Workflows Between BuildingConnected and Autodesk Construction Cloud

ADRIEL NAVARRO: Good morning, everybody, and thank you for joining us today to Workflows-- Between Building Connected and the Autodesk Construction Cloud. Before our talk begins today, here on the screen we've got our safe harbor statement, where if you'd like to pause and take a second to read it, you're welcome to. But in summary, we may be making some forward-thinking statements today, and we encourage you not to make any purchasing decisions based on that, as things may change by the time these statements come to fruition.

My name is Adrian Navarro, based out of Orlando, Florida. I'm an implementation consultant here at Autodesk. I've been here for a little over four years, doing implementations and trainings with customers and content creation. For anybody familiar with the Learn ACC or the Autodesk Construction Cloud Learning Center, I was part of the group that founded that website and put the content together.

Now, prior to joining Autodesk, I worked as an estimator and assistant project manager for a site development contractor here in the central Florida area. So I was actually a customer of these products before I joined the team. Next, I'd like to give my co-speaker Cory a chance to introduce himself as well.

CORY KINTZ: Hi, everybody. Good morning. My name is Cory Kintz. I've been a product manager for just over nine years, four of those here at Autodesk I specifically have been working on Bid Board Pro and BuildingConnected Pro the last couple years. And my team has been responsible for delivering the new set of APIs on AWS platform services. Looking forward to talking about that in the second half of this presentation.

ADRIEL NAVARRO: Thanks, Cory. And with that, let's go ahead and get started with today's talk. Now, making sound decisions early during the project offers the best opportunity to affect and improve project outcomes, like cost and schedule. This is resulting in a shift in how projects are procured, with general contractors getting the opportunity to be involved earlier and having more say in how projects are planned and designed.

At the same time, owners are highlighting negative experiences in a growing dissatisfaction with the adversarial nature and limitations of design, bid, build. These include the limited opportunity for innovation and inability to respond quickly to changing market conditions and the higher perceived levels of risk. In parallel to this, projects are becoming more complex, increasingly challenging the project teams. Owners are seeking value and certainty through early partnership, and collaborative delivery methods are predicted to be used on approximately 85% of projects over the next three years. This shift, together with the current macroeconomic environment, will play to our core strengths in design and preconstruction as general contractors look to better assess risk and avoid losses and project overruns.

Bringing us closer to the ground is this 10,000-foot view, where we can see that today, individuals are spending 5.5 hours a week on nonoptimal activities, from tracking down project files, plans, and even communications. Speaking for this in my own experience, maintaining project documentation is difficult when you're not in a document management-dedicated role, as many construction professionals find themselves today. Document management has become a part of most roles and not a solely dedicated role.

Doing takeoffs, requesting quotes, building proposals, bid leveling, RFIs, and value engineering with design teams and owners, in addition to contract management, permits, change orders, and document management for ongoing projects, it's a lot. What could you do with 5 and 1/2 hours back in your week? Because of the lapses in document communication, we see that over 50% of rework is caused by mishandling of document data and set communication.

When you don't have a common data environment for teams to operate out of, you get instances where new drawings or project details are made available. Yet, the field doesn't receive them until 24 to 48 hours later. How much construction has occurred in those 48 hours that will be affected by these new changes? And lastly, we see that 75% of hairlines recede due to many factors, including the previous two metrics we just mentioned. And as much as I'm sure genetics played a role, my hair loss was certainly expedited by my time as an estimator.

This brings us to today's agenda, where we'll be discussing an overview of our bidding and project management solutions in BuildingConnected and the Autodesk Construction Cloud. Then we'll move into an introduction into the native integration between these two and demo of the currently available workflows to be leveraged. Then Cory will take the floor to discuss BuildingConnected's API and demonstrate some additional workflows that can be achieved, culminating with some Q&A in the second half of today's hour.

BuildingConnected Pro, or BC Pro for short, a collaborative bid management solution for finding qualified trade partners, sharing files, and estimating. Historically, construction has been extremely fragmented, with GCs and owners only leveraging the connections they've built themselves, with no real place to expand upon them. To solve this, we built the Builders Network, a place for GCs, owners, and subcontractors to connect, collaborate, and expand the Rolodex of qualified trade contractors.

With BuildingConnected Pro and the Builders Network, GCs and owners can find and choose the right vendor for the right project while leveraging bid comparison tools and qualification statuses. Say goodbye to Excel bid forms, create and customize your own, whether in a project or a template, and have an environment where all quotes are formatted in the same way. Beyond unit rates or lump sums, collect alternate pricing, clarifications, certification requirements, and more.

And once those numbers are back from the subcontractors, leverage BC Pro's bid-leveling tool, giving us the ability for side-by-side, apples-to-apples comparisons, plugging values for those instances where a quote may be incorrect or have missing data, and compare your qualification metrics all at the same time. Choosing the right subcontractor for the right job has never been easier.

Now, how does this tie into a common data environment? Let's take a quick look at Autodesk Docs, the common data environment, and bridge that gap together. With Autodesk Docs, we connect all project data, starting from design through preconstruction, and into actual construction seamlessly, with various advanced capabilities and benefits that include the following.

A single source of truth-- not only do we have a one stop shop to access all of our project data, we also have the ability to control the access and distribution through secure sharing and robust permission settings, with an easy to configure folder structure. A secure federation of data-- connect projects that need to share information without the hassle of downloading and uploading repeatedly. Leverage our transmittal tools and engage and improve the accountability through review workflows, markups and issue management, along with document version comparisons, all in the same place.

Now, here we see a glimpse into the future of the Autodesk Construction Cloud, with all of our core precon capabilities on a platform alongside Autodesk BIM Collaborate and Autodesk Build under a single login. And we are connecting teams and workflows across our platform. At the core are a host of platform-facing benefits, such as a central repository for document management, a.k.a. common data environment; a single place that securely houses all project data, including drawings, models, contracts, specifications, and more. It ensures that everyone is working from the same information, reducing risk.

We also have robust analytics, reporting, and data visualization capabilities within the platform. So you can extract actionable intelligence that you can use to identify, quantify, and mitigate risk, helping you make better decisions on current and future projects' the Builders Network, selecting and communicating with the best qualified trade partners, the ability to tap into the industry's largest crowdsourced network of more than one million-- again, million with an M-- construction professionals and quickly build the right team, all within the same platform.

We also have administrative control. No more having to manage users across multiple point solutions and an API first mindset with access to all of the data, from design, through construction and handover, helping our customers remove data silos, increase efficiencies, and win more work.

This brings us to the main topic for us today, the integrations. With the BC Pro and Autodesk Docs integration, you can sync files in a BuildingConnected project to Autodesk Docs. Autodesk Docs can then be your central file storage tool, so that you can spend less time moving files between systems and make working across the Autodesk Construction Cloud faster, more collaborative, and making handover from preconstruction to site construction easier.

Now, there are some requirements prior to leveraging this integration and the available workflows. You must have a subscription to not only BC Pro, but also, the Autodesk Construction Cloud through Docs, Build, or Autodesk Takeoff. You must connect your Autodesk ID to your BuildingConnected account. And lastly, you must have the necessary permissions within the Autodesk Construction Cloud to create projects or be a project member to link existing projects.

But enough talking. As I'm sure you can tell, I can wear a wall down if you let me talk to it. So let's look at a couple of ways we can leverage this integration today in the following demonstrations. First up, we'll be linking a BuildingConnected project to a new project in the Autodesk Construction Cloud, meaning a project that is yet to be created within ACC. For example, maybe we want to get our invitations to bid out the door while simultaneously creating the data environment for our internal teams to leverage with Autodesk Takeoff and/or the review tools found in Autodesk Docs within ACC.

Here, we see that we are in a project inside of BuildingConnected where we can link with the Autodesk Construction Cloud directly from the Information section; however, not the only place that we can do this. In your Project space, from the Files tab, you'll see that at the very bottom, in the middle of your screen, we're able to connect with Autodesk Docs. By clicking on this link, we are prompted to either link to a new project or link to an existing one.

Linking to a new project, we'll choose our account, template, if necessary, and we'll see that all of the project information has transferred already to fill where it matches, from the number, the name, the address, and any relevant dates. Once we click on Link project on the bottom right of this modal, it's going to initiate the process of creating that project in ACC. This may take a couple of minutes.

Once it's ready, you'll see that by refreshing the screen, we're now going to have a different version of the files area that looks identical to that of Docs, where we can upload files and add folders. You can also drag and drop. And within BuildingConnected, folder structures are respected. So anything that you drag and drop will be uploaded the same way that you had it.

As items are uploaded, you can see that you can navigate anywhere within BuildingConnected project. Once the files are in there, you'll notice that we can also make the same connection within a bid package. So if we needed to make a connection for a specific trade contractor or for the overall team, we are able to make this connection, not only from BuildingConnected, but also into Autodesk Docs.

Once the connection is made, we can go back and take a look at our files of our project. And we'll see that we have two different folder structures. And when we visit Autodesk Docs, you'll notice that within Files, we have our product picker up at the top, showing that we are in ACC, our project picker showing us we're in the project, and both folders, all bidders being those of project files and the bid package specific underneath it.

Now, within this space in Autodesk Docs, we are able to manipulate the documents as we wish, whether we're uploading, downloading, editing the names. Again, we'll see the similarities between the two storage areas. And we'll see that as we access this file, you'll notice they're the same ones.

And as an example, we're going to go ahead and delete this file. By deleting this file in Autodesk Docs, when we go back to BuildingConnected to our project, you'll see that that file is no longer there-- again, managing your documents all in one place simultaneously, seamlessly, without the hassle of upload, download, and the multiple data silos.

Now, let's take a look at how to connect a BC Pro project to an already existing project in ACC. Let's say we created the project in ACC to leverage the review workflows and ensure we have the most updated pieces of data to provide our subcontractors, but for requesting quotes. And now that we've gone through that workflow, and we ensured that we have all of the information our bidders need, we're going to go ahead and share specific files to our bidders from Autodesk Docs.

Here, you'll see that we have our project in Autodesk Docs, where we have our folder structures on the left. You'll see that we have a folder named Bidder files containing all of the documentation we want to provide to receive our accurate quotes. You'll also see that we have many other folders that are maybe specific to just us and our project teams as we're working through the design bid phase in Autodesk Docs.

When we go to BuildingConnected, we go to our project, we'll see that our Files area is unlinked to Autodesk Docs. But we are able to make that connection. We'll follow the same steps as before, but this time, link to an existing project. We'll use the keyword search bar to find our project.

Once we've selected the project, we'll click Link on the bottom right corner of the modal. Notice how the transition is seamless, now giving you the ability to select a folder from Autodesk Docs, such as the bidder files. We can also be as granular as sharing just the drawings if we wanted to.

But let's make the specs available as well. And as we make that link, now we have access to those files from Autodesk Docs inside of our project in BuildingConnected. Same as before, any manipulation of drawings in this space, once a link has been made, carries over from one to the other. So we deleted that set of drawings, and we'll see, that by accessing Autodesk Docs, it's already reflecting that change.

You also see that not only deleting, but if we wanted to go inside of our specific bid package, like we did earlier, notice how we can also make that link not only at the project files area, but specifically, to our bid package as well. And just like before, manipulation of files from one area affects the other without having to do it from two separate locations. We delete this file, head back over to BuildingConnected, and after a refresh, we see that the file is gone.

Now, here on the screen, you'll see a summary view of the workflows that we just watched. And although the process remains the same, there are multiple scenarios where project creation would start in BC Pro. But also, maybe it would start in ACC. No matter the scenario, this integration is only the beginning in a very bright future of collaboration within a common data environment for construction professions.

But wait. There's more. Native integrations, such as the ones we just saw, are only a couple of the possibilities currently available. Please welcome my co-speaker Cory Kintz, who will be guiding us through even more integration possibilities by leveraging APIs and BuildingConnected and the Autodesk Construction Cloud.

CORY KINTZ: Thanks so much, Adriel. Very excited to be here. Thank you, everybody, for attending this presentation. We're thrilled about the integrations we're making, not just with Construction Cloud, but with the whole Construction Cloud platform and its ecosystem of partners.

Today, I'm going to talk about how BuildingConnected's new set of APIs are part of our forward-looking vision to bring bidding and estimating into all the different workflows that you need to do in preconstruction and to give you a little bit of a hint as to where we're taking preconstruction in the next few years, but also, give you real tools you can use today to automate workflows and extend your data to where you need it. This is Autodesk Construction Cloud. It sits at the center of lots of different pieces of functionality.

Of course, we have our flagship construction solution Autodesk Build. And in Design, we have Autodesk BIM Collaborate. But what we'd like to do is to bring our preconstruction acquisitions in ProEst, BuildingConnected, TRADE TAPP and our new Autodesk Takeoff tool into the Construction Cloud as consolidated platform for preconstruction.

What do we mean when we talk about the platform? We think about tools like Autodesk Docs, that Adriel just presented about, being integrated with BuildingConnected. But it also can be all the analytics tools that these various features will share with each other, leveraging the Builders Network for up-to-date contact information for professionals in the construction industry, so that you don't have to manage your own Rolodex of client and trade partner information, single account and user administration, and my favorite, what we'll talk about today, open APIs on the Autodesk Construction Cloud platform, Autodesk Platform Services, or what we used to call Autodesk Forge.

So we're talking about the platform. This is a shared set of tools and services on top of which all these different features, like Bid Management, like Takeoff, like Cost Management are built.

When these products are built on this platform, it means that they can share project information, share the same file repository, so that the same file isn't copied and manipulated in two different places, allowing for discrepancies; shared user management, so they can share account administration and client and trade partner information; line item definitions, being the same or mappable between Autodesk Takeoff, your estimating tool, cost management, the bid forms, and the bids you get back from subcontractors; same subscription information, so you can manage it all in the same place, and same reporting infrastructure, and so much more.

You can see what we're trying to go here. We want one platform and pre-con at a minimum, where you can do take off estimating and bidding all from a single interface. But we also have other exciting ideas for how we want to help you save money on construction, deliver projects on time and more safely. One example is being able to bring real project cost information from recent projects directly into your bidding, estimating, and Takeoff environment; roundtrip those costs, so you know exactly, based on your recent projects, how much things should cost in the near future.

We want to be more collaborative with bidders, especially in pre-con. We want you to bring your MEPs and other subcontractors earlier into the design process, give them the power to indicate where scopes might be missing, where value engineering could be useful, and identify other issues earlier in the process, so that you're not left out during site construction.

We want you to make better decisions about your bidders, in general, by bringing actual project performance data into your pre-qualification environment and showing it to you in your bidding tool. And of course, being on one platform makes handoff much easier, since you don't need to bring files and information from one place to another. They're already there. Simply have all of your bidding file and proposal information all in one place, and your site construction team can have access to it just by being part of the same platform.

All this is possible because all of our features are built according to open API specification on top of APS, Autodesk Platform Services. So I'm going to talk today about how you can get started using APIs to extend your workflows and provide customization where you need it now. It might take us years or even longer to build exactly the workflow that you need today. But we want to make sure, that no matter what, you can always achieve what you need using Construction Cloud.

You can take your TRADE TAPP and BuildingConnected data and bring it to your partner application through the Construction Cloud platform. So let's go through a couple of examples of potential automations and customizations you or a partner app-- or maybe if you're here visiting as a technology partner, a potential application you could build and provide to clients. Let's go with transferring bids directly into cost contracts and Autodesk Build.

Take TRADE TAPP information and BuildingConnected, which now lives in the Autodesk Construction Cloud platform, and bring it into a project, using cost management. Let's use ACC Connect, Autodesk Construction Cloud's preferred partner for automation, and create a workflow where we're going to move bid information from bidders and BuildingConnected into Autodesk Cost. So here, you start with a Connected project, which you would have seen in Adriel's presentation. You can connect BuildingConnected projects to Autodesk Construction Cloud. In these, of course, you have bids from bidders.

What we're going to do, in ACC Connect, is set up a recipe and configure the automation rules we want. Let's say, for example, when we award a subcontractor a bid in BuildingConnected, we want that bid to be created automatically in the linked ACC project. So here, you can see, we took a subcontractor in BuildingConnected, and we brought them and their bid and all of their line items into a cost contract and ACC Connect. So that you don't have to have two different people bringing information from the same place into another tool and just copying it over, all manually, every time you ever issue a bid in a contract.

Let's talk about some of the things we're really excited about in preconstruction, like bidding directly out of Takeoff. You can take your BuildingConnected project, link it with an Autodesk Construction Cloud project, and then build bid forms directly out of the quantities you take off using Autodesk Takeoff. So this is a conceptual application our team built to show what that might look like.

So here, you have a model view on a project, an inventory of Takeoff items. When clicking on each Takeoff item, we can see in the model which that Takeoff item refers to. Let's say you've selected the scopes you want, and you want to bring these items directly into your bid form and ask subcontractors for prices. Using BuildingConnected APIs, we can simply put these line items into the bid form on a bid package in BuildingConnected.

You can clarify whether you want to provide the quantity or have the subcontractor fill it out. If you want them to double check your quantification, or if you don't want to prompt them with that information, let them tell you what the quantity should be. So here, we are back in BuildingConnected. And these are line items that we created directly out of Autodesk Takeoff.

Of course, if you create a mapping between a Takeoff item and a bid form line item on BuildingConnected, it means you can level bids directly against your Takeoff. So let's talk about another conceptual example, where in the top center of this video, we have the bid leveling table from BuildingConnected. And then we have our Takeoff items. We can select our Takeoff items and see them in the model and see that the quantities I have from my Takeoff are different from the quantities subs are providing, and even in between each other. This is a great way we'd like to help you identify potential scope errors earlier on in the project.

Another thing we hear from clients is how hard it is to analyze data from preconstruction. Of course, you may want to use your preferred analytics tool, whether that's something advanced or something you're just familiar with, in Power BI or Excel. Nonetheless, you have to get that data into a data warehouse for you to be able to even analyze it, in the first place. And we know that can be very difficult, getting data out of Construction Cloud to where you want to be able to analyze it.

It's very hard to keep full-time software engineers that can do the data transformation necessary for you to do the analytics work you're trying to do every day. Instead, consider using a partner like TORIC, which provides a no-code interface for you to extract all of your Construction Cloud information, including BuildingConnected information, to those data warehouses, so you don't have to know how to write code or read API documentation. Simply get the data extracted and put where you want, so that you can analyze it.

In fact, there's a whole ecosystem of Construction Cloud partners. Whether you're interested in becoming a partner, or you're interested in other workflows that Construction Cloud doesn't have just quite right natively in the application, our ecosystem of partners is built to make sure clients are able to accomplish all the workflows they need.

Autodesk provides robust programs to help software partners develop applications on Construction Cloud. We'll help partners get their product in front of our customers. We'll provide marketing support for these applications. In short, we'll be a true partner to help you as a software provider solve problems for our shared customers.

It's been a very productive year for BuildingConnected and TRADE TAPP APIs. Back in 2022, we only had a legacy API that was not fit for partners and substantially limited functionality. In this last year, we provided a full suite of read APIs for almost all key building connected data, from projects, bid packages, bid forms, bidders, and of course, opportunities on Bid Board.

And right now, we're in the process of releasing our right endpoints for most of that same data and even more, so that you can create projects and bid packages and even create bid forms from partner applications or from your own set of automation or any other third-party application. And of course, as I just mentioned, we have an accelerated partner program for developers and other software companies interested in being part of our partner ecosystem.

TRADE TAPP is also in an early release program for its APIs, so that you can leverage both bidding data and TRADE TAPP information to get all of your qualification risk information that you need on your bidders where you need it. We're going to continue to invest in APIs over time. All of our new features are going to be built to open API specification.

But of course, we want to provide real-time information. Perhaps you work in a hard bidding environment, and you need real-time information on bids that you receive from subcontractors in a third-party tool. We'll be providing Webhooks to help you do that, so you get bid information piped to wherever you need it as soon as it comes into BuildingConnected. And in the next few years, we are hoping to expand this functionality and deepen integrations across the Autodesk Construction Cloud platform.

Here's a table that lists all the functionality that is currently being released or has already been released. As you can see, this covers the vast majority of information in BuildingConnected. If there's a part of BuildingConnected that is not exposed over API, we want you to reach out to us and help us understand how we can help you use your preconstruction data more effectively where you need it.

Up on the screen is a QR code. Of course, if you're ever interested in integrations, the first place to go is APS. aps.autodesk.com Is where we put all of our documentation, not just for Construction Cloud, but for all Autodesk products. And here's another one. This is a set of tutorials just for you if you want to get started using the BuildingConnected API, with full-on Postman collections, with stubbed-out endpoints, and guides for how to get started as a developer or a potential partner of the Autodesk Construction Cloud. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure having you.