that seems to be the stage that you don't have complete control over it. It relies on how other people are using your models. The deliverable is big. So how did you--

MIKE BARTYZEL: Well, this is-- this is the biggest control because we curate the data. Before the models go out, we can go and check all the data is actually there.

AUDIENCE: Right. But if the architect doesn't want a-- or the owner doesn't want a model--

MIKE BARTYZEL: No, we only go to stage 3 if the owner wants it. This is part of the deliverables. He wants that data. He wants to use that data. And then we will just go and do that as a project with stage 3.

AUDIENCE: And that's if you were involved in convincing them that that was of benefit to them. Because I've seen a lot of owners who don't--

MIKE BARTYZEL: We do. That's what we call forward integration. We go and talk to the client, and convince them, well, if you use that, we'll give you that data, and you can use it. Tell us what you actually need. Do you want to use it for quantity take-off, asset tagging? Whatever you want, we can do it.

AUDIENCE: I'm just wondering how you're capturing your sync-to-central times. Is that within Revit or with the API?

JOSE FANDOS: Yeah, with the API.

MIKE BARTYZEL: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JOSE FANDOS: Yes, it is.

AUDIENCE: For your ghost Revit model, are you importing the CAD or linking it?

MIKE BARTYZEL: It's linked in. We never import. It's always linked. But like I said, because it's in a ghost model, and you're only taking those views from that ghost model into your main model, nobody is really opening that ghost model. So you're fine. And Revit doesn't go and look for those links anymore because it finds the view, and that's all it needs. So you're fooling Revit, really, not to look any further, and that saves time.

AUDIENCE: So the stage 3 model, as you're selling to the owners when a contractor builds a completely different job, what's the value of this stage 3 model that you've presented as it's transformed over time? [INAUDIBLE]. I don't see a lot of back-filling as built-in information in the models at the engineering stages. What's the value?

MIKE BARTYZEL: That's true. They're still-- we always want the model to be developed further. We all need the designers. We all need to do the first stages, and then the contractor takes it on. And very often, still, a lot of the models are just binned, and the contractor starts all over again.

AUDIENCE: Right.

MIKE BARTYZEL: But if you work very closely with a client and you've put it in your EII, you've put it in your BIM execution plan, and the client actually polices that, then people actually do use those models. If we can prove to them that everything's curated, it's exactly how you need it, why would you go and start all over again?

AUDIENCE: Well, I haven't seen them come to fruition in my recent history. And to me, it's like the owners are investing a lot of money in something they're not seeing a return on yet. I'm working on a job with you guys right now in New Jersey. We're building a completely different building.

MIKE BARTYZEL: Well, we have one project called KFD Metro Station, which is in Riyadh. And actually, we work for a contractor. Contractor's our client, even though it's not end client. But--

AUDIENCE: So you read that linked through your-- passing-- working through it [INAUDIBLE]--

MIKE BARTYZEL: That's right.

AUDIENCE: In certain cases, I can see that [INAUDIBLE].

MIKE BARTYZEL: That's right.

AUDIENCE: But when you don't, that's hard.

MIKE BARTYZEL: When you don't, it's hard. But getting the client onboard early, it's extremely important.

AUDIENCE: That makes sense. OK.

MIKE BARTYZEL: Thank you.

AUDIENCE: Thank you.

AUDIENCE: You mentioned the two different tools that you may have. The comparison between models. So you eventually-- is that part of Kinship, or is that another--

MIKE BARTYZEL: No, this is actually part of Adroit. So it's in-house developed tool. But you can probably do it through Dynamo, as well. We've done it as add-in, but Dynamo is so powerful, you can do through that, as well.

AUDIENCE: Yeah. Well, are you selling your plug-ins?

MIKE BARTYZEL: Not Adroit because it's internal. But the person that does it might, in the future, start his own business. So that might be something available.

JOSE FANDOS: And about Kinship, it's commercial. And it's already got a few clients. BuroHappold.

MIKE BARTYZEL: We are one of them, right?

JOSE FANDOS: Yeah. BuroHappold.

MIKE BARTYZEL: The first.

[LAUGHTER]

JOSE FANDOS: For certain partners, BDP, a few more. But it's by invitation only at this moment in time. We're making sure we have the resources to take on board some of these large companies. And they are large, so we want to make sure that they get special treatment, as it were. Because we're still making sure that Kinship works in a different set of environments and for different types of needs-- architects, structural engineers, mechanical engineers. But you can come to see me at the booth and we can talk more about it.

AUDIENCE: On Kinship, you said it was cloud-based. What cloud service are you using?

JOSE FANDOS: So yeah, it's AWS, the cloud service.

MIKE BARTYZEL: Amazon?

JOSE FANDOS: Yeah, Amazon Web Services.

AUDIENCE: Could it be used with different [INAUDIBLE]?

JOSE FANDOS: Not at the moment, not at the moment. So it's a Revit-focused tool.

AUDIENCE: Did you say you had RTV Export Pro on your own machine?

MIKE BARTYZEL: No, not on android machine. I think we've bought quite a few-- but it's quite cheap. It's like $50 per license or something like that.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MIKE BARTYZEL: Yeah, and you can also schedule the exports through that. So you can do all the PDFing in the hours that nobody's in the office, or any other DWFX, whatever else that you want to export to. It's quite a powerful tool.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MIKE BARTYZEL: No, no. No, no.