Safe and Sound Construction with the Autodesk Construction Cloud Mobile App

JACOB WESTERGAARD: Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our class, Safe and Sound Construction with the Autodesk Construction Cloud Mobile App. My name is Jacob Westergaard.

SNEZHINA SHUKINA: And my name is Snezhina Shukina.

JACOB WESTERGAARD: If you like to know more about who we are, please feel free to scan the QR code and reach out to us if you have any questions. Before the class, be mindful that there are things that are currently in development that we'll be speaking about throughout the presentation, and why that's important is mainly because those can be subject to change, so just keep that in mind.

SNEZHINA SHUKINA: What do we cover today? We're going to start with why data is important and how to get that initial data to people on-site. We're going to talk about standardization workflows and why, and then we'll walk you through some proactive safety management workflows, how to collect data from site, track it via assets, and visualize for KPI tracking. For that, we have several mobile and web demos prepared for you to learn and get inspired from. Let's look at who is this for, and this is for everyone collecting or managing project data, from a document manager, anyone working on-site, to project managers, and executives.

JACOB WESTERGAARD: Projects today are very fragmented when it comes to the use of data it has a huge and direct impact on the project outcomes across all levels and this comes hand in hand with a lack of digital maturity across most of the construction industry just imagine what 95% of all captured project data is going unused actually means. So the big question is, how do we solve these problems. Historically, we know the teams are scattered, often working with their own source of truth. And it becomes even more scattered as you move through the different phases of the project. What we do with Autodesk Construction Cloud is bring teams and team members together, enabling easier collaboration from a single source of truth, whether you're in the office or on the construction site.

And to make sure that we don't lose rich data throughout the whole project life cycle, we're supporting you with capabilities that will help you throughout all phases of construction because, ultimately, our goal is to make sure we have no unused data at the end of the project. And by the end of the class we want to have demonstrated how ACC can help you move away from purely being reactive on projects to being more proactive, and ultimately, as the project progresses, start to predict potential problems that might occur in the future, and lastly, to show you how all the above is much easier obtained with standardized processes in place.

For our first section, I want to talk about how we get data to the field with ACC and why data literacy is so important in construction in the document management layer we are provided with a folder structure, which, of course, can be templated according to company standards. And of course, we always recommend standardizing as much as you can on projects. And to provide control over who can access what information, each folder will have permission tools available, which can restrict access but also determine how much an individual role or company can do with the data within that given folder.

Prior to making documents available on-site, an integral part of keeping construction projects organized and teams aligned is how document versioning works in ACC. Version control happens automatically as changes are published and allows us to view previous versions or compare versions to keep track of all changes, and, of course, ensure that teams are always working with the latest information. So in essence, it helps with sharing and distributing new versions of models and drawings, and in turn, keeping everyone on the same page.

This is, as mentioned, support for both 2D documentation and 3D models, as shown previously, and the demo here is showing you how a version compare is working for 2D documentation moving into approval state. With the increase in data that we put in Autodesk Construction Cloud, we need to make sure that teams understand what they see in front of them. Data literacy is about the ability to read information, work with it, analyze, and communicate with it effectively, and I'll now walk you through how we make this information available to site teams in all those Construction Cloud.

Here, we're making an individual selection of documents that have been marked as approved ready for site. And what we want to do next is move them into a space dedicated for the site teams to work from called sheets. In the publishing process, we're able to create and assign a version set, which you can use at a later stage to publish updates as they become available.

We're then being aided by the native [INAUDIBLE] processing engine, which will leverage OCR capabilities to read out sheet name and number. And as revisions are made in the future, a clear revision log will be visible as well to help you understand the history of the data that you have in front of you. The final step in the publishing process is to review sheet titles and tags before ultimately publishing your sheets for all site teams to view on-site.

So far, I've shown you two examples of how you initiate the publishing process from individual selection of files. We also have a tool in Document Management called Packages that we currently have running through an open beta. And what this allows you to do is initiate that same kind of publishing process but through a packaged approach for both documents and models. But I'll refer to some of our handouts for more information on the Package tool if you want to learn more about it.

So we covered how we make data accessible to teams and gone a little bit into some of the tools available to support understanding the data. For the remaining time of the class, we're going to be honing in on some of the tools at our disposal for moving from being reactive all the time to more of a proactive approach and how we can start to predict some of the challenges that may come in a project.

The number one thing any company would want to ace is the safety management on a building site, but yet, it's also what most companies struggle with. Technology can play a big part of establishing a good safety strategy and data holds an important role in its success. It all starts with shifting the mentality from being reactive with safety to becoming proactive. What we ultimately want to do is create a safety strategy company-wide, and the best way to do it is to make sure that you don't take too much at a time.

Try and select a single point of focus, so starting with one project, and use that as a pilot for future standardized processes, basically, learning from those successes and, of course, also failures that might come. Get buy in from the teams on-site. Make safety a culture and something that everyone owns together as safety champions. Standardize how you capture the data from site because if data is not or if it's to be used, it needs to be consistent throughout the project.

And lastly, keep the project data in a common data environment not just host documents and data, but also supports the key workflows that your teams need on-site. In Autodesk Construction Cloud, we offer several tools to establish a robust safety management process. But we won't be going through all of them today, but we will be focusing on the workflows for safety and standardization.

You can see that I've moved standardization up and made it a part of safety planning. And the reason for doing so is because in order to make a success plan for safety on-site, you need to meet-- you need to make sure that you have a consistency across your project. Standardization is really key and is everything and probably the most crucial to get right.

We want to determine early on how we want to capture information from site and what is key for keeping our site team safe and sound. This really starts by making sure we have the proper templates for safety forms established and then very equally distributed to the teams. By doing it early, we make sure to set the right foundation for establishing a good safety strategy, and with a consistent way of capturing the data, we can also start to explore predictive analytics of how projects are progressing through the time.

We have three different levels of standardization of forms. We have project templates, which are used to create projects with standardized templates, allowing companies to make sure that new projects created have the right templates from the point of creation. The Library tool supplements the project templates for maintaining and updating the templates after the point of creation, allowing you to bulk update templates across multiple projects in one central location.

And To secure consistency and that the standards are maintained across projects, individual projects are not able to edit or delete those forms that have been made mandatory through the Library tool. So in essence, if you use project templates and library together, you'll have standardized safety forms across your projects, and the project level form templates will be centrally controlled through the Library tool.

The first time you'll be using project templates you're likely going to be creating one from scratch. It's just shown in the demo here. What's important to just be aware of is as you do and you go through creating them, make sure that you create all the safety form templates and incident reports that you need in a project because this is where we'll be carrying these over to the library to manage going forward.

And if we go to the library for form templates, we'll be linking the recently created form templates from the project template into the library and once that's done and you've created your first project based on the templates from the library, the centralized approach to managing the form templates from that library will, of course, also be visualized within the individual projects as well to just avoid confusion and be clear on intent.

With the templates sorted, out we can then start to leverage our own safety inspections from those templates. The Forms tool allows you, in a very intuitive way, to go through your different inspection checks on-site, and if there is an answer that requires raising an issue, It can be done directly from the form, capturing the root cause, description, and photographic evidence if that's needed. All this is possible to do for site teams both online and offline while keeping links between the different reference points within the platform.

Another important area to safety management is making sure that site teams are able to report their observations in the most straightforward way possible. Whether it's from non-conforming forms that needs addressing or if incidents occur on-site, because we've achieved buy in from the site teams early on, they'll know how to directly fill out an incident report and how to capture everything needed to bring the proper attention and resolution and in order to start managing projects safety performance as the project progresses. It is key that we capture root causes to be able to identify trends and resolve common safety concerns before they even begin.

And we've talked about safety training a little bit as well. What we're really after is creating a culture where everyone on-site takes ownership of safety and promotes it as a culture to follow. This involves getting buy in of course early on, but equally, we want to make sure that as the project progresses, we keep highlighting and we keep educating the teams to be successful. The solution in mind for this is the Meetings tool within all Autodesk Construction Cloud, which again, enables us to centralize more of the project data and keep focus on the things that are relevant.

By using Meetings for orientation and training sessions, we also promoting the use of the mobile app, which in turn will promote digital maturity for the site teams, which is one of the key struggles in the construction industry. And it all comes with direct links and references to other things in the platform, like forums and issues that may be relevant for the specific meetings.

These are all very important tools at our disposal for getting us to become more proactive in safety management, and the way we consistently capture data on-site will allow us to move into a more predictive state as the project progresses. But this is all something that Snezhina will be talking a lot more about.

SNEZHINA SHUKINA: In this section, we will talk about standardization for assets and status tracking as part of assets management workflows. On the construction side, we have risk of hazards and possible injuries, but if you keep all construction assets and inventory up to date, you lower down that risk. You can standardize workflows and track assets quicker during construction. That's why it's so important to have a construction site focused on its assets with stored information in one place. You can do that ACC.

And going back to this slide, assets are right in the middle of our construction. Assets are relevant during the full project life cycle, so in all phases from design, to plan, execution, and maintenance later. To better manage assets and avoid errors, you need unified data. ACC is a unified platform that has a tool specific for assets. There, we can track and manage the life cycle of all project-related assets and equipment in all phases from design to commissioning and handover.

And usually, people talk about assets management. Assets management actually uses software for assets tracking. You can track the process-- the progress of assets using sheets or models as basis, or in many cases, people just use Excel lists. In ACC we can integrate assets with forms issues photos and other items to complement the site workflows.

Usually, we want to reduce cost and enhance teams efficiency we improve that by tracking project or construction KPIs we standardize assets for quicker use on-site, and because we standardize, we can leverage analytics and move from a reactive to a proactive and even predictive mode. In a moment we'll cover all those topics and how they are connected, but to summarize this assets tracking collects the actual data and assets management leverages that collected data and looks for trends.

And who are the players here? In assets management, we have assets as data in the center and depending on the role, we can have a different workflow, and we have many roles. Roles that are interested in asset tracking include project managers, construction managers, and executives or anyone running or managing the project or running or managing the business. Those roles will look at collected data and we will use mostly dashboards as a tool for decision making.

There are other roles that are actually collecting assets data from site and those include former construction managers or quality controllers, anyone in maintenance on-site, or anyone actually working on-site. Those roles will use any tools from classic pen and paper some will use photos and hopefully more and more people will use any digital tools and in the demo today we cover the mobile app as a digital tool.

Typical assets workflows include long assets lists captured and tracked in Excel files. If you're doing that, you may see you can import the data and create assets, but we are not demoing those today because we want to look at modern assets workflows, and those modern assets workflows include 2D and 3D assets captured on drawings and models in ACC we can use 2D markers on sheets. We can as well use design models to create assets and track their status in the 3D model.

Some other workflows include scanning barcodes that are placed on the real assets and those barcodes leads to important data that we can update or even auto update when scanned. And there are other integrated workflows like cost and schedule and tracking, submittals, RFIs, but we are not going to look at those today. In all cases, everything is about the data and information, centralizing data, how we capture it, how we use it, and collaborate with it.

So let's look at those two files and sheets. As a starting point, we have drawings stored on the sheets or we will have models stored in ACC. Assets progress tracking on sheets includes drawings on-site, originally printed on paper, now we can have standardized digital document sets for sites, as Jacob showed us earlier.

Sheets are organized by version sets or location or discipline or any custom tags. They can be filtered on site by different personas depending on their responsibility. In this demo video here, we are going to filter by mechanical discipline, and once we select a sheet, we can choose to place an asset. If available, an asset list will appear if not available, we can create an asset from a standardized asset category.

We place an asset on the sheet by using the Markups tool. After placing it, we can directly fill in relevant information and create a form or a photo. With the Assets tool selected on a sheet all placed assets are visible and can be accessed via mobile.

Status field and any custom attributes can be updated to reflect the situation, for example, creating a checklist or a form. All templates will pop up on top as prefilled. You can directly fill in the checklist now or leave it for later, as I will do in this demo. And by the way, you can download sheets and work offline.

You can also track assets using the barcodes. There is a barcode scanner. Scan the barcode and it will pull up assets-related information to perform commissioning or any other asset workflows in the field. From here, you can as well directly access the assets placed on the sheet and get full context.

And in the last demo in this section, I'm true to show you our latest 3D progress tracking workflows on models. To set this up you can choose a design model-- a design mode stored in ACC to extract elements from. After you choose the model, you can do a category mapping so that you are mapping the model elements to asset categories in ACC.

You can leverage import rules to better filter out the results. And in the last step, you will do a parameter mapping so values from the design model are extracted automatically into the assets in ACC. That includes status and location, if you have those already set up in the model. And once you're done, this will create a list of asset. So you don't need to import them anymore from Excel.

Once created from the model, there will be a direct link between the design model-- the live design model in and the asset and this is a powerful connection between design and construction and not only you can create assets from the design model, but as well, you can update the construction status into the design model.

Once the design model is linked to the assets in the model, you can view the assets list and visually track the real status update coming from the site. This is a bidirectional communication with unified data.

And at last, let's talk about standardization and customization. Custom categories custom statuses and attributes give us the ability to freely choose the asset setup and bring everyone on the same page with project standards. In this short video, we are displaying the custom setup. In assets, we can create custom categories and subcategories.

In this example, we are creating an architectural element with a custom status set. You can freely choose the status names and colors, and this customization helps us with covering broad statuses, but also broad languages. Each category can have its own custom status set and each category can be prelinked to a form template that we saw earlier in the tablet demo so that when on-site. You're doing the commissioning with assets or other workflows with assets. The relevant form pops up on top of your scree, and we also have custom fields that we can set up in each category.

How else is this helpful? If you have standardized the assets, on-site people have benefits like finding easier the checklist and issues they need, but as well, they can track their own progress and get actionable insights directly from the tablet. You can get insights for assets category as well as track the assets progress in percentage or number, visualize raised issues, or open checklists, and with this, you are always up to date.

And this is an example of how you can better use data. It's important to understand what data you have available and how it can help you to move from a reactive to a proactive and long term into a predictive mode. With the standardization we perform, we can not only make life easier for people on-site, but as well moving to a mature state of active analysis and prediction.

And now we want to give some examples of what you can do. The first example is a custom Power BI dashboard, and this is about assets progress tracking on-site. It displays a link to forms and issues, a live link, and behind, everything is automated. This way we can track assets auto KPI assignment. This is based on closed forms, and it's just a small example of what's possible, not only in assets, in all the other modules as well.

Let's move to the last part. We heard already about the importance of data in a data-centric construction, we heard about the importance of standardization and unified data, and we also heard that with most construction data, over 95% goes in unused. And with ACC reporting tools, we want to do something about that unused data.

In ACC, we have developed a group of tools that you can find under the ACC Insight tool. They can be used on one project or a group of projects-- all projects, and the goal is to use the data and make better decisions faster. Our data tools cover custom dashboards, partner cards construction IQ, which can help with prioritization and this one actually uses machine learning.

We also have a native reporting tool, and if needed, a tool called Data Connector can be used and extract-- to extract project data for custom dashboards or integration with Power BI. And because we're talking about site workflows here is a project home and with project home on the tablet you can make quick actions today. Stay up to date with all your work staples and take it further where you left off the day before.

You have quick access to ongoing forums and issues. You can start taking photo evidence, recently viewed files, recently viewed sheets, and most use form templates so that you can start a checklist directly from there. And if you work on the web, you can as well use custom cards, but you can as well stay up to date with the latest risks, issues and anything in the Cards area, and you can take quick actions. Here, we even have some construction IQ cards and partner cards.

But what if you're a role that leverages that data for decision making? Then, you might be looking at Power BI dashboards, and this is how you do that. In ACC, you can extract data either from project level or an old project and evaluate. To help with the dashboarding, we have developed templates, and here is an example of our latest templates for field quality control. This one is for project KPIs and we can have one for all projects as well.

If you want to look at a group of similar projects and see how they are doing, you can use this dashboard. We have over 30 templates already and those keep growing. Can find them under data connector in your ACC project. Custom dashboards or data extracts is important to make use of project data in a unified way. And ACC is built on large sets of APIs, many of those public APIs that let us connect and talk to other applications.

We have over 180 partners with direct integrations, and integrations make data and notifications available across tools, guaranteeing people are working off the latest and greatest information. The ecosystem is really big, so please make use of it. Make use of your data and stay safe, stay connected, and stay on top of your project and business. Thank you.