Streamlining the Delivery of a $2.5 Billion Water Infrastructure Project Portfolio Using Autodesk Construction Cloud

MATT DRAKE: Hi, everyone. I'm Matt Drake. I'm a Senior Digital Engineering Manager at John Holland. Today, myself and Deepak Maini are going to speak about some of our water projects, why they're important, and give you some insight into how we're beginning to streamline their delivery using ACC.

A bit about myself up here, I have over 17 years experience across civil and structural engineering. And over the last 10 years, I've specialized in multibillion-dollar mega projects designing and building roads, railways, tunnels, and water infrastructure.

DEEPAK MAINI: Thanks, Matt. Hey, guys. Welcome to AU 2024. What an honor it is to present with Matt Drake. My name is Deepak Maini. I'm one of the principal business consultants based here in Sydney, Australia. With over 26 years of experience in the industry, I've helped customers implement technologies on projects ranging from a few million to several billion dollars. This is my 13th year as an AU speaker. I also have been mentoring various AU speakers for past nine years.

Outside my full-time job, I do a bit of teaching at various universities locally and overseas. I've also written several books on various design and construction software. Thanks, Matt.

MATT DRAKE: Thanks, Deepak.

So just a bit of a look at the learning objectives that you might have looked at when you signed up for the class today. That's what we'll be going through.

So John Holland in Australia are normally associated with roads and rail, but let's talk about water today. I'm going to play a short video for you now.

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So for those who didn't know, John Holland is a market leader in the delivery of water infrastructure. This slide shows some of the landmark water projects John Holland has already built. Water and energy projects are on the rise as we start to see a decline in road and rail infrastructure planning. John Holland is naturally adapting well to this new pipeline of work, being a market leader in the water sector.

Here we see some of the water projects we're currently delivering across three different states, all vitally important projects for the future of this country's water security. And what do all of these projects have in common? They're all using ACC as their common data environment.

So why are these water projects so important in Australia?

Australia is the world's driest inhabited continent with hugely variable rainfall. Drought and flooding are widespread issues across the country.

Climate-change modeling predicts significant drying-out of southeastern Australia, including the Murray-Darling Basin, Australia's major irrigated food-production area. Remember, our water security also underpins the food we grow here.

Some rivers in Australia are predicted to experience three-fold rises in their salinity levels by 2100, including the Macquarie River in New South Wales. This impacts aquatic life, reduces biodiversity, impacts agriculture and irrigation, affects our water supply, and also disrupts the ecosystem.

Water is now front and center of Australian politics. A federal water minister did not even exist a decade ago. And only this year, Australia's water ministers met for the first time in a decade to renew their commitment to work together to protect and secure the country's water resources.

Almost our entire population lives in cities, which are expected to grow by up to 15 million people in the next 30 years. Water consumption in these larger cities is projected to rise by up to 73%. Let that sink in for a few seconds.

This shows the value of work done, reflecting the amount of investment over the last decade-- stable, but not enough considering our population trajectory.

And this rainfall graph shows us what climate change is doing, more extreme highs and lows. It's the lows we should be worried about. If we do hit another big low point in the next few decades with increased population and lack of new infrastructure, like shown on the last couple of slides, our water security is at great risk.

So let's talk about tech stacks and the digital tools we use at John Holland.

John Holland is a very large organization with a myriad of different tools. And across our different types of projects, we can have a lot of overlapping tools. Having too many software solutions can be an issue because it can lead to a lack of integration and compatibility among different systems. This can result in inefficiencies, increased complexity, and difficulties in data management and sharing.

So how can Autodesk help in our situation? I'll now hand over to Deepak Maini.

DEEPAK MAINI: All right, so how can Autodesk help John Holland? That's the question that John Holland came to us with. Now, to make sure that everybody understands, our partnership with John Holland is the partnership for innovation. Now, what does that actually mean?

John Holland is one of the pioneers of construction in this region. So we are in the process of renewing their second EBA contract, so their second Enterprise Business Agreement contract. And if you are not aware of this, each agreement goes for three years. So that means that we are already in the process of streamlining some of the initiatives that you want to run with John Holland for the next three years. For the next three years, we want to make sure that we are able to help John Holland achieve the goals that they set for themselves, not within just the technology team, but also in the wider team. And that is what we mean by partnership for innovation.

As part of their enterprise agreement, John Holland gets access to enterprise licensing, meaning, based on the tokens, they get access to any software they want till the time it's in the contract. They also get access to any new or in-progress technology that we are developing, obviously with the right contracts in place. But most importantly, they get access to what we call as Enterprise Success service.

So what's an Enterprise Success service? Through Enterprise Success service, a customer like John Holland gets access to success planning. So they are assigned a customer success manager who works with them throughout their EBA lifecycle and planned success of the initiatives that we are going to deliver. So we just don't go and deliver an initiative. We figure out what is the outcome of those initiative and what success would those initiative would bring to companies like John Holland.

It gives them access to Enterprise Priority Support. So no matter how much we train the teams and no matter how much the John Holland teams are upskilled, at some stage, they would need support from Autodesk. And through Enterprise Priority Support, that's what they get. They get access to priority support.

The next one is adoption accelerators. These are 15 to 90-minutes videos that we can record on various topics that we can then provide to John Holland for them to upload within their own internal learning portal. And through those, they can then upskill their teams.

And lastly, which is the most important one here, is they get access to Transformation Services via Autodesk consulting, and I am a part of that consulting team.

So how does consulting work? We first identify outcomes. We sit down with our customers like John Holland. In this case, we sat down with Matt Drake and his team. We work together to identify the problems and the associated outcomes. In this case, the problem was they had a massive tech stack. They had to reduce the tech stack in order to reduce their expense, their cost of technology.

We then also had to sit down with them and define and standardize workflows because, at the end of the day, it's not just about cost. It's also improving the workflows. It's also streamlining them. And most importantly, it's about providing them efficiency through those workflows. So we sat with Matt and his team, and we collaboratively looked at the problem and identified the challenges.

And lastly, we create path to scale. So we supervised the John Holland team in adopting of new technology. But at the end of the day, it's a massive organization, so they need to make sure that they are able to scale the adoption of technology themselves. And that's why we go through this process called train the trainer, which means we train Matt Drake and his teams. And they can then go and train the extended teams, also some of the other contractors and consultants that they work with. As you can imagine, on a massive project or a portfolio of projects like that, it's not only John Holland who works on those. There are also other consultants that they work with on regular basis in joint ventures and so on.

So what did we do in this case? We first reviewed John Holland's current water project processes. We reviewed their current stacks, and we also reviewed their current workflows.

Then we took time to map those workflows and processes to the workflows and processes available in Autodesk Construction Cloud. In some cases, we also go to an extent of creating additional integrations if some of those integrations are not available out of the box. That's what we did. We sat down with Matt and his team. We looked at their current workflows. We then provided them a demonstration of how we were able to map their current clash detection workflows with ACC Model Coordination.

Now, performing model coordination, which is the clash check, or was a very, very important part of the process because, at the end of the day, if there's clashes in their designs, they can't build it on site. So this was an extremely important part of the process. And one of the factors that played a major role was what we call as object exclusions. I'm going to show you a live demonstration of this.

But basically, object exclusion means that they are able to exclude or ignore certain clashes that are nonessentials, so for example, pipes that are under 10 millimeters of diameter or pipes that are under, let's say, 1 inch or half an inch or whatever it is. So you can ignore those kind of clashes. But most importantly, if at the next phase of the project, you want to bring them back, you can do that. So I'm going to jump over to my Model Coordination project window to show you a quick demonstration of this.

This is the Model Coordination window, as you can see here. I'm in the Model Coordination of this project here called Integrated Design Project. In the Model Coordination environment, we see automated clash checks between different models in our project. Now, these models could be just the models or they could also be 3D views. What I mean by that is, a Revit file could have multiple 3D views, so we do not want to select all of them for clash checks.

That part is pretty easy. We can go under Settings on the top right, and we can go under Models, and we can clear the views that we do not want to include in clash checks because in some cases, we have seen that the consultants will include views that have links to other models as well. So it pretty much grinds the whole process to stop. But by simply going into Models, we can deselect the models that we do not want to include in our clashes. It's very simple process.

However, in this case, that was not what we wanted to do. We wanted to have the clash check of the model turned on. However, we want to remove certain elements from clash check. In this case, if I go and change my coordination space to, let's say, Plant, I will show you what we did. This, again, is just an example here. We, obviously, for the right reasons, cannot show you the live John Holland project here. I'm sure you can all imagine.

So in this case, I've created an objects exclusion of all the pipes that are under 2 inches of diameter. I've currently selected four models. If I click on four models here, as you can see, out of all the available models, I went and picked all the piping models here. And in all these piping models, I ran a rule which, if I click Next, I can show you here. So I went and said, in all the piping models combined, I want you to go and select all the pipes that have their diameter equal to anything less than 2 inches.

Now, for us to be able to do that, we could go to any of these elements and we can look at their properties here. So for example, if I click on this particular pipe, and if I look at the properties here, these are all the properties of this pipe. We just need to make sure where's the diameter property available. And we simply go and select the Diameter property. In this case, as you can see, it is the Size property that we selected.

So this is an extremely powerful feature available inside Model Coordination, where, instead of turning off the whole model, we can select certain elements within that model and we can turn them off from clash detection. Or we can ignore them from clash detection. So if I just go and say Next, I can specify the name here, and that's pretty much it. If I close out of it, now when I run my clash checks based on this rule active, it'll ensure that in all the piping models, all the pipes that had their diameters less than 2 inches are ignored from clashes.

But let's say at a later stage of the project, you decide to bring these clashes back in. For that, we can simply go into these three dots here and we can deactivate this rule, which means that next time when we update our clash check by simply clicking on this button-- which currently is grayed out because there are no changes in my design-- if I deactivate this here, after it's finished saving, I would be able to click on this Run Clash Check button, as you could see. And now it would run the clash check with these types included as well. But in our case, we went and activated this, meaning we were able to ignore all these pipes with those diameters that were less than 2 inches.

Again, please note that this is just an example here. That's because we can't show the live project of John Holland in this presentation. I hope you understand.

So coming back to the slide deck here, that was one of the most important things that you are able to do. As a result, John Holland and the extended consultants were able to save a lot of time.

Now, that was just one part of it. The next part was to create and deliver adoption and upskilling plan. And this is where a colleague of mine, Andrew Beazley, he played a massive role. Andrew went and had a detailed discussion with the John Holland team about their current skills. It was also one of my colleagues, Kelly Furtado, and I, we sat down with them as well. And we found out what were their current skill sets. Based on that, Andrew was able to record anywhere between 15 to 30-minutes courses for John Holland teams to upskill. Again, this is one of the advantages that John Holland gets as part of their EBA process with us as part of their EBA relationship with us.

Once we recorded these courses, Andrew was then able to deliver these courses to John Holland. John Holland uploaded these courses within their own internal training platform. Once they were uploaded there, all the John Holland teams had need to upskill, they were able to simply go in there and start reviewing those courses and upskilling them. In fact, their internal system also allowed some of the managers to review what courses the team have already taken.

We also participated in some of the initial coordination meetings because it was new. The whole ACC Model Coordination process was very new to the John Holland team. We participated in some initial coordination meetings, but the John Holland team was very quickly get up to speed with the whole process. They did not need us after that, and then they took over the whole process. And the outcome of the whole thing was we were able to help John Holland in streamlining their tech stack. And that was the most important bit here. And that was the reason John Holland team came to Autodesk.

Now, I want to finish my part of presentation by displaying this code from our Consulting Services team, that, at Consulting Services, "We don't deliver projects, we deliver value." With this, I'm going to hand it over back to you, Matt.

MATT DRAKE: Thank you very much, Deepak. So as Deepak was mentioning, our tech stack has gone from something that might look like this, with a number of different tools linking to a number of different applications, to this. So this is our current working tech stack for our water projects, streamlined and centered around the Autodesk Construction Cloud. ACC has replaced many of the tools shown on the previous slide, which is already saving us a lot of time and money and increasing efficiency across our project teams. Less systems means less searching for information and less risk of duplication and losing confidence in that information.

Right now on our water projects, we're saving up to $50,000 a month purely in software costs. That's $600,000 a year. And we expect this number to continue rising as we look to further increase our adoption of ACC. We're gaining efficiencies in information management and losing desktop products that take time to install and update.

So why has John Holland chosen to work with ACC?

ISO 19650-- so ISO is extremely important to us and our clients. John Holland are one of only a few businesses that are actually ISO-certified by BSI in Australia. Most government clients have embraced ISO 19650 and now require it to be implemented on their projects. And ACC can be structured in a way that complies with ISO 19650. And we've actually worked really closely with Autodesk to develop ISO 19650-compliant templates for our projects.

Sustainability is taken very seriously at John Holland, particularly on our water projects. It's a subject I'm also personally very passionate about. And Autodesk are also taking big leaps in this space. Over the last few years, we've taken steps to start automating our embodied carbon registers using data from our digital models. And recently, we've been working with Autodesk to look at how we can start utilizing their EC3 product to help optimize some of these processes even further.

As Deepak mentioned before, John Holland don't see Autodesk as just a software vendor. Through our enterprise agreement, we see Autodesk as a strategic partner that helps us develop digital strategies and also assist in the implementation of those strategies.

Web-based over desktop products benefits most of our construction staff and ACC is a platform which really enables this for us. Both Autodesk and John Holland also share a focus on the ethical use of AI. John Holland have been early adopters of Copilot and have an internalized version of ChatGPT, while Autodesk Construction IQ within ACC is helping contractors with predictive analytics across projects.

We've also seen trends in key clients leaning towards ACC as their common data environment, too-- Hunter Water, Sydney Metro, and Victorian Transport, to name a few in Australia. And we've also seen some trades and subbies, such as Stowe Electrical, start to get on board, too, using ACC as their common data environment.

Over the last few years, John Holland has seen a sharp increase in the adoption of ACC, doubling our user base in creating almost 30 new projects.

That's an 80% increase in ACC usage over three years across our business.

As we touched on earlier, clash detection within the ACC platform was a key outcome to the success of our improved processes.

We still do have cases where we will revert out to Navisworks and iConstruct for some specialist clashing, but the vast majority of all clash avoidance is now being done using ACC and integrated fully within the cloud and available to the whole team.

So where to from here for our water projects? We're really excited moving forward and fostering our relationship with Autodesk. I think it is important to mention that we're still in the early days of this journey, too. As we said earlier, we're just about to renew our second EBA, and there's a number of initiatives out of that EBA which we're looking into currently.

But our high-level vision for our water projects at John Holland is end-to-end digital workflows for project delivery. And how do we do this? We want to do it through our partnership with Autodesk and their cloud platform, ACC.

Thank you very much.