Safety First—with BIM 360 Field

LAUREN COLLIER: All right. Good morning. Can everybody hear me OK? It's a little too loud, maybe? All right. Well, it's go time. So good morning. I think I got a really good luck of the draw from a class day and time.

I have some colleagues who were either on the first day, or they're on the last day, or they have an 8:00 AM. And I'm not the very first class in the morning, so that's always good. Because you never know who's going to show up. So I'm pretty lucky to have the 9:15 time slot.

My name is Lauren Collier. I work for SSOE Group. Our headquarters is in Toledo. We are a global firm. I'm not sure what our office count is at this moment, but we have offices across the United States, as well as León, Mexico, China, and India.

I'm the global VDC department manager. And today, I am here to talk to you about our journey in BIM 360 Field. And we decided to start that journey with safety. So the title of the class today is "Safety First." it's one of our core values as an organization. But it allowed us to jump in the BIM 360. Not only in a safe way, for sometimes, you need to be able to create that pilot in order for people to get that buy-in.

So our learning objectives today. I will not, during the presentation, do a step by step of how to create a checklist. No. I did put that in the handout if you want to download that PDF. So if you're here to learn on how to do a step by step, it's going to be more about the journey today during this presentation. I'll show you some outcomes. A little bit of a how-to. But as far as the step by step, you're going to find that within the handout.

I would like you guys to walk away with learning how to use or replicate a practical safety checklist. And that was really about the safe buy-in into BIM 360 Field was from a safety perspective, we wanted to become more predictable, and start to gather the analytics around our safe job sites. So we organized a structure to do that.

Understand what data is available to connect to and harvest. BIM 360-- I mean, we've heard about it in almost every keynote. It's a pretty big deal this year, especially built on the platform. I work with several computer programmers. And from the API perspective, it was extremely easy to connect to the field data.

And then we're going to learn how to visualize and make some project safety decisions based on live project data. And I'm going to show you a couple examples of how we used dashboards and Microsoft Power BI in order to visualize that auditing data.

So the problem. This is the traditional structure that I see diagrammatically in the AEC industry. We document our audit, maybe using an app to do that. Maybe using-- there's still some people do have a clipboard from time to time. But we create some form of documentation. And then it's stored away in some form of folder structure.

We may send it to the stakeholders. But when it lands into that repository, either digital or a project binder, it is very hard, if not almost impossible, to remember what you did last week, or what you did yesterday.

And if you have to search something, there are some search functions in PDFs and some documentation. But if we want to start being, I use the word predictive, or smarter, about what is the information we're collecting on a project, that data needs to be visible in some form or fashion. This is this document-driven workflow that historically is where we've been for a long time.

So in order to be predictive, I have to be able to see the data. I have to be able to see it over a period of time. I have to be able to connect it to other things. So what we decided to do in our pilot is, we knew we still needed to create that piece of paper. And I think you can definitely do that within 360 Field. There is the reporting function.

Now some may argue how attractive those reports are in BIM 360 Field Classic, but we're not here to debate that. But I can still produce that piece of paper for an auditing trial in this process. What we then decided to do was, we knew we needed to put it into a database structure. So in order to do dashboarding, the very first quick test we did was we exported that data to Excel.

Excel is very easy to work with. But if I wanted to do this without having to deal with a person because I wanted it to be done in a more automated fashion, it really was a discussion with my IT infrastructure. We set up a SQL database. We put those permissions on that database, and we were able to tap in our dashboard into that database.

So in this data-driven workflow, I'm still producing the paper to fulfill that need. But I'm now starting to collect the data so that I can connect it. It's becoming more transparent. It's available so that we can start visualizing our construction safety environment.

So why safety? Well, my corporate safety manager couldn't be here today but this is Mr. Scott Goodwin on the left. I have a really energetic, amazing safety director for my company. And why we decided to start with safety-- and this is a quote from him. Since he couldn't be here, I said I might as well get your quote to share with the audience.

And really, for him, this is a really easy commitment and transition because he can't be on every job site. He can't-- now, I know he does read every daily report that comes in from our job sites, because that's his commitment to the organization.

But he needs to be able to train and make adjustments for our safety program. And he can't do that if he's staring at static reports. So for him, it's about making sure that our loved ones get home safe. It's about mitigating risk on our projects. And that is why we decided to jump in with safety first with BIM 360 Field.

So diagramming our needs. What I did here is we have data in a couple of different places. Up here is our ERP system. we use Dell Tech to do a lot of our project data information. And there were a couple pieces inside of here that I wanted. And I knew I needed to automate that Dell Tech database into the BIM 360 database from an administrative burden that I couldn't have somebody enter in 100 different companies for projects.

So with the push API that's available in BIM 360 Classic, we were able to write an app, essentially. I'm calling it the data push app here. Where we have all of our approved vendors, and we're pushing into the companies inside of enterprise HQ so that my company list in BIM 360 Field matches my ERP system.

So we are pushing a client or vendor name. We're pushing the location data. Surprisingly, it matched and mapped very easily from address. The one thing that was a little more difficult, I wasn't able to push the image. I'm still working on that. So a lot of times we like to have our company icons available for visual.

So I'm pushing everything about that vendor from Dell Tech to BIM 360 companies via this app. So my administrator only has to add the company. They don't have to manually type in that information. Because if I was going to get buy-in in this, I had to automate as much of this as possible. Because we just don't have the time and the luxury on projects to type things in three different, four different times.

From there, inside of Field. If any of you guys are familiar with Field, it can do QA/QC, commissioning, safety checklists. It tracks issues. You can categorize those issues via punchlists. QA/QC, commissioning, safety. Those are some of the defaults.

You can create your own as well. You can have tasks and daily audits. We chose not to do the daily audits. I'll explain why. We have a different app we use for that. And there's the reporting function.

So from there, we wrote a harvesting app. And I'll get into that a little bit later. But literally, the harvesting app is using the REST API. That's Application Programming Interface. I've learned to repeat acronyms because, especially in our industry, you have some really technical people that know what you're talking about, and then you have the other people that goes, great, another three letter acronym. What does that mean? So when I use the word API, I'm talking about the programming interface.

So the harvesting app. We have it run twice a day. That's a little bit of an overkill, but it works for now. I haven't had a need to run it more than twice a day at this time. What that does is it logs in, it harvests the data that we choose to harvest. It puts it into the SQL database.

We are choosing to use Power BI. I have the data gateway set up in Power BI. That refreshes on a cycle. So the dashboard then refreshes on its own. And what is really nice about that is I don't have somebody manipulating an Excel file, or manipulating a report. The data is there for them to view and interact with.

Any questions about that diagram?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

LAUREN COLLIER: I think we're still looking at the different dashboarding options out there. Quite frankly, we had a Microsoft environment already. It was very easy from a learning curve perspective. Some of the difficulties. I would say I'm having is how to publish that data that is more accessible. Is it on-prem? Is it via the online version? And we can go into that.

But really, it was kind of that first step into the cost. There's a lot of very expensive dashboarding options out there. And for a very low margin, I was able to jump in. So maybe a year from now, we change that. But that was really the main driving factor there.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

LAUREN COLLIER: No. To the HQ company environment inside of 360 so it's available.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

LAUREN COLLIER: Correct. Yes.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

LAUREN COLLIER: Oh. No, no, no. Sorry. Thank you for that clarification.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

LAUREN COLLIER: Currently it is on-prem right now. I am investigating if I would like to put it up into Azure. But right now it is sitting on-prem in our environment in SQL. Good questions. Thank you.

All right. So you know, this really isn't hard. Really, it's just different. And that was my message when interfacing with our construction management teams. It's really, they were doing these activities. We're digitizing these activities, and making the data more transparent and available.

So the timeline of this journey. Last year at this time, I was in a BIM 360 class. I learned in that class-- It was a lab-- how to set up the environment. I came back. I started talking with our construction management teams.

They were a little hesitant. Nobody really wanted to jump into it. And then my safety director raised his hand and goes, can you create me a safety checklist? I go, absolutely. And we knew in the month of December we had a short period of time before a large project program was going to kick off in January.

In this program, we had three different sites going on. We needed to have consistency. So in about a three week period, we worked with one of our computer programmers to start working on the app. We set up the environment.

To get the project team started, I really use the training material via YouTube and what's available on Autodesk. Over the course of this year, I've created some additional videos and how-to's. But really, the learning curve was wasn't very difficult.

So come January, we trained the team. I waited a month to collect a month's worth of daily data before I started dashboarding. I started tinkering, but I didn't show any of the project team until a month in. I really wanted to have a consistent data set to work with to give it a little punch, a little wow factor.

In March, we added two more projects to that. Come summer, the proof of concept was really working smoothly. We would monitor to make sure that SQL wasn't hiccuping. Make sure that the harvesting app was performing. We were getting some continuous feedback loop as far as what they wanted to see in the dashboards.

And then in fall, actually, we presented to the management team. It was a very short presentation. And that presentation was more just around data for our company, and how we're looking at data, and where we want to go forward in a big data environment. But it was a proof-of-concept that what we were able to demonstrate that this is a viable solution.

So BIM 360 Field Classic. There are a couple different parts here that I want to talk about. It switched names a couple of different times, so I put HQ in the parentheses. My guess is it's going to switch again. But here is the admin portal.

And inside of this admin portal, this is currently what's being called BIM 360 Enterprise, or HQ. This is where you create your projects. You then pick the services you want to add to the project.

So over here under Settings, you pick, do I want Glue? Do I want BIM 360 Next Generation? Do I want BIM 360 Classic? Those are now both available depending on your accounts. Do I want docs? Do I want BIM 360 plan? And then you activate those on your project.

We choose to-- we don't activate all of them. Quite frankly, we're not there yet in that suite to decide how we want to use that. You then add your companies and your members. So this is where from the company's standpoint, when we do the project setup, when we pick from our master list, and add that. And we're only adding the approved vendors that are working on the job. That's a really good clarification.

There is the web version. And so that's what you see here in this image. And then there's the app. We use both iPads and Surface Pros. I will say from an administrative standpoint it is much easier to work with Surface Pros.

Just from an IT account standpoint. So I know my IT personnel really like that. But my users do like the iPad a little bit better from a functionality standpoint. So you have two options. And we're using both pretty successfully. If you're using the Surface Pro, you'll be using the web interface. If you're using an iPad, you'll be using the app.

Inside of the web version, though, is where you get the administrative portal. If you can do it with the iPad, you'd have to log into a web browser. The admin portal, though, is where you set permissions of the different roles . You set up your reports.

So it has all of the same app features, and then plus the additional permissions and reporting. And then and then you have had the app, and the app is really used for the auditing. The checklist, the issues, the photos. You can access the library.

We're just now starting to get our feet wet in the equipment side of things, and integrating them with Glue in the model. I'm waiting at this point to see where next-gen goes, and where we want to go with that. But it does work pretty well. But we just aren't necessarily using it at an enterprise level.

So the web admin piece. When you log in the web admin piece, you're going to find your initials over in the right hand corner on your computer screen. LC is for me. There's a dropdown inside of here. You can go to the project admin.

This is where you create your templates. So you have to create your templates using the web portal. I don't believe I've never been able to do it within the app. But my recommendation is start simple. You can really build a complex checklist. And we actually have made a pretty robust one.

But start with smaller chunks. How many questions does one want to have to answer in an audit? You have to be comprehensive. But don't overburden your site team, because they will give you feedback If you give them 200 things to audit. So you may want to consider, do I want to have maybe a couple of small checklists versus one big one? But that's really up to what you want to do.

You define your issue types. I recommend defining root causes. Because root causes that are assigned to issues give you some categories in sorting. And it really does help with the trending where you can see where you can make incremental improvements on your projects. And then you add your members, your companies, and your permissions inside of the project admin portal.

So here is the web. The icons along the left hand side in the web portal. You have your issues. You have your tasks, checklist, daily updates. Equipment. Equipment can be tied to Glue. So you can have a 3D visual status with just the commissioning and the data of the equipment.

The library is where you can add your PDFs to that. What's exciting about next Gen-- at least, from the Insider program-- is that docs will be replacing this library. So I only have one place to upload something instead of a couple. Really nice change.

The photos. What's nice about the photos is in the admin, you can turn on, if you want to, different metadata on those photos, if you to track that. That's good. We didn't add location right away. That was something we added later. It was nice to put a location to that photo. Locations is something you define in your project setup.

And then the reporting. And I will say the reports are not attractive. And there's been no development. With Classic, there will be no development to make those prettier, just from a visual standpoint. But if you need to document and you need to create that piece of paper, it definitely does that.

So we chose to just keep that standard report. We attempted to look at maybe putting some time and development into that. And when I realized I could harvest the data and start dashboarding, I decided we'll just generate that piece of paper to create that transmittal trial, and then we'll focus on working with the data.

So the IOS app. This is pretty much your choices. Very similar. Icons are the same when you open up the app. Your users only have permission to the projects that they're added to. So in the field. I would say the one workflow that I notice that's a little bit hard for some of our field guys who really never come to the office-- sometimes never log into a computer.

In order to accept the project, you get an email. And in that email is a hyperlink. And you don't see that project on your iPad until you accept that email hyperlink and go to the web portal. I didn't think it was that difficult.

That was one of those things that I had to be on the phone several times. Let's open your email. Let's go to the email that came from BIM 360. Let's click on that hyperlink. All right, you're in. Now we can go to your app.

So that was one of those things that being in the office, you sometimes don't think it's that hard. But when you're in the field and you don't want to mess with two devices, it was one of those things that we did have to do a little bit of handholding.

You can integrate with the BIM 360 Glue 3D Viewer. That is really nice. We may not necessarily build completely off of all the 3D yet, but it does give visual context. And when you're working through complex problems, and most of our projects are in the industrial nature, and it is a spaghetti warehouse, and there are a lot of utilities and systems moving, that 3D is very, very valuable.

And there's not one drawing that I've seen in the many years I've been at SSOE that's given me that same context and complexity that we work with. So many of us have already bought into BIM and know the value of it. And what's great with next generation is that more integration with Field and the 3D environment. And then again, the data is accessible with Rest API.

So this is a quick video of what it looks like on the iPad. I pick my checklist. I pick the location. There is header information. In this video, I don't show how to go up into the header. If you have critical checklist properties, that was something in training.

As you can see here, I'm creating an issue because I had a no, or a non-conformance. Automatically, there's a checkbox in the admin portal where you can, when you say no, it will automatically create an issue, which is really great. Inside of that issue, you can have comments. You have the author, the location.

Again, this is what I'm talking about the root cause. Root causes have been very helpful in the dashboarding environment for us to trend on. We didn't create those categories in the beginning. And about a couple months in, I realized, wow. if I want to be better in some of my analytics, I need to be able to trend where we're seeing problems.

So this is just the iOS environment. Attachments is how you add photos. It will generate the camera right away. Or you can choose to pick from your photo library. You can add as many pictures as you want.

During issue capture, one of the things I know my field people like to do is they'll take a picture of the issue. And then before they close the issue, they take a picture again. And it does create a nice storyboard of that transition.

And it's so easy on the iPad just to snap that picture. And what I like about attaching it to the issue is it's just not going to be a picture in a folder structure that just sits there. It has context. It has that metadata.

So here, this is another quick video on how to create and edit issues. This is my active issue list on a template project. As you can see, there are different phases. Ready to inspect. Open. Work complete.

You can then add your company. Your due date, your root cause. You can add your photos. But again, from a learning curve perspective, it's just getting them used to some of the button clicking.

Nice thing about the app versus the Surface Pro is you can work offline. And we all know that our job sites, depending of the type of nature, that your Wi-Fi connectivity can vary greatly, to almost impossible to wonderful. And being able to work offline is really nice. And then you sync when you get back to your area network. So that's just the basic nature of what it looks like in the iPad.

So I talked about how we weren't using the daily reporting inside of Field. Now I have some people who are starting to do that, because they really, quite frankly, only want to use one app. I think today, we, from a technology standpoint, could be using a million apps.

On my if I could do anything, what would I make-- and I took this straight from one of my vise presidents-- is this concept of that single source of truth. And I know that's kind of a corporate answer, but we need one place to go. And the technology and the applications that we choose to use and implement, we really need to think about, how can we interact with it?

And if you're using applications that don't have an open API that you can work with that data, on my checklist of implementation, that's pretty high up there. We don't have the luxury in the margins in our business to take on the administrative burden of several apps. Because you would be dealing with project setup, companies, data, reporting, permissions.

And I really challenge the company is we can use technologies like BIM 360, and we can use some of these other apps. But we do have to remember, they all have licensing agreements. And what is that total cost of technology that we're putting on our projects? And are we going to get that back? And if I can't connect to the data, to me that ROI starts to diminish really, really quickly.

But we were using Raken for daily reports. I can't connect to all of the data. I can connect the sum. So in order to get more buy-in with my construction management team, they really, really love this app.

So I knew that part of the challenge and the sales pitch internally was, I needed to connect these two data sets together-- excuse me, together-- in order for them to start visualizing, look. In a dashboarding environment, if we're putting this data into a database, we can start connecting things.

My programmer wasn't very happy with me because what we had to do to connect those two project datasets was a little more difficult than, of course, I conceptually thought. I just drew the diagram and handed it to him. And it took him a little while, but we were able to solve that. We had to create a mapping structure in order to do that.

So I have a harvesting app now that goes to BIM 360 Field. It also goes to Raken. And then now, twice a day, it updates our SQL database, and then updates our dashboard.

I am OK with doing this twice. I'm maybe OK doing it three times. If I'm doing it 12 different times, I'd really challenge my organization on that. Because the more silos you create, it's much more difficult to blend it together. Not impossible. It's just it's more difficult.

How are we doing on time? Not too bad. All right. So the technical needs. I have to have a BIM 360 project. I have to activate Classic Field inside of that project. I have to create some form of checklist template. We have those down to a science now with safety. I'm now looking to evolve those checklists, and working into more of an overall standardized quality program.

We did create a harvesting app that runs. We are using the get functions of project, issues, companies, questions, and checklists. It's writing to a SQL environment. If you'd really want to get started, you can write to just Excel to get your feet wet, start understanding.

I actually recommend that, just to understand what the data looks like. Because when you get into a dashboard and you're linking those tables, what was nice about doing the Excel exercise is I kind of knew what I needed to connect by the time I got into that dashboard environment.

And then we currently are using the Power BI Report Server which just was released last month. It's in a hybrid mode for our organization. We have a lot of proprietary clients. Though we are starting to have that cloud conversation. But they have a sense of warm and fuzzies if it's sitting behind our firewall.

So we use the Report Server to do that. I do have a few project teams though that do allow me to keep it in Power BI online. But again, it being an online service, it has a user fee associated to that.

So for any of the technical programmers in the room, this will be the only code slide I have on here. I do know what most of these mean now. When it was first shown to me, I go, wow. You're really smart. But when you really look at it, it's not obviously that difficult.

But inside of here, this is showing me some of that GET-- what we're calling the GET data that's available. And as you can see here, you can create a checklist. You can get tasks, templates, log in. Locations, companies, issues. And so we chose to get these functions over here. Those get put into tables inside of SQL.

So a quick example of the reports. This is what it looks like. I highlighted when there was an issue associated to it. And the picture formatting, you only have three options, which for somebody who has an architectural background like myself, I really couldn't stomach that. Hold on. Clicker happy. All right.

So here's one of the first examples of one of the pieces of our dashboard. For example, we have created certain sections inside of our safety checklist. He wanted to organize the data by those sections. And then for example, I'm collecting on the no responses.

I want to from, an electrical perspective, on this particular project, I've had four GFCI issues. All right. How can we be proactive in recognizing that data? Well, maybe my next safety meeting is just around electrical and why it's important for us to have proper equipment on the site.

Here is another quick screenshot of that same electrical data. I have a nice date range slider bar. My PM loves this, because he quickly can just slide that back and forth. The data evaluates visually, and we can select on that.

And you can see here, this is now broken up. We've had 10 electrical no responses within this time period. And then which companies are those associated to. And it's not necessarily meant to be a negative report. It's meant to be a transparent visual report.

Now, some people can take that differently. For us, if we continue to do this, we're going to continue to have a good understanding of our contracting market, and who do we want to work with. And if safety is one of our core values, it's important for us to work with people who have that same value structure.

And then-- whoops. There we go. I had to take that proprietary nature. I had to block out some of those companies along the left hand side. But here, quickly, is a 60 day summary sheet of our active reports. Not all of our projects are doing the safety. Eventually that's where I would like to be.

But you can see the daily report data, where we are at in the country, and then the safety reports. And then a year from now, I would like to see my BIM 360 numbers matching my Raken.

AUDIENCE: Are you going to try to [INAUDIBLE]?

LAUREN COLLIER: We'll see what happens with next gen. I choose to pick my battles.

So here's a quick example of how you can interact inside of a dashboarding environment, and why this is much easier than a static Excel pivot table. You can do it. I would say it was much easier for me once I learned power BI to create these dashboards very, very quickly to connect the table data then it was, really, for me to be in Excel. So again, that's how we interact with the no answers.

Here's a quick of the issues. So issues by company. Average time response. That was a little glitchy, because some of those times are off because it took us a while sometimes to close that issue. So that was an improvement piece where the contractors were looking, and they're like, oh, well no, I fixed that, though. The time response was actually coming from our CM people not updating that issue quick enough. So that was good feedback.

But we were able to interact with this. And I quickly could get a list of the issues by that company during a certain time period, their average time. And at that point, then you can make your judgment calls on how you want to address some of those issues.

So discovery. Number one, good and consistent data will tell a very compelling story. And those are the stories you need in order to go down this data-driven environment. Change is hard. I believe my manager told me, Lauren, don't take it personally.

But you need leadership buy-in to help you push that commitment, because you will run into people who don't share that same vision as you do. But passion is personal. And in order to do this, we need passionate people to push it along. So you just have to keep on keeping on in that journey.

Closed platforms or apps will have a short lifecycle. If you're going down a data-driven journey, they won't play in this ecosystem of data exchange. So when you're looking at technology, talk to them about that API interoperability. And that could change if you choose to work with them or not.

So what failed? A lot. [LAUGHTER] We were able to get started really quick. You know, that fail fast, fail often. That's really how we make things work. Our harvesting app at first did not deal with archived projects. So I archived a project this summer. And all of a sudden, it was gone from my dashboard.

Call up my programmer. What are we doing? He goes, oh. I'm rewriting the database every night. I go, no, no. We can't we can't do that. Because if I archive the project, it disappears. So we quickly we're able to pull a backup of that data, rerun the harvesting app, and then we chose to do a compare update function.

We have a question feedback loop on the checklists. What questions are good? What maybe wording needs to be improved? We were missing, for our chemical industrial projects, we were missing some Haz-com questions.

And we had a safety issue that really dealt around Haz-com procedure, and we weren't addressing that. So we made that adjustment. And then issue types. In order to get better business intelligence, we had to create different issue types to help us trend.

So what's next for us? I really would like to start working with my construction management team to create more standardization, and create a quality program around the BIM 360 platform. I would like to build and improve better dashboards.

It's much easier for project leadership to go to that dashboard than it is for them to log in 2, 1, 10 different apps to look at that data. They want to go-- it's that executive summary. So they want to go to that one place to, all right, what's going on? So I really want to put some time and improvement into that.

Continue to automate. When you start working in the database environment, you're able to start automating functions. And that really puts the relevant data in front of people faster.

I want to integrate with other construction apps. There's been several safety ones that I've seen this week around the construct exchange. And I'm looking forward to seeing how we can start looking at those as well.

And then the next generation, 360 2.0. That is on our horizon. We're in the Insider program. If you are using Field Classic and you're not in the Insider program, they really are listening. And I'm not saying that as an Autodesk pitch. But people in that program have given feedback and shifted directions. And they really want to make a better 360 environment.

So this is my contact information. Like I said, the how-to is in the handout. I did not want to bore you with that detail today. Email me, tweet me, LinkedIn me if you have any questions.

Going down this data journey is one of, definitely, my passions. I hope you got that from the presentation today. And please take the class survey. Give me feedback. That only makes us better. So thank you.

[APPLAUSE]