A Platform for Success: Streamlining the Design Process and Increasing Industrialization Through Platform Design

PAUL RUDDICK: Hi, my name is Paul Ruddick. I'm the chairman of Reds10. And today, I'm joined by my colleague Scott Laird. And today, we're going to talk to you about the platform success, streamline the design process, and increase industrialization through platform design. But before we do, I'd like to talk a little bit about our company Reds10.

So who are we? We're a vertically integrated business. And what does that mean? That means that we own our own factory. We own our own operatives. We have our own in-house design. So we don't really have many subcontractors. We have it all in-house. We set a new benchmark for quality, safety, well-being, and enjoyment at work.

We design, deliver, and operate quality buildings that save our clients' money and improve productivity, provide seamless end-to-end focus for the customer. We invest in apprentices and develop sustainable workforce. We are passionate about bringing youth into the construction industry. And we also like to make money as well.

We think construction doesn't make enough margin, so we promote making a margin because actually that promotes a sustainable business. And if you just look at that, this is our manufacturing facility. We have five factories on a single site in East Yorkshire. We're based in the United Kingdom. We have offices in London, our factories in East Yorkshire, but we deliver projects all over the United Kingdom.

We've had great success recently. And we've been recognized within the industry, winning numerous awards for best building, best contractor, social value, working with local charities. And we really do think that we're raising the profile of construction industry within the UK.

So where were we? So where were we as a contractor? We were almost a traditional contractor. We were engaged in our supply chain too late for them to have a real effect on our delivery. Our procurement strategy was not working. It wasn't delivering what we needed to do. We're duplicating design across multiple areas, which is seen across different construction where there is either the architect ourselves or specialist subcontractors or trying to design the same thing.

Design for manufacturing was only focused in the factory. It didn't take it on-site. And it didn't take on board the installation as well. We only had a limited systems testing. So our systems weren't were paper based in terms of how they were approved. They were fire compliant and compliant with sustainable margins.

And we'd only started the industrialization of our processes. So we really were kind of at the starting point of this journey. And on the top right-hand drawing there is a picture of where we started in 2008, so some 15, 16 years ago, where literally was a 2D plan where we put some chairs in classrooms on a plan.

SCOTT LAIRD: This was the start of automation and design and many late nights working on this. But this is when we used to basically hand mock up drawings, late nights doing X, Y, and Z. And then kind of all lisps and lists start to come into to fruition here. So this is the very start of us starting to look at for automation here.

PAUL RUDDICK: And at the bottom right was one of our first buildings 10 years ago, which was a small single classroom timber building in a field which we did. So Reds10 we've really started organically. We started very small. And now we're building 20, 30 million pounds schools. We've got contracts for 100 million pounds UK building new facilities for the UK Ministry of Defense.

But we started small and that's been one of our biggest benefits. And the picture on the right is one of our recent buildings that we've built, which is the Imperial War Museum in Central London. This is an office within a conservation area. And all of that is built through offsite volumetric techniques.

SCOTT LAIRD: Thanks, Paul. I'll take it over from here. Quite a lot of you would have probably seen this quote over the years. Pretty clever guy that's come up with it. In our industry, we get some similar quotes that have come along like these two here.

I heard these 10, 15 years ago. I still hear them to the day. I hear people just not wanting change or just keeping doing the status quo. One of the big ones, the consultant [? Zane ?] just down at the bottom there-- I hear this on a regular basis. We get a design from a consultant, and we let you put it in a [INAUDIBLE] and start again.

I was at a dinner with Jim Lynch not so long ago where very contractor was saying that. And it shocked me. So I think it's one of the houses of business we've been trying to change the future of construction and changing the status quo. Needs to change. You can't just keep on doing the same thing over and over.

So we've got three objectives in this presentation. The first one is I'm going to talk about we are a design led company. We focus design first. We get cost, procurement, logistics, everything to follow suit. And if you've seen it in the past, I mean, I've dealt with some big contractors recently. And the procurement was the leader for the driver.

And basically, what we found that was doing was basically, you could have a design. It's fully designed. You pass it over to commercial and procurement, and they go often and get a slightly cheaper product down the line. And they go with it because the margins are better.

I mean, obviously that brings a massive issues in design, first of all, restarting the design again. And it brings in loads of clashes and major issues down line. So we're trying to change that. We're trying to let the design develop early and getting there. So this is why we're going to be leading with design.

So onto my first point in there. The procurement. Again, what we found is the procurement was not detailed enough to let you go out to get the actual product that you need. It would be pretty loose up until you're basically manufacturing. So we've started to change that now. Our procurement is literally leading pre-approved products.

So again, some of the stuff that Paul was just touching on a little bit, not having a tested system. So we had numerous products doing the exact same thing and probably cost him about the same but starting to cause a lot of confusion in there.

And another one. So when we've got subcontractors and consultants working on our buildings, it was from job to job to job. Some of the alliance frameworks that we're on recently, we really need to get them into frameworks. So for good performance, they can get jobs. For good KPIs, we should be rewarding them. So put all three of those together. If you do any one of them wrong, you start having issues down the line.

Early engagement. Again, this has been said a lot about the industry. And I've only really just seen it start to come into fruition now. As I say, we're on big government frameworks, and we all talk about early engagement, but it's not actually happening. There's fruits of it start to happen now.

And I know Paul has been with the government sector, has been really leading the way, trying to get us in early to help with the surveys, some advice, and getting people on. So this is a typical kind of manufacturing chart here. So as soon as you start changing design, the cost and the impact starts going up.

In the UK, we've got our seven stages of design that we go through in Revit architecture. We follow this. Most contractors in the UK will follow this as well. But you can see basically your sweet spot is stage three, stage four design. You don't want to be making any changes after that. Earlier, you can get that done at stage 0, the better it is for the whole system.

We use quite a lot of products across the suite to do this. The main ones being Autodesk Cloud and AEC family. So we're primarily an AEC Autodesk-driven company, which you'll see throughout the presentation. We're also starting to see new products come in to help at earlier stages, later stages and operations.

So all of this Forma, for example, where we're doing rapid analysis of feasibility studies, acoustics, wind, solar, flood risks, Forma starting to lead the way on that Fusion operations. This is a new one to me. And we're starting to look at the productivity in factories and whatnot.

And then Autodesk Tandem, this is where we see the future of having all this connected information. Autodesk Tandem in a perfect world you would do all your modeling as you should do, and then put it straight into Autodesk Tandem, and you've got a model up and running instantly with live operational data.

Informed design for an event, again, this is a new one that we've got on trial, and we'll talk about this later on. But this for me, when I heard about it, it could potentially change what you do in design and construction. It's starting to get away from silos of information where it's not correct or it doesn't quite fit what's going on there, so real good things to happen on that.

And again, all of these bits of software, we as a business it revolves around ACC. We've got good connectivity. And it really works. And we're starting to see some real benefits from it. A couple of good examples of early engagement. So one of our military projects, we've got really detailed blast security that's required, took us several months to test, build, and approve that.

Imagine if you're doing a project and you're coming straight into it, and you've not done that testing or you've approved it. You've got that lag every time. But if you have those products, say, if you had it in form design, you can give that information straight to consultants, straight to architects right at the very beginning. You don't have to reinvent the wheel every time.

Another great one-- this actually popped up for us a couple of weeks ago. We've got a set of stairs in our building. They're all roughly the same, but what is different? We've got a different manufacturer every time. What we were letting them do is do their own design every time, even though it looks identical.

And basically what that started throwing up was, I'd need a new steel post. I needed a different flange, different column, different bolt, X, Y, and Z. I can go on and go on. And that just killed our procurement, and it killed delivering projects in a timely manner.

And so what we've started to do, we started designing our own stairs. So when we get down to it, we've got a set of stairs that we can give to the manufacturer, and it's consistent. And we control that design now. So if they come up with some great ideas or innovation, we can implement it into our designs and pass that out to other contractors.

Framework efficiency. So again, programs, construction, so everyone wants to get quicker, faster, better. So this first graph here is basically showing one of our buildings that we've done about a year ago, where 69 bed spaces 21 months in total. So on this, we had no testing. The level of on-site completion was low, and we had no major subassemblies.

So we go into version 2. We're starting to see a program impact on this. But what has happened because we've been on these frameworks, we've got 50% of testing complete. The groundworks is off the critical path because we were doing more work now, and we're starting to look at major subassemblies like packaged plant rooms and external walls and internal linings and whatnot.

So version 3 is the programmatic approach. And this is getting delivered by the government frameworks across military, DFA and MOJ. And we're only starting to see the fruits of that labor now. After these versions above, we've had continuous improvement. We're starting to learn. We're starting to get better.

And basically, because we've got that consistency of work, we've now got a fully tested system for blast, ballistics, and CTN. We've got high levels of site completion. So there'll be a couple of images I'll show you later on where that makes your benefit and why we're doing it. And minor package subassemblies. So we're getting after the small gains here. The previous veterans were the big kind of wet pods and whatnot. So we're starting to see efficiency across the [INAUDIBLE].

Inefficient design, one of the items that Paul was alluding to earlier. So the amount of projects that I've been on, and it's a lot, the incorrect surveys, feasibility studies they were incorrect. And basically we started off designs with this incorrect information. So it caused a massive knockdown effect in there.

So, as I mentioned earlier, Autodesk Forma that we're trialing just now helped you do some rapid analysis of these. And you can get high-level information very quickly. It lets us start to inform what we need to do as a business and what we need to get after because there is some information that you can get on the net, you can get quickly from Forma, or do you need to go real detailed surveys in there. But it's a massive, massive stumbling point for us.

On the frameworks that we were doing, surveys and feasibilities are the key to the successful project. Not working to the same standards. Again, a lot of projects, and I've done a lot of consultants, and a lot of subcontractors, people think they're working to the same information that we've got. I've got some great examples of [? Wiltshire ?] standards, and they'll come in different when they come back to me, or they're outdated. And it constantly happens just know.

So I've been working with Autodesk to try and get something that would stop this. So Content Catalog, which has just come available for ATC collection, this again with Informed Design this is a step change in sharing information with people. Subcontractors, clients, everyone will be able to get that information to a level of detail that you know is accurate and to stop this duplication.

LOD 500 quality designs. I'm sure a lot of people have seen this image in the past you got to the left. It's basic version. And further to the right, you're starting to get real-world designs. Well, you need the real-world designs, but the current software that you use is very difficult when you've got that level information in there. So you need a way of controlling that detailed design, so it's still in the model.

So again, Informed Design I can see the fruits of the labor that's coming through. That's basically going to let you have the LOD 500, but let you push 100, 200, 300 into the models. So speeding up the models while having the correct data in there. So design for some of them, just stepping through some of the examples that we've got recently that basically set up our business and reinforce what I've just gone through there.

This is [? Sky. ?] This is a DFA project we've got. This is literally a week old. I've literally taken this photo mid shot. It's not 100% where we want to be, but it's a long way from where we used to be. We're going on-site. We've got a well-defined site. The foundations are in. The drainage is in. We're starting to take groundworks off the critical path.

And we've done phase one of this installation, and it's gone really well. And we've got a second phase going in a couple of weeks. But in that second phase of a couple of weeks, we want to get further ahead on the groundworks. We want to get the turf in. We want to get all of the information that connects to the modules.

This is a site that we've done recently referring to those free versions, previous on. But it's quite a grainy photo, but the context is there. When we deliver modules to site, we want that site as complete as possible. We want the site to be clean. We want the services in.

Ideally, if we could do it, we'd have the power up and running and the feeder pillars sitting outside these units. It just makes your building so much more efficient. You're doing your groundworks on your module at the same time. Why would you do anything else? You want a clean site so it's efficient. You're starting to get into the production mindset here.

Previously, if you asked me five years ago, that would be a muddy site with a couple of bits of foundations and nothing else. So it's quite key to success of the project. And this is another score. So this is another project that we've recently delivered.

So again, we've got high levels of groundworks finished. We've got the services coming in. We've got the tarmac up and running. And this is during mid install, and we've got high levels of PMV on the modules. The score that we've got here, the CCS 45 over 45, that doesn't come around very often.

And one of the reasons we got that score is because we had a real efficient site. It was clean. And the site manager, Lee, and the project manager, Abby, pulled that all together, being efficient, dealing with the factory, and dealing with the site to bring them in because he's literally had this review when we're mid install. So it's a great achievement to get.

Pre-installation value up at 60%. I'm referring to the level of groundworks and finishes, not the modules here. So the higher you can get that, the better it is for the whole entire project. So, obviously, the higher you appreciate that, the more issues that come with it because you're starting to play with tolerances in the ground that don't match the manufacturing. Concrete can be plus or minus 10 mL. Our modules are down 2 or 3 mL to get that to work. So we're really investing in how we can do that for the future.

Design for manufacturing assembly. This is version 2 of the [INAUDIBLE]. I was looking at earlier. You can see there's high levels of completion here. This module has probably been on-site one or two weeks compared to some of those other photos. So you're starting to see some of the stuff down in the bottom left start to get introduced.

Pre-manufactured value we're up at 90% here. And, obviously, that's kind of your limits there. So you're starting to get-- we're trying to push it past that 90%. How do we deal if a fire breaks out? How do we deal with waterproofing? How do you deal with subassemblies it starts to play in there.

So as a business, we're starting to get after these many subassemblies now. So we've done the modules. We've done the factory. We want to get a kit of parts that starts to join this together. And, as I say, these parts are not easy to get after. You've got to have a lot of continuous improvement, and you've got to have a lot of work from start to finish.

You've got to have the repeatability as well. You'll never get this right in the first project. I can pretty much guarantee if you do, I might as well stop work. And again, this is version 1 of that one I've just shown you there. But on version 2, again, we managed to cut off six weeks of the bricks installation just by knowing the product better, just knowing the sequence.

And it wasn't rocket science. It was just learning from what you've already done. And then, in version 3 of this one, which we're currently building right now, we've had a wholesale change of how we put the modules together. We've put the bolts all internal. So it gives us some issues, but lets us have a higher finish of facade and outside.

And when that happens, we can start to look at the level of completion in the factory without taking it too far. So I think it was roughly about 3,000 bricks that we had now installed in that project. Along with that 3,000 bricks, we've also now got a much smaller subassembly to do on-site. So we're starting to get those efficiencies, and we're trying to find a sweet spot to get that right.

Research and development. So one of one of the points that Paul alluded to earlier on was this is key. And you can only do this if you've got consistency in your products and your frameworks and your clients. And it's a really important thing.

So the Building Safety Act that's come around recently. And we started this about two years ago or maybe three years ago. And we're ahead of the Building Safety Act because we could see this as an issue. This is an industry-wide. It doesn't matter if you do MSC, volumetric, steel frame concrete. There's not really good system testing out there.

They would test individual parts, which is great, but then you'd have to do an assessment of those parts as a system. So we as a business spent a lot of time, a lot of money getting on this. And off the back of this, we've now got our fire test system. So external walls, internal walls, loaded floors, compartment floors.

And we've tested the whole system. And we're going to even take that further. We're going to start looking at our own specialist testing. So there's testing for unique methods that we do. There's not actually a British standard for it, so we're going to get after it because it just gives the clients confidence that they've got a system that works.

I can tell you what I've been at all these testings. There's been 15 of them. How a fire reacts to our products, you'd be very surprised. For example, plasterboard in there. Normally, when you look at the stats, you get 60 minutes on the plasterboard. Well, it's the system that gives you 60 minutes from what we can see.

The whole system gives you that integrity. And you actually watch some of this test and you see it happening, you're like, well, you only get 10 minutes for that, 5 minutes for that and 5 minutes of that. So you can get a much more rounded appreciation of how this goes together. And it really helps us inform future iterations.

We've also done some ballistic testing on some blast testing. And I've got a couple of videos through the blast testing. But again, similar to the fire, this type of testing lets us really get a product that we can really get efficient, we can build, we can make it better quality, and you can get people trained on it as well.

So if we kept on changing this every 2 minutes, how do you properly train someone? You can't really. It's changing based on the amount of systems that we've got in the background of this information. As soon as one of these tests change, I've got SOPs, I've got designs, I've got training.. I mean there's a whole host of things in it.

And it's probably one of the things that I think construction definitely in the UK struggles with. There's so much change all the time. Some people do it amazing. But they relied on the skilled people and the experience to get them through it. When we start running out of skilled people and experience, we're going to start having issues.

I was up at this test in the South Wales Valley. It's like a scene from Terminator. I was about 300 meters away from the blast. And it was amazing. And basically, when we were doing this, we had high-speed cameras all dotted around the building. We had them inside, external because we really wanted to see what was happening to these.

And one of the main reasons we're doing this testing was again, similar to what we referring to earlier, the standards for MMC or different methods of construction, they're just not there. In the UK, we've got building regulations. And they suit traditional concrete frame buildings. And it leaves it open to interpretation. The only way we can really close interpretation is test it and really deliver on it.

So this is another video. This is a slowed down video of the tests. On this test, you can see the reaction of the module here. A whole entire module is bent, deflected, and then come back into place. When I walk back down with the army and the personnel from there, I didn't know what to expect. I thought all the bricks would be off. I thought there'd be a load of damage.

Came down, and there was very, very little damage. There was a couple of hairline fractures. And so it just really reinforced the product. While it's not in the [INAUDIBLE] legislation, the product works really well with good testing. And it works so well, Paul decided to test it again a week later with a higher capacity load on it. And again, it passed with flying colors. One brick fell off this time. And so it's really, really, really powerful adoption there.

Again, this is the last video of looking from the inside, so you get a really good effect what has actually happened here. That video didn't play, for some reason. Here we go. This is playing now. Hopefully, I get this to work when it's live. But I'll move on.

But basically, on this one here, basically, what again-- it's just loading here. So basically, we had sensors inside that building to see how it react. And basically, the test for this particular explosive to go off, you can't have any fragments flying into the room because it's, obviously, going to injure people. You need to have a condensed system that works.

We've taped and filled, and we've done everything that we do as we test the system and the fire. And what was great off the back of that was we know that system works. We know it's not going to fail under that type of scenario. So it's a really good thing to do.

So if I was to employ anyone, if you've got a standard product, and you want to get it out there, and you want to get confidence from the client, test it. And once you've test it, pull it apart and test it again and really get it into your business into your systems.

I mean, we've done so much testing on all of that. It gives us confidence. So when if someone asks me a question, I know how it's going to react because we spend a lot of time getting in there. And if I was changing products constantly, as soon as I get a new product, I start to get an itch.

I'm like, what do I do with that product? And I know what I've got to do with it. I'll have to do research testing and make sure it works. Otherwise, I can't back it up. And hopefully, that's giving you a bit of an overview of some of the issues and how we've got over them.

The second point here industrialization. And it's got a buzzword that's come about recently. And when I first heard industrialization, I was like, yeah, we're going back to what the UK used to do best, and we're starting to churn stuff out and get efficiency in there.

And when I go through some of this as well, the industrialization, for me, it's not just the factory. It's the site. It's the people. It's how you do process or how you communicate. If any one of those isn't ticking along nicely, you'll get a major issue, and it'll cause damage to industrialization.

So you need everyone singing off the same hymn sheet. And we've not got it perfect. I came off a call with Paul just now, and we were talking about communication. Most of the things we've got an issue with communication, and it's how we deal with that. And we get that, and we learn from it.

So when people say industrialization, they probably jump straight to this kind of scenario. You've got an A-axis CNC machine with [INAUDIBLE] 3D printing and CNC machines. And the reason I put this image up here, I was at the Autodesk factory in Birmingham last week. Great bit of kit and so advanced. I was blown away with some of the technologies they had in there.

They were using Fusion to pull this stuff together, and they're basically treated as an R&D lab. How do they get these quicker and better and what can they do off the back of it? Again, like we've been doing testing-- Autodesk, we've been doing the testing and getting that out to the clients-- it's the exact same thing we were trying to do with the clients.

And when I'm starting to chat to everyone in there, I can see some real benefits from that. While I'm not going to jump into the robot straight away, some of the principles of what was going on there and how they've got to there really relate.

So preconstruction design-- again, going back to the points that everything's involved in industrialization. If you're preconstruction construction design is not on point, and it's not following what you need to do, you're going to get to a stumbling block very quickly. Go back to the earlier comments about procurement, collaboration, X, Y, and Z.

If we've designed it wrong, or we're not being prescriptive, not pre-construction design, we're setting ourselves up to fail straight away. Structured data. And again, we've now got on top of our data yet. We're ISO 19650 compliant, and we have been for a good few years. And it's probably one of the great things that the UK governments have been driving recently.

And I only really twigged what the benefits of the structured data can get to us. So these robots and everything you see on here they need structured data to operate. If you don't have the designs and the data, you cannot use their systems. And while we're a million miles away from using something like Autodesk we've got, we're starting to see the benefits of it, and we're starting to follow that through our designs and through our testing.

Automation design-- so there has been a lot of people in the industry jump straight to these robots, get everything up and running without not really having a product or a platform to get it going. So, obviously, we've come from a different tact here. So we've started to take little chunks out of automation in design.

There's a couple items that I'll show you what we've been doing on that. But again, the efficiency gains on some of this are amazing. And with some of the chats I've had with Autodesk, the automation in design, it's only going to get better.

The supply chain-- similar to the procurement earlier on, we really need supply chain on board That want to innovate, and they want to learn. Again, come to our own engagement, if we're getting them on when we're starting to manufacture, it's too late. You need to get them on early.

The continuous improvement. We've not nailed this either. We go through a lot of continuous improvement. When we think we've fixed something, three weeks later, it's happening again, even though we've just started on another project. So the drive is that as a business. And it comes into some of the lean practices and whatnot that you need to look at.

But continuous improvement is a cultural shift that you need to get on top of. And every project might look the same, but you might have different people, different people might understand different processes. So how do you get that across the piece?

Manufacturing and site-- so the industrialization, as we said, we see it across the piece both on the site and the manufacturing facility. To be able to truly get industrialization, you need to get throughout all six of these points.

Pre-construction design. So, as I said, we're evolved around design. And from the factory floor to building regulations to cost to supply chain, you need design to do all of that, or you're just making it up. And education is a massive piece for me. So the amount of times that I've had a consultant come on board and we go, right, this is our system, these are our standards. We'll give it to them.

Six months later, it comes back to me. It's like back to front and upside down. It looks pretty, but the information inside it doesn't fit our standards. So I constantly have to re-educate our team and consultants. So education is key to the pre-construction design.

Defined product and standard-- going back to our testing again, if the designers at the start don't know what products you're using, how do they design it? They can assume a lot of stuff, and they can get you a nice federated model that comes out of stage 4. But it's not manufacturing. I need to know exactly what that product and what standard we're going against. Sorry.

Not quite work that one. But in the background here was what I was trying to show on that one was we used ACC for our central model collaboration. We used that to centrally locate all of our designs in manufacture on pre-construction. So we used again-- go back to my original slide-- we used a lot of products to get our model coordination on point.

Structure data-- going back to this so-- Dynamo is one of the scripts that we've started to use quite a lot recently. It's a great tool I wish I started on earlier but going back to my very first drawing in 2008, I think it was. This is the similar principles were starting to slowly pick up these items here.

So from this script, what we're now able to do is get consistent tagging of our assets in there. When you come to the data sheets and whatnot, they're a bit loose to rooms and not specific to our asset. So we're now driving data back into our specific assets.

And by doing that, we can create individual assets for individual modules. So I've just highlighted here our module, but we do it for NME, doors, windows. And assets, for me, is going to be a really powerful tool in the future. So if you know all your assets, you know your products, you know when they're getting built, and you know the details about them, so if you can link all those two together in the future, it will make a massive difference.

And again, going back to the scalable. And we've got ambitions to scale this business up over the next three to five years. We're trying to double our turnover from 160 to 350. We can only do that if we've got scalable information designs data.

And this one script here is starting to change that. So what we're starting to see in here, we're starting to get individual assets that can now get out to the person. So when I start looking at some of the industrialization that we're looking at, we need this to be in an individual basis. I can't have big massive GA plans with loads of details on it. No one's going to look at it in the factory floor or in the site. They need the specific information at the right time.

All made design. So this is a product. This is a DFA project. Again, I think I must have done this about a year ago. It was one of the images I showed you earlier that got the 45 score. So this here was one of the very first ones that we automate some of the design. So again, using the Dynamo scripts, we're looking to see if we could make this more efficient. So it took us six weeks to manually draw this cladding. And it took us minutes to run this Dynamo script.

Took us months to build that script, mind you. But we're now using this in all of our projects. So this image that just popped up on the right here, so this image was generated by that script. So the only thing that we went in there, done on there was we moved stuff around. We've done the human elements there. We made it look a bit more consistent and whatnot.

But by having that structured data in there and having it down to the base and the assets, I've now got a cut in schedule. I know exactly where my cladding is. So this cladding is off our new project. I wanted to show it, so I had different and unique boards in there.

But the script, the way we designed it lets us have that flexibility. So if we've designed it right in the pre-construction stage-- and again, that's a key thing. If we've not done that, we have to redesign it all and then start again. So pre-construction stage is done right, this stuff is easy. And we can literally rattle these off in minutes. Gives us consistent naming. We get defined drawings. And we get automatic updates on it.

So some of the software that we use throughout the business-- there's a lot of software. And subcontractors use this. We use this across our suite. And three or four years ago, we had to write in the scopes of what you have to use as software to work with us. We had major issues of right at the very start of how we were designing, we were bringing stuff together.

We couldn't get anybody to talk to each other. We had major issues with that, and it just cost so much issues. We ended up scrapping some of the models and just literally restarting again. So while we've got all of this information, it's all interconnected. And we really drive it.

So we've got integrations as well. And these all integrate with ACC. And we're using for specific items like Tekla, for example, we're drawing our steel in there. And this is for Autodesk. Advance Steel could be as good as Tekla, but you need to figure out how your engine works. If it doesn't work, well-- because if you can nail that, Advance Steel would sit in the left. It wouldn't sit in the middle. And it's a game changer.

And again, in their tech lab, we can do macros. We can do scripts. We can do various things in there. We're automating that stuff and automating subassemblies in there. And just a couple of others here. OpenSpace was one of the first-- us as Reds10 were one of the first companies to start using this.

And again, because that link between ACC and OpenSpace, clients absolutely loved it. So during the pandemic, I couldn't get to the factory. Clients couldn't get to the factory. We used OpenSpace, and they love it. So they ask me every time, has it got OpenSpace on it? And I go, yes. So every single project we've got now going through the factory, it's got OpenSpace in it.

We drive. It's a catch-all as well. So we've got quality systems on ACC. If someone's missed it because we've done a capture on OpenSpace, we've got enough information and data to see that we've done something right or we've done something wrong. I've used this a few times over the years as well.

And a couple others. Solibry is a good one. So we use that for information and model checking. So again, linked directly ACC. We see this-- unless ACC comes out with one-- we see this is a great progress because one of the issues we were getting consultants uploading models to ACC on a Friday or not, as the case may be.

Well, we didn't know that until maybe the afternoon on Monday. So we were trying to figure it out. So we've been looking at Solibry to basically run a rule set over the weekend to say these consultants have delivered to your standards, and they've also delivered on time. So we're starting to build that in there. And you can only do that because it's integrated. So the APIs talking to each other. Two years, three years ago, you would not be able to do this.

And pilots. The last one here. Again, Informed Design for Inventor and Informed Design for Revit. Again, some of the stuff I've been talking through all these slides just now, these two products if they get it right and I've got a trial version of it now, and I can see the rapid progress in that. If they get that right, a lot of the stuff I was talking about there will go away.

LOD 500 drawings would be hosted on ACC for Informed Design. But the end user and the architect and the contractor, they can use that on their side through our system. And we can control that information without making the model clunky.

I ran a trial on this. And the trial was we've got a 5 axis CNC machine for making doors. I was able to go straight from Revit design into the CNC and deliver the same standard. That's just cutting out duplication of designs because I didn't have to think about it. I just literally plugged it in and sent it to the machine. And it wasn't quite as easy as that, but I can see the workflows of this happening in the future.

Autodesk Froma, I've touched on this earlier. It's a rapid, pre-construction, and feasibility analysis. Again, I don't actually need to leave my seat to get acoustics, daylighting, PV, flood risk, and doing generic designs in there. It'll be a great tool in the future.

And again, the great thing about that is if we've got Informed Design, we've got all of our information in ACC, we can link Forma into all of that in the future. Again, talking to Autodesk the other day, having these all linked makes it seamless. So there's a future for this Autodesk Tandem. So we've got this on trial.

So one of the companies that we've got as a business, we've got an [? M&A ?] and a BMS company. And primarily, we've got those businesses because we wanted to know what people were doing or how they were using buildings. And we just couldn't get that information by not being engaged in it. So we started building our BMS systems, and we started develop our own code to find out how these buildings are really operating.

So all of the slides are saying the structured data, making sure we've got efficiency and design, that all leads to Tandem in the future for me. So the way I see it, if we've done our ISO 19650, and we've got our structured data correct, you should be able to just link an ACC project straight into Tandem and get operational and hard owner information on there.

And the great thing about that is you'll literally be able to hand over a building to a client that you know is fully coordinated, and it's got the information on hand on tap. And when you're starting to look at the connectors that go into Tandem the bit of BMS code that we've written, the connector can now link into that. And you can then get a 3D visualization in there while also using AI.