Delivering $1 Billion of Work Collaboratively with Autodesk Construction Cloud

LIZ FOX: Delivering $1 Billion of Work Collaboratively with Autodesk Construction Cloud. My name is Liz Fox, and I'm a VDC manager leading the tech implementation team at Barton Malow.

MARK AUSTIN: My name is Mark Austin. I'm an accelerated value executive at Autodesk.

MATT BURNESS: And I'm Matt Burness, a group product manager at Autodesk focusing on cross-company collaboration on the ACC platform. Today, Liz will be describing the journey Barton Malow has been on with General Motors as they pursue a lean construction methodology and how they have partnered with Autodesk to support them with the tools they need. Mark will then do a deep dive on the partnership with Autodesk and the Accelerated Value Workshop that helped the Autodesk team truly understand what Barton Malow and General Motors are trying to achieve and how this led to the development of the ACC bridge product.

I will then walk through how the Autodesk product team was engaged as part of this process and how folks like Barton Malow and General Motors are helping to shape the future of collaboration on the Autodesk Construction Cloud. I'll hand it over to Liz.

LIZ FOX: Thank you. So I want to kick it off with a brief overview of Barton Malow and who we are. Barton Malow is a general contractor born and raised in Detroit, Michigan.

And next year, we're celebrating our 100 year anniversary. We've built iconic projects all over the country from the Daytona grandstand in Florida, to the campus crossroads edition, to the Notre Dame football stadium, countless K-12 improvement projects in our local school districts. And most recently, we've broken into the EV market building battery cell manufacturing plants all over the country.

Our organization is broken into three main entities. I represent Barton Malow Company, our self-perform union arm focused on automotive, energy, and industrial projects. We also have Barton Malow Builders, our more traditional, commercial, and institutional project-based arm. And then Barton Malow Holdings is our umbrella that includes all of our entity support teams such as finance, legal, safety, and our lean team.

Barton Malow is constantly working toward finding the most effective and efficient ways to serve our clients growing needs through innovation, technology, and continuous improvement. With more than 3,000 team members, our 100% employee-owned accompany is on a mission to transform the construction industry. Our success, however, is dependent on having the right partners.

For over 70 years, General Motors has been that partner for Barton Malow. In our rich history, we worked under a multitude of contract types delivering projects like manufacturing facilities, tech centers, and office spaces. We started working with General Motors in 1953, performing maintenance and miscellaneous work on plants around the Metro Detroit area. In 1980, General Motors awarded Barton Malow a contract to build the Orient and Wentzville assembly plants in Michigan. This was one of the largest private contracts ever awarded at the time.

In 2015, General Motors called on Barton Malow for one of the largest projects we would ever partner on, the M5 Productivity Improvement Program, which was a design build contract. This project consisted of building four new body shops across the country and over the course of two years. The principle approach to this project hinged on safety, schedule, cost, and required a deeply ingrained sense of collaboration.

As a team, General Motors and Barton Malow saw the challenge ahead and worked together to create a one team, one goal environment. Together, we pushed the boundaries of this industry in a multitude of ways.

As part of the M5 project, we completed a record breaking concrete pour known as mega slab to expand General Motors 1,000,000 square foot Arlington assembly plant. Together, with two of our concrete trade partners, Lloyd Concrete Services out of Virginia and Unlimited Concrete Solutions, LLC out of Ohio, we set out to place one of the largest 8-inch slabs ever done at 256,100 square feet.

As you can imagine, the logistics of this endeavor took weeks of planning and coordination between our four companies to bring 131 tradesmen and women from three states to Arlington. And after 33 hours of continuous work, we successfully placed and finished 647 concrete trucks worth of material.

Under a typical design bid build contract with the hierarchy that usually defines the team culture on site, we would never have been as successful in this undertaking. It was collaboration and partnership that enabled the M5 project team to leverage each partner's expertise. This new way of approaching work set the wheels in motion for Barton Malow's lean evolution further strengthening our relationship with General Motors and laying the groundwork for how we would work together in the future.

At Barton Malow, lean isn't just a delivery method either. It's part of our culture. Lean is a culture of respect for people and continuous improvement to create more value for the customer, while identifying and eliminating waste. We're currently in the first of three stages of implementing lean at our company. We're starting to integrate lean tools into our day-to-day project delivery methods. We're training employees through our lean university.

And we're hosting Kaizen events to help improve our processes, including one we hosted earlier this year with General Motors to work on how we turn over projects to each other in ACC. We're all in on lean, but why? What benefits does lean provide to our team members and our customers?

Lean construction aids in delivering value to the customer without sacrificing building quality. Trade personnel are provided a safe, and clean, and organized jobsite to deliver that quality work. Well-informed project personnel know what their job requirements are and are empowered to make decisions to keep the flow of work progressing. We've found that in implementing lean, we've been able to enhance the success of our projects while gaining trust among project team members, both internal and external.

In May of 2020, ground was broken in Ohio for the future site of Ultium 1, a joint venture between General Motors and LG. Barton Malow was selected to join the team to lead the construction process in our first integrated project delivery contract together. The next year, we broke ground on Ultium 2. And the year after that, we broke ground on Ultium 3.

In 2022, when General Motors changed joint venture partners to Samsung, they once again called upon Barton Malow to lead the construction process of Armstrong, their fourth battery cell plant breaking ground later this year. It's safe to say that General Motors is not slowing down. And we are committed to working together to deliver these huge IPD projects.

Earlier this year, General Motors announced that they are seeking to produce only zero emission light duty vehicles by 2035. In order to reach this goal, they are going to need to build new infrastructure as well as make improvements to their existing facilities. And to help fund the goal, General Motors is making investments in gas-powered vehicle assembly plants. They've committed $1 billion into infrastructure improvements in four plants across the country and another $1 billion in funding to make improvements to their Flint, Michigan plants where the gas-powered Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra heavy duty trucks are produced.

But how do we successfully deliver billions of dollars worth of work? Again, we're calling on our lean principles and our history of partnership. Unlike typical ways of managing projects, IPD requires a commitment to collaboration among the owners, contractors, and designers. In IPD, we all share risks and rewards equally, furthering our commitment to one team, one goal.

While we have measures in place to guide teams through quarterly health evaluations and facilitate poll planning on site, in 2020 when we were beginning our journey into EV plants, both General Motors and Barton Malow were just starting to adopt Autodesk BIM 360. And neither of us had a holistic grasp on how we would function in this new software. Would we function in one environment or would we both open our own site? How would we maintain our data while also maintaining transparency across the team? How do we turn data over, and at what frequency would we do that?

To further complicate things, in 2022, Barton Malow made the decision to move out of BIM 360 and go all in on Autodesk Construction Cloud, implementing ACC for any new project that we opened, while maintaining our existing projects in BIM 360 in a special caveat that any of our new General Motors projects would be opened in BIM 360 and not ACC. General Motors was beginning to explore around the same time, but they were not ready to fully commit as we were already in the midst of shaking out how we were going to function in BIM 360 using ACC Connect to push data between our sites.

We stood up the Ultium 3 project site and BIM 360 in July of 2022. Soon after we started to shift our conversations with General Motors from BIM 360 to functionalities we were discovering in ACC. Our shared goal is to be fully collaborative with the construction process. While BIM 360 is a great tool with plenty of API capabilities, to make working on an IPD project in two environments possible, we were also eager to explore ACC and this new tool called Bridge that would give team members closest to the work control over how data was saved and shared.

After months of discussion and multiple working sessions, in December of 2022, we made the decision to use ACC for the first time on a General Motors design build project called Project A. It's important to note that while the contract says design build, we truly treat these as an IPD light, using and implementing similar collaboration methods in how we approach the project. By March of 2023, we opened four additional General Motors projects in ACC.

And that's three ACC sites per project. We have one for General Motors, one for Barton Malow, and one for our AE partner Ghafari. This led to our next hurdle. The tools are at our fingertips. But how do we successfully deploy them to five project teams across three ACC sites consistently?

There's a lot of evidence offering compelling reasons to adopt IPD. This method has shown to increase efficiency in project delivery, reduce waste, provide a safer working environment for on-site staff, and ultimately provides a better chance of ending on time and on budget. But they require a change in the typical approach to building. IPD Requires consistency and collaboration.

There's just no way around it. So throughout the fall as General Motors met with Barton Malow to discuss this transition to ACC, a lot of questions and concerns around consistency in our workflows came up. If you ask any of our project delivery team members on either side of the table, they'll tell you that every project is different depending on who is on the team. Our combined project teams are large with multiple projects running at once.

There's a lot of room for variations in workflow. If we don't try to standardize the way we work in ACC, we could really turn it into a mess. We understand that every project is different, and there are obviously nuances. But our goal is to create a standardized workflow that will fit 95% of project needs. We recognize that to be successful in working in multiple environments, there was a need for common configurations.

We may not have identical projects in each hub, but we needed to reach an agreement on who housed what data, how and when we shared data housed in one hub to another, and we needed to understand how each of us was working in our own environment in cases where we were doing things differently, such as role-based permissions and folder structures.

We decided it was in every partner's best interest to create an ACC playbook to document these configurations and workflows to ensure consistency among project teams. While we believe that we could have created our playbook on our own, we saw an opportunity to leverage our relationships with Autodesk and bring them in as a partner on this endeavor.

In December of 2022, we sat down with our customer success managers at Autodesk and explained to them where we were in our adoption process, our goals moving forward, and enlisted them to help us achieve our one team, one goal vision. Now I'm going to pass it over to Mark to dive into the workshop that Autodesk led in January of this year to help kick off our shared playbook initiative.

MARK AUSTIN: Thank you, Liz. Yeah, so let's take an opportunity to dive into how this all started, Accelerated Value Workshop. The goal of this workshop is to listen to our customers as partners not as software vendors, to collaborate and better understand their workflows, and also to fully optimize and utilize ACC to its fullest, whether it's from a napkin sketch, to pre-con, to the construction, or the handover process.

Myself and my colleagues are from the industry. So we know the ins and outs of these complex workflows. Once this workshop is complete, you get tangible results. This is what Barton Malow, General Motors, and Ghafari were able to walk away with an executive report. You can see a screenshot on screen right now, an example of this, really is the current state, the current solution, desired state, the next steps. This becomes the foundation for the playbook that gets developed from Barton Malow, GM, and Ghafari.

So we can see on the screen right now is a section from the playbook. This section is outlining the issues, standards across all three hubs. Knowing who's going to respond to what, how it's standardized across all three hubs, this allows for consistent results, clarity, and what is known as a typical chaotic process. This is a screenshot as well. in the standardized folder structure, roles, and permissions, different hub to hub outlines, understanding who has to what information as well as to the project team. Again, it's transparent, and it's predictable.

So how do we ensure success? We want to make sure all parties that are going to be touching these workflows are in the room. What that means is we can't really utilize Zoom in this instance. We really need everyone in the same room to be able to collaborate.

Having input from these critical individuals such as an APM, a DE, a project manager, superintendent, whoever it might are going to be critical in helping develop these because they're going to be the ones that are going to be using these workflows day in and day out. Plus, it helps ensure success. We're all creatures of habit. So when we become stressed, we go back to old ways.

Slow and steady-- we don't want to eat the elephant all in one bite. Construction is way too complex to try to take it all in at once. Plus, we can measure things along the way. Data is becoming a big deal. And we need to be able to measure it along the way. And if you're doing the entire process, it's just too complex.

And probably one of the most important aspects here is level of trust with all parties. Just as Liz was talking about, this is a large project. It is a lot of money, and it is complex.

So we really need to open up about where risk is at from party to party or trade to trade. Really no finger pointing. But these are IPD projects, so we all share the risk. So when we're able to balance that risk out, we have better outcomes.

Now we can dive a little bit deeper into Bridge itself, how it was identified as a clear winner on this project. The Bridge was a clear answer to complex workflows. GM wanted to eliminate ambiguity in the turnover process. All parties involved have different folder structures, not just wanting to standardize workflows but rather needing to. It's a billion dollars worth of work.

And there's a lot going on here. So we have to standardize for success. And it wasn't just synchronized hubs. It was synchronized collaboration. Really working and understanding data ownership up and downstream helps them manage risk.

Consistency Bridge allows for workflows that have to be consistent results from project to project. And it's a source of truth. If someone or an entity has files in one location on their hub, they want to be able to distribute across hubs knowing you're looking at the latest and greatest. And it's repeatable from project to project. It's seamless.

You set up the Bridge or the rule, and it runs in the background. You don't have to worry about it. It builds trust and confidence. If you have a trade or a party that's being onboarded mid-project, it's OK. We can create these bridges or rules mid-project for opportunities.

For a one-step process, documents and files need a lot of input such as submittals. There's a lot of people touching that providing input. However, when it's complete, it should be done. It should be uploaded not downloaded, distributed. It should live in one location and distribute across hubs. We're really trying to minimize unnecessary management of data here. Again, no more back and forth. If it's complete, it's complete. It should end up in its final destination whether that's on a singular hub or multiple.

Communication has to follow suit and evolve with technology. Construction today is a fast-paced and has been typically a handover process. But we can't do that anymore. Documents, models, RFIs, submittals-- the project is more of an evolving entity than it ever has been. And it's going to continue to evolve in that way. This evolving process leaves us less and less room to be reactive during construction opening ourselves up for risk.

Don't fear automation. New workflows, whether it's AI or not, have the opportunity for us to redirect efforts where truly needed. Automotive manufacturers have a great example of this. With new features such as adaptive cruise control and lane centering, people are able to spend maybe a little bit more time focusing on drivers around them for potential risk.

That doesn't mean losing sight of the car in front of me. Barton Malow is one of the industry leaders here that is embracing disruption and thinking differently. They are helping us shape the future by utilizing and embracing change.

We all have a common goal here. We want to see our projects teams to succeed as builders not just putting out fires. Barton Malow has helped us understand areas of opportunity for our products to shape the future of ACC with their feedback.

We take all this information, whether it's through an Alliance Workshop, Big Room, client interactions, we organize it and process it. We take that information, amplify our findings, and relay that back to our product teams. This is when we started to get Matt involved in some of the conversations to how to best utilize Bridge.

What are we hearing from the rest of the industry about Bridge and also to provide that client feedback to him. We want follow-up from our clients and to keep you informed, whether that's a good or bad on how Autodesk is moving forward because your input is valuable to us. It helps us shape the future. With that said, I'm going to hand it on over to Matt to be able to talk a little bit more about his Bridge interactions with Barton Malow.

MATT BURNESS: Thanks, Mark. Let's dive into the product team's engagement with Barton Malow and General Motors and how we have developed a trusted partnership with them to help drive their vision of one team, one goal. In order to achieve this vision, Barton Malow and General Motors are helping shape the future of collaboration on the Construction Cloud. I want to talk about the key pillars of our work together.

First and foremost, I want to talk about this as an ongoing partnership. As we have heard, the industry is evolving faster than ever and so are the needs of Barton Malow and General Motors and others who are at the cutting edge of it. It is critical for us to have these ongoing partnerships as the product team to help us understand where the industry is headed and what tools and working models are required to enable companies to focus on getting the job done rather than how they are going to collaborate with one another.

With this in mind, we approach these problems together, working with Liz and her teams to understand the challenges they are facing, from the broad problem of collaborating across hubs and accounts, to specific challenges when refining workflows and processes. This also means ongoing qualitative research calls with a broad range of subject matter experts to ensure the problem is understood from various perspectives. This understanding is then tested against research with other partners to ensure the ultimate solution can scale to fit the needs of all.

From there, we work with Barton Malow and General Motors to show them some of the possible solutions that we are exploring. They then give us their perspective as to which of these solutions best fit their needs or if none of them do. Critically, this is a dialogue not a one-sided presentation. And the solutions that are developed are informed at various stages by Liz and her team.

And, of course, we don't always get everything right the first time. And we are incredibly grateful to Barton Malow and General Motors who help us iterate on these solutions so that we are improving and working to solve more of the problems they are facing and more generally the industry is facing.

Mark talked earlier about the Accelerated Value Workshop. And I can't understate the value of this as part of not only the partnership with Barton Malow but also a broader engagement across Autodesk too. Echoing the Barton Malow vision of one team, one goal, we are all working together to enable cross-hub collaboration and support companies working in a way that makes sense to them.

In particular, I want to call out this sentiment that was distilled from that workshop that underscores the need and starts to sketch out the future direction of the Bridge technology. To truly have a common data environment, the democratization of information needs to be available. With three separate instances of Autodesk builds, as Liz mentioned earlier, data must be standardized, permissioned, and exchanged at a frequency that accommodates the needs of each team.

We must build a scalable solution that can address the needs of a billion dollar investment in the future of EV transportation from vertical construction to civil, industrial, and retail projects. From the very large to the everyday, all projects bring together multiple stakeholders, and we must address your needs at whatever scale you work. To meet these needs, Autodesk is investing in platform connectivity and specifically with Bridge, cross-company, cross-account workflows and seamless collaboration so that folks like GM and Barton Malow can get back to business without having to worry about how data is flowing across their accounts and hubs.

I want to take a step back for a moment and talk about where we started with this data fragmentation problem that has been present in the industry for a long time. Autodesk has been investing in connecting the different phases of the construction life cycle. And more recently, work has progressed on addressing this additional layer of fragmentation. Barton Malow, and General Motors, and the industry more generally is working to improve their processes and be as competitive as possible.

To drive these business goals, it is critical to standardize processes and derive insights across projects. They, of course, are then rightly motivated to maintain their own hubs and accounts to achieve these business goals. Uncovering this need sparked work on the Bridge technology to ensure folks can work on their own hub while still collaborating seamlessly with other companies.

Connectivity between phases and across companies is part of this broader data fragmentation problem the industry is facing and that we are partnering with customers to solve. Regardless of how our customers want to work, how they choose to collaborate, and where they are in the data life cycle, Bridge should scale to their needs.

Working with Barton Malow and General Motors has helped informed a solution that spans the needs of architects, engineers, contractors, and owners, where valuable intellectual property is respected, where handover documentation is automatically available on an ongoing basis throughout the project, and where time spent on moving data around is saved and can be reallocated to higher value tasks.

Critically, Bridge enables data to be shared across hubs between stakeholders throughout the life cycle of the project and the building. This tool and its future would not have been possible without our partnership with Barton Malow and General Motors and many others like them. To reiterate what Mark said earlier, all roads lead to Bridge.

Today, we support sheets, files and folders, and automations for both of them, push and pull workflows, and design collaboration and Revit Cloud Worksharing workflows. We realize this is just the beginning. There is still a long way to go for this new way of working, and we are excited to continue to work with Barton Malow, and General Motors, and many others to continue to shape the future of collaboration on the platform and the industry.