Take a Load Off with DPR, Windover, and Arcadis

NATHANIEL COOMBS: Should we kick this thing off?

JOHN PRIOR: Yeah, let's do it.

NATHANIEL COOMBS: All right everyone.

KEVIN LUCHT: Get started.

NATHANIEL COOMBS: Well, a couple of months worth of work comes to a head here. And I have to be honest, this is by far the thing that I was looking forward to the most, coming to New Orleans. So we had a great panel here for you guys today. We're going to be talking about Autodesk, Take a Load Off with DPR, Windover, and Arcadis, looking to represent different perspectives throughout the industry, from your very large contractors, more midsize, more civil. We want to kind of give a wide range of perspectives on the topic of quantification.

So this is probably the 100th time you've seen this. I just want to pause on it for a second. But much more importantly, we have today's speaker panel. I am Nate. I am a senior business consultant at Autodesk here. I spent most of my career, if not all, working with our quantification tools, particularly Assemble. And I'm joined by my colleague John.

JOHN PRIOR: Yeah.

NATHANIEL COOMBS: Feel free to introduce yourself.

JOHN PRIOR: Hello, everybody. My name is John Prior. I'm a VDC subject matter expert here at Autodesk. Nate and I actually started working at Assemble on the same exact day, so we're twins in a way. During my time here at Autodesk, I've worked on Assemble, Autodesk Takeoff, then Collaborate and Tandem. And with that, pass it on.

AMR RAAFAT: Good afternoon, everyone. Excited to be with you today. My name is Amr Raafat, Vice President of VDC and Technology at Windover Construction, and named the Autodesk 2019 Innovator of the Year. I lead our VDC team to transform the way we build with technology. I started my career as an architect, and been in the industry for 20 years.

KEVIN LUCHT: Hi, I'm Kevin Lucht. I'm a senior national solutions manager with Arcadis. I've been with Arcadis about six years, but I've been in the business 35 years. I've done [? simple ?] design, project management, and construction management. I'm working on projects all over the world, from an airfield in Kyrgyzstan, to rail projects in Middle East, and design and build rail and road projects here in the US. So I have the scars to know what I'm doing and not doing.

NATHANIEL COOMBS: We need better intros, John.

JOHN PRIOR: It's not about us. It's not about us.

PRASHANT SHARMA: Hello, everyone. Happy to be here, part of this great panel. I'm Prashant Sharma, part of DPR Construction as a senior estimator, and based out of our California Redwood City office. And I've been with DPR for six years been doing pre-construction for about 14 years.

And I work on projects, but I always love looking into new tools and tools like these, Autodesk Takeoff. Happy to be here.

JOURDAN TRICE: Me too. I'm Jourdan Trice. I support pre-construction technology at DPR. I've been an estimated for about 20 years, and I love using models for quantification. So I started with Revit, and then I had the good fortune to get into Assemble and now we're looking at Autodesk Takeoff here at DPR. So excited to be here today. Thank you.

NATHANIEL COOMBS: Like I said, very happy to have this crowd here and the great panel, and looking forward to the discussion today.

So the agenda, obviously, we want to make sure everybody knows who we are. We want to give a little bit of an overview of Autodesk Takeoff itself. At the same time, I don't want today to be all about technology.

We have four experts on the stage-- sorry, John, me and you aren't going to count today. But we have four experts on the stage, industry leaders, and I want to make sure their perspectives on everything from model based quantification, 2D quantification, everything in between is covered, whether or not it's talking about Autodesk Takeoff.

So I want to start by giving our panelists the opportunity to highlight their organizations, the great work they're doing around the world. And from there, we'll move right into panel discussion for the back half and hopefully have some time to take questions from the crowd here. So without further ado, John?

JOHN PRIOR: I'm a little offended. My job title is literally GDC Subject Matter Expert, but we'll go ahead. Next slide, please.

So really quickly, I do want to save as much time for these guys, so if there is a demo that you want to get, please come to the booth. I'll be there all day tomorrow. I can give you an in-depth demo of Autodesk Takeoff. But for those who don't know it, Autodesk Takeoff sits on top of Autodesk Docs. It's part of the Autodesk Construction Cloud. And again, please feel free to come to the booth if there's more that you want to learn about it.

Which button's next?

NATHANIEL COOMBS: The big green one.

JOHN PRIOR: OK. So in short, Autodesk Takeoff is a 2D and 3D quantity takeoff tool. It'll be able to work with PDFs, Revit files, and IFCs, all within one place for you to get both your 2D quantities and your 3D quantities. So it works by you pushing information over from Autodesk Docs. But again, please feel free to come to the booth if there is more in depth demo that you want to receive. So with that, I'll pass things over to DPR to go through their case study.

JOURDAN TRICE: Thank you.

NATHANIEL COOMBS: And I will say if you can't find John, there should be plenty of folks down there to give you guys a look at the products, as well, and not just Takeoff, but Build, Docs, any one of our ACS suites of products.

JOURDAN TRICE: All right. Thank you all. Again, we're really excited to be here to talk about DPR and our experience with Autodesk Takeoff. DPR, we exist to build great things, not just great buildings, but great relationships and great people.

PRASHANT SHARMA: Those are our core values. We like to be-- we want to be trusted. We like to enjoy our work. We always want to be seen different, and we always want to challenge the industry, try to do new things, bring new things to the industry. That happens to be ever forward, happens to be my favorite core value, too.

JOURDAN TRICE: And we started with 11 employees in 1990. Now we're up to 10,000, roughly 10,000. It keeps changing every day. So this is what I got. I pinned them down on these two numbers here, so 5,000 full time admin, 5,000 craft, 27 offices around the country, with our headquarters in Redwood City, California.

PRASHANT SHARMA: So we are all across US, and our customers, clients have taken us beyond US. Today, we have operations in projects in Europe, in Asia. Yeah, so we are truly are a global company today.

JOURDAN TRICE: Our areas of strategic focus here allow us to deliver more predictable outcomes for our clients. I just kind of wanted to highlight these for you, and our do work-- we call them do work priorities, our SPW, prefab, data, and VDC. Got it.

PRASHANT SHARMA: We like to be known as technical builders. We like challenging projects, and that aligns us well for these five core markets. We do a lot of self perform work. We want to be known as self-performing general contractors in the industry.

JOURDAN TRICE: So why is DPR Construction, we're piloting Autodesk Takeoff today? Our estimators are 2D and 3D Takeoff experts. We have about 350 plus preconstruction experts, and so we have these two processes that live in different environments, these point solutions, and now we have the opportunity to combine the process in one inventory. And Prashant's going to tell us a little bit more about some of the benefits.

PRASHANT SHARMA: All right so let's look into Autodesk Takeoff and how it aligns with DPR. We love the collaboration concept, that the idea that all us estimators can work on the same platform together. That's really gelled well with us.

On the project, multiple estimates can work together. It doesn't matter if you're in the same office or not. And that's really been very useful. On site and offsite estimators, we have over overseas offices, as well, and being able to utilize those resources do work together, that's been pretty great, especially for me.

JOURDAN TRICE: Biggest thing.

PRASHANT SHARMA: Yeah. To put in a collaboration image, it's just hard to get that into one. We like the fact that you can package scopes in Autodesk Takeoff. You can have a doors section and a drywall section and establish that, use that to have separate takeoffs and use it for bidding. That's been useful. Single source of truth is a concept we really like, and the fact that all the information, all your documents are in one place has been really useful, also being able to collaborate with an architect and an engineer on the project.

Some unique ATO features that I think are great, the fact that today as estimators, we can utilize automatic drawing, file naming. The sheet names can show up automatically. You can control versions pretty intelligently. That's something we like.

Something that we've been wanting all this time is models bring us a lot of variables, use those variables just like Excel to build formulas and to do takeoffs using that. It's been extremely useful. We can actually do that in 2D, as well, so that's something we like, being able to utilize multiple project takeoffs but use that to develop takeoffs on your next project. So you can import takeoff conditions in ATO. That's something that's been pretty useful.

I'm sure a lot of folks see this. It's hard to get a lot of bulk population of estimators get on board onto a 3D platform in estimating. And the fact that the 2D and the 3D interface is pretty similar, you're using the same commands, same icons, I think has been a grand success for us. And a feature that everybody likes, being able to cluster groups, take your building 3D model and break it up into sections and being able to look at it individually, that's been pretty useful.

And lastly, we are a large company, but being able to use master format or unit format, standardize our way of takeoffs and using that across multiple projects, it's possible and works well with the takeoff platform. So we like that, too.

JOURDAN TRICE: A lot of favorites here, yeah. And so just in terms of usage or adoption, this is still a pilot, but in I would say like maybe six months to nine months, we've got six regional SMEs and they're kind of spreading the word and trying to just-- I don't want to say evangelize, but the people that really get onto the platform tend to love it. And so they're telling everybody in the office.

We got over 20 projects in ATO now, both awarded and pursuit. And we've managed to work with Autodesk and develop a really good relationship, one of our colleagues in the audience here to see how we aggregate feature requests and to track them. And so Autodesk's been really great about working with us on the product management side.

We have a lot of regional training going on with our build implementation of our integration manager. So our integration managers are spreading the word not only about build but also about ATO, so it's really fantastic for our teams. And then we're looking into the API to see how we could leverage the downstream data today. But I think this is just building and building and building, and so it's pretty exciting for DPR.

NATHANIEL COOMBS: Everybody loves cluster. Everybody loves cluster.

PRASHANT SHARMA: And with that we hand it over to Kevin-- or Amr, sorry.

AMR RAAFAT: Hello, everyone. Excited to share this great panel, to share the experiences and case studies of how we apply technologies such as Autodesk Takeoff and other softwares and capabilities that could work together in harmony and provide solutions to solve the challenges on projects.

A little bit about Windover Construction. We are based in our headquarters in New England, in the Boston area, and we build academic, nonprofit, senior housing. We have the go to for modular construction in the New England area, life science, hospitality, and residential custom homes, and multifamily. We focus on prefabrication, affordable housing, and we've been building around New England.

We utilize the technology to offer innovative solutions to make sure we build in the most efficient ways, and Windover construction launched the IDEA platform, which stands for Innovations for Design Engineering and Automation. It's right now applying all these different technologies, from 4D planning to 3D printing, additive manufacturing, coordination, to transform the way we build. We wanted to extend that to support architects, engineers.

And right now, we've been supporting projects in California and the Texas area, in New England, as well as actually in the Middle East area, with a great developer in Dubai. When we are utilizing Autodesk Takeoff to-- we're going to show now the different case studies. So I would like to jump into the case studies here.

For years, we've been having all this data embedded into our models. We end up in the design phase with detailed Revit models. It's information rich, has a lot of data into it, built into it. But it's been challenging to communicate that to the preconstruction workflow for our estimating team to utilize and really benefit from to extract this data and work with when they are working on a detailed budget.

So finally, when we started working with Autodesk Takeoff, we've been finding the value of how we can extract all this data in a very easy to use interface and make it possible for estimators to extract the data. It can be exported to Excel. There are so many ways we can-- I love Prashant's point about the cluster and how you can divide points. And this not only to quantify pieces. We actually having it with clients as a visualization tool for folks.

Clients are not as good as we are in visualizing what's in 2D and 3D, so we've been utilizing that to enhance collaboration as Autodesk Takeoff between the BIM data, whether it's coming from the architect-- we build it with our in-house VDC team, and they enrich and support our estimating team with all this data to save time during the quantity takeoff process. We love that it has a 2D aspect to it, as well as the 3D aspect to it. So our estimating team had been heavily lacking a lot using the 2D aspect, as well as the 3D components for it.

This is a project, because Windover, Windover is a resident as the Autodesk Knowledge Center in Boston. We just received an award for that project yesterday to transform the way when we build a global Autodesk Excellence Award, transforms the way we build with laser scanning, prefabrication, drones, and BIM coordination. And one of the many things we did on that project is the telescopic pioneering technology, and how we use Autodesk Takeoff to quantify the amount of steel we need to produce those telescopic studs.

So this project is an existing building, an affordable housing project that we needed to add an addition for a 120-year-old building. So the challenge is in every existing building. There are so many surprises. We found out that the ceilings are not even, so we partnered with Howick, a New Zealand Autodesk Technology Center, and StrucSoft in Canada to produce those telescopic studs so when you go to the job site, the power of these telescopic studs is that the travel very small, these go in tight elevators, tight corridors. And when they go to their intended location, they can expand and support this. It's industrialized adaptive construction. So this was the first project to apply this technology, and we're excited about the partnerships we do with Autodesk.

So we can unlock, which see now, different applications of how we can unlock the power of model-based quantity takeoffs, how we can use our data that we end up in the models after coordination or early in the process during design phase to help me quantify pieces. And the beauty of this is that we built our in-house libraries that could support each building type that John will-- expert in it, he can explain it more.

This is a housing project we had in the New England area, and this is how it can break all the different visually as well as quantify all the different roofs, finishes, exterior walls, window types, and you can embed that into it. And we use also Tandem to embed, Autodesk Tandem, which is to support future facility maintenance. You can embed all this data, manufacturing data into this.

We also have this project. As you see here, it can be exported to Excel to support the existing workflows for estimating teams. And it can work both ways. You download these Excel files. We add the data and put it back into Takeoff. So it's been a very flexible solution. This is also to support the additive manufacturing solution, one of our projects.

Virtual mockups has been a big part of this. So it can help us quantify all the different elements of how we we're going to build. We've also been using additive manufacturing technology for historic preservation. This is a project in the North of Boston. There's 100-year-old buildings that we created exact replicas of the facade using laser scanning and BIM data.

And the power of this is that after we create these models in Fusion, you can take it to Autodesk Takeoff, help it quantify all the materials that will be needed to support additive manufacturing. So there is a lot of possibilities to really redefine how we work, especially working closely with estimating groups and supporting them with the accurate data they need, and it has a great positive impact on the estimate and providing clients with substantial cost savings and accurate estimates. Thank you so much.

NATHANIEL COOMBS: Last but not least.

KEVIN LUCHT: Just a minute. Here we go. OK.

I'm going for Arcadis. And I'm just going to give me a little of background. I'm not really going to talk about how we use Takeoff, but more how we arrived using Takeoff. You know, we never used Takeoff before, never used that in our company. We haven't. And how we sort of came on to it with a very big project that we're on called California High Speed Rail.

So Arcadis is a fairly large worldwide company. We have about 28,000 employees worldwide. We're in about 17 countries, and we have three business global business rooms-- one Resilience, which is our environmental and water, one Mobility, which is our transportation, and another one is Places, which is our vertical design and construction.

And we have a lot of people that know a lot of things, and we can draw from a lot of people. Well, we're not a contractor. So we really don't use-- may not be looking at how a general contractor would use [INAUDIBLE] or use the technology. We're more of a CM to the owner. And that's how we've been using it.

So a little bit about California high speed rail just to give me some background in the magnitude and size in the project if you don't know of anything on it. It's a 500 mile segment from San Francisco home to Los Angeles. It's a very big project, and they started. Currently, there's construction going on in the San Joaquin Valley, about 190 miles, and are currently starting-- started in about 2015.

So in 2008, just to give you a magnitude on the dollar size, the California people decided [? they want ?] a referendum. They gave $10 million to finish this project. So today, they have about $23 million [? funded ?] and finished just that section there [INAUDIBLE].

Project has grown from a $10 million project to [INAUDIBLE] 500 miles, and now it's [INAUDIBLE] $23 million. That'll only do 119 miles. Now, they're probably going to look [INAUDIBLE] the $1 trillion or more or something like that. [INAUDIBLE] some ridiculous amount, and they're estimating that it's going to finish out in 2050.

And the schedule is the same thing. They start in 2005-- or 2008, excuse me. And they thought they were going to finish them 500 miles by 2030. So then we're looking at when they're going to actually finish now is the 119 miles by 2030. You can see there's been a lot of change, a lot of things going on within the project that just compound a lot of things.

So we weren't going to decide. We had a team that we were going to provide some technology to our estimating team that was on there to [INAUDIBLE] some paperwork. We didn't know if they were going to mail [? them. ?] We went through a process before we went there, and that helped us make this decision. So I don't know.

We started with Business 360, and then trying to do that in the process, it was lackluster. We didn't care for it really too much, and we thought we were going to have to go somewhere else. And then all of a sudden, all [INAUDIBLE] PlanGrid, and we just thought that was the greatest thing since sliced bread.

I mean, that really just opened our eyes, and we just jumped on that. And we just started using that immensely. And we've been using that, and we started with-- we went from two projects on it in 2020, and we have about 16 projects on it now.

And recently, we've been moving over [INAUDIBLE]. So we're moving that in the [INAUDIBLE], and this was one of those projects that we move into the building platform to give us more control, give us more [INAUDIBLE] and just size and scale on our project. So we looked at this solution since I'm a solution manager.

We were trying to figure out what's our objectives here. So the one thing is we need to digitalize processes, and these guys were still doing it haphazardly. We aren't some old crusty estimators that were still doing paper.

They were still doing maybe a [INAUDIBLE] or Adobe. But they had all kinds of things that they weren't doing. We want that single source of truth just like everyone else.

They didn't have it, and they weren't using SharePoint to try to store their files. But everybody's putting in an email and putting it on their drive, and data was scattered everywhere. So we went to lowering the email traffic and eliminating duplication of data and remove risk. As you can imagine, we had a lot of risk and data just being everywhere because at one point, we had some managers actually give out estimates that we weren't trying to do with his estimating team.

They weren't [? compliant. ?] They were wrong. So we had [INAUDIBLE] reduce that option that they couldn't do that anymore.

But we were in the CM for the owner, or we were on a team from the CM when the owner. We have about 150 people plus or so forth. But the team that we were focusing on, as I said, was the estimating team that were verifying change orders. So we needed to verify the quantities.

We needed an independent estimate, and we had a small staff. And we hadn't been on the project for two years. And then the new manager came in, and he was looking at all the processes, and we weren't getting our estimates out. And we proposed a solution to him [INAUDIBLE]. When we look at it, the journey that we went through with all those other things, preparedness for that, we didn't have to really just jump in on a big project like California high speed rail with something very, very new.

So we had some background with us. Now [INAUDIBLE] the platform [INAUDIBLE] controls on the team thinking, we can block it off from anyone coming in and grabbing things, only access by the team, and so forth. The thing that we had was that we had no experience in Takeoff.

So we thought Takeoff was the right solution. It's that 80-20. We thought 80%, we can-- it was the right solution. There was that unknown 20% that we hadn't-- we decided to do do.

And the other thing in my mind was, was this team ready? They were eager, but I wasn't sure whether they were ready to actually take on when they needed to take on. And we got support from on this from Randall Nash and Alex [INAUDIBLE] and [? Alice ?] Anaconda and this gentleman right here, John Priar. He was very helpful to us.

[INAUDIBLE] I thought we were throwing them a lifeline. We were just throwing him a lifeline, and we really couldn't go wrong. They were really going down from the last count [INAUDIBLE].

Now they had SharePoint [INAUDIBLE] with no control. What's the first thing you do when you're going to start a project? You [INAUDIBLE] a SharePoint site.

So that solves everything, right? I'm sure [INAUDIBLE] my snickers with that one. They didn't have much control of their data, and they lost the access to it. They had no chain of custody on the estimate and as I said before, they had estimates that were going out incomplete.

And we ended up-- we were actually-- and the magnitude of the project, as big as this project was, we had 700 change orders that we were trying to process. And we had our expectation, and what we were contracted to do was to turn around those in three weeks. And we had change orders that were in volume from 50,000 to 60 million.

So I don't know [INAUDIBLE] $10 million estimate on a big project. We were having [? to ?] estimate $60 million change orders. So we needed to get control and organize and get permissions to these guys so they had control on their data. And we gave them some processes.

Oh, oh, pressed the wrong button. Sorry. So we didn't know what we had to work with. When we talked to the team, we felt like Apollo 13, you know?

They came in and threw the stuff on the table, and you got to make something out of this. And we didn't know what we had. So we got from them-- we had some ongoing [INAUDIBLE] with high speed rail. So we're limiting in what we can get from them and what we have from the GC [INAUDIBLE].

The big thing was we had no models. So these guys, I'm hearing them talking about models and how they use them in Takeoff. We only had the PDFs, which was OK. It was OK, really, for us since as a CM role, we really know what we're getting into, and we don't sometimes get the model.

A lot of times, we don't get the models. And we work with PDFs anyway as part of our workflow process. So it was OK that we had only PDFs.

And [INAUDIBLE] multiple sources. Document [INAUDIBLE] way out somewhere else on the GC, and one of the partners on the [INAUDIBLE] have it somewhere, and then we [INAUDIBLE] somewhere on the SharePoint. And we just needed to consolidate, and they needed [INAUDIBLE], and they needed [INAUDIBLE]. So we put it in there.

So we used Takeoff. We got them organized. We get permissions on there, and we organized by the change order and by name.

The biggest thing, a couple things about the Takeoff that we were able to do, is we can navigate the sheets. We can customize the qualities that we wanted. And it was easy for them to do that and to move around within Takeoff and send [INAUDIBLE] the pay item, do the quantity take off.

And the thing was, it was a single source. We were able to keep it all in one place. We didn't have to go from-- Joe has a spreadsheet on his hard drive or it's on SharePoint or somewhere. It was all in Takeoff. It was all right there.

So again, we were organized in the single source of truth. So if you go back and look, then we [INAUDIBLE] that we laid out. Yep, we did control data.

Yes, we then. Single source of truth? Absolutely, we did.

We had all of these objectives that we were talking about. We have higher efficiency in the change order when we delivered it because we knew we had the right day and the right time and the right place. And we were able to verify it.

We made our Arcadis goals, and we reduced our risk immensely. So we didn't have to change orders going out and [INAUDIBLE] legal challenges. And we didn't increase productivity.

And the manager told me. He thinks that from the one thing we're doing before, we actually increased our productivity by 50%. And that was the combination of both take off and just getting this team organized so that they can actually use it.

So it's a combination of [INAUDIBLE] and Takeoff that we were able to do that. So, thank you. And if you have any more questions, I actually had a presentation, a 45 minute presentation yesterday. SO this was the very condensed version

NATHANIEL COOMBS: Yeah, you guys can clap. Yes. The cool thing about this is I didn't want to take away the spice from the discussion.

So although we rehearsed and we had a plan for what we were going to do, this is really the first time I've heard the full presentations from our speakers as well. So thank you guys for making Autodesk look good as always. But now I want to leave it up to the fun part-- open discussion. In this case, we have some questions that we're going to run through that we wanted to talk about.

Might skip some here and there depending on time. I want to make sure that we leave a few minutes for questions from the crowd. So this is much more relaxed, much more casual, but I want to hear some opinions from the team here. So [INAUDIBLE].

Am I clicking? I'll just try not to move. Good luck, but-- all righty, so, question one.

I guess-- you know, I'll start with you, John. Other than Cluster, what is your favorite artist feature and why? And compared to that, what do you think is the most impactful?

JOHN PRIOR: Can you hear me? I think I need a mic. Oh, there we go.

So, actually released just this week was the ability to export to PDF. That has been something that I've heard a lot from customers about something that they want. So I'm really happy that we were able to deliver that.

Most impactful and kind of to echo what Kevin was saying, just the fact, like, it's connected with Docs. You can start grabbing those documents from your Docs folder, move them to Takeoff. Once you're done with your Takeoff, they're already there for build. You moved them in there. So the fact that it has that seamless integration with Autodesk Docs makes it a really easy exchange of data for all project teams.

NATHANIEL COOMBS: Amr?

AMR RAAFAT: The ability to export to Excel because the first part that we've been asked from our estimating team is that can you export it to Excel so it can be embedded into the existing workflows. So we love that part, and it can go back. So we like the-- and this is also the most impactful because it can adapt to its existing workflows as well as bring it up bit by bit to transform the way we work.

NATHANIEL COOMBS: 100%. Kevin?

KEVIN LUCHT: We're going to stay simple since we're only using PDFs, and we're not in models yet. And as I said, we had some old, crusty escalators that were still doing things by hand. But I think the [? sheet's ?] being indexed.

I know it's simple, but when you have as much volume and data as we had on high speed rail and [INAUDIBLE] if you think the-- you're going from one [INAUDIBLE]

NATHANIEL COOMBS: Is that the mic that's oh, we're going to get [INAUDIBLE] the voice mic. Sorry.

AMR RAAFAT: [INAUDIBLE]

NATHANIEL COOMBS: No, we're good. It's just-- we don't want [INAUDIBLE] anymore.

PRESENTER: [INAUDIBLE]

NATHANIEL COOMBS: Wonderful. Good thing we're not in media and entertainment. [INAUDIBLE] at the top. All right.

KEVIN LUCHT: [INAUDIBLE] there we go.

NATHANIEL COOMBS: This thing on? Let's go. All right.

KEVIN LUCHT: [INAUDIBLE] thank you. Where was I? Oh, talking about--

NATHANIEL COOMBS: Old, crusty estimators.

KEVIN LUCHT: Old, crusty estimators. OK. We just wanted them to start using that [INAUDIBLE] get through in the data, and on these big highway jobs or rail job-- I don't know if you've ever worked on any.

They just go on and on with sheets [INAUDIBLE] scrolling through them [INAUDIBLE], the sheets are indexed, and I can just go search for it, and it goes to it. That just saved the huge amount of time and effort [INAUDIBLE] for what we were doing. And then the impact moment was just putting the data in one place-- I mean, single source of truth-- and just helped us so that we weren't scattering around [INAUDIBLE] putting [? it ?] around everywhere.

NATHANIEL COOMBS: Prashant? I think we're going to have to-- should everybody use that mic or just--

PRASHANT SHARMA: [INAUDIBLE] yeah, let's see.

NATHANIEL COOMBS: Cool.

PRASHANT SHARMA: Am I good? Yep, thank you. So we do have a lot of estimators at DPR, and they all are pretty well-trained about using Takeoff tools in 2D. And our challenge has always been about using more of the 3D content that we receive.

And so my favorite feature is of just the simplicity of the interface, the fact that we don't-- we have just a few icons. There's not a lot to learn. It's 2D and 3D is the same interface, and that just helps a lot more folks get into the 3D world and get used to it pretty easily. That's pretty impactful for us.

JOURDAN TRICE: I-- he took mine. I think it's hard to choose. There's too many.

My favorite, I think, is the work packaging and the scope packaging. I think it really helps to separate out the take off and then to be able to come in and assign it and to review it and to see what somebody has completed over time without sharing files. I think that was really burdensome for us. And so, like, not having to share files, having a constant, clean single source of truth record of drawings is probably the two.

NATHANIEL COOMBS: I feel like it's similar. One of the biggest challenges [INAUDIBLE] had was it was a departure from the common estimating process of going through, assigning something, and onto the next thing. It dumps everything in front of you, and then you're left to kind of figure it out versus Takeoff giving you all the benefits of 3D quantification but still aligned with the common workflow that the estimators are going through.

JOHN PRIOR: And I'll follow up there too how Revit-savvy are the estimates that are getting to it? Have they used Revit before, or is this the first time they worked with a 3D model?

PRASHANT SHARMA: I would say a few of us have used Revit. We know Revit quite well. But I wouldn't say-- as a rule, estimators are not used to being in Revit, and the fact that you don't have to go into Revit to customize a lot more and upload content onto your Takeoff platform, I think that's something we were all hoping for as estimators. So that's been welcomed [INAUDIBLE].

NATHANIEL COOMBS: All right. So should I get rid of this slide? All right, I'm going to throw this one over to you, Kevin, because I know you had some big players on the California high speed rail project. But how do you think Autodesk Takeoff benefits not only your teams but your clients and partners as well?

KEVIN LUCHT: Oh, you can see what we were able to accomplish with it in a short period of time on how we actually apply it, got some backup training. We were able to take a process that these guys were doing, and they were floundering with it. And we got them organized. And then we got them a productivity enhancement with Takeoff. And we just gave value back to ourselves, Arcadis. But we also gave it back to the team and back to the client that we were now getting close to delivering on that three week time frame that we were under contract to do. So doing a $60 million change order is-- I don't know if that one got done in three weeks, but we sped up that process.

NATHANIEL COOMBS: Clients definitely like it when you're on time.

KEVIN LUCHT: I know.

NATHANIEL COOMBS: Any other thoughts on this?

AMR RAAFAT: It certainly helped with the communication between our estimating team and clients to explain all the categories and the estimates coming from and the different takeoffs as well as a communication tool during the clients so we can communicate the fact it's a part of Docs, that we can help communicate in real time with clients. So we can use it, as I mentioned-- clients are not as good as we are in visualizing what's in 2D and 3D or looking at the spreadsheet. They can visualize and see all the different items and categories.

NATHANIEL COOMBS: Absolutely. So this one, I'd love to know the count on how many times everybody in this room has heard the word collaborate and collaboration this week. I think we're easily over 1,000 on day two. But how has Autodesk Takeoff influenced your guys' ability to collaborate? I'll leave that one open to the crew here.

PRASHANT SHARMA: Happy to take that, yeah. So internally, I already mentioned we have a lot of offices spread out even overseas. And the fact that I could just sit on a Teams call or a Zoom call and sit another estimate on the other side of the globe, and we could be doing a Takeoff live-- I could set up conditions as an estimator right next to the project, and another estimate on the other side could actually do the Takeoffs, sitting [INAUDIBLE] and doing the Takeoffs.

And I could check in any time at any point to see what the progress is or if there's a slight alignment in our Takeoff approach. That's true collaboration, I think, and that's been pretty key for us. Jordan, what do you think?

JOURDAN TRICE: Yeah, I agree completely, and then to be able to say that if we're using Bridge and build potentially to feed the design documents into the platform, you know, that's the perfect external layer of collaboration there too.

NATHANIEL COOMBS: Have you seen anything else with other clients that would be cool? Not to put you on the spot, but.

PRASHANT SHARMA: I'd say on the client side, we are fairly transparent with our estimate. So we bring in the clients and the architects into our takeoffs. And we would like to see that more, and, hey, go. Take a look at our takeoffs and see what we have. And we even bring it up during our meetings. Gets more confidence going in--

NATHANIEL COOMBS: For sure.

PRASHANT SHARMA: [INAUDIBLE] collaborative.

JOHN PRIOR: Yeah, and I would say just the fact that your own team members can be working in the same documents in the same place. When you're working on some type of desktop software, people are emailing each other, exporting whatever they have in their Takeoffs, chief animator can go in there see what was the most recent quantity that was taken off. And they just have full project transparency that way.

NATHANIEL COOMBS: Absolutely. So, to our VDC guy, how do your BIM/VDC teams engage with your estimating teams in quantification in general?

AMR RAAFAT: For so many years, the data is already embedded into the Revit. But the challenge was to have to communicate that to estimators who not necessarily need to be good at extracting data from Revit. So with Autodesk Takeoff, it had been enhancing that export of all this information, which models, that could really actually save up to 70% of the time quantifying on on-screen Takeoff versus 2D Takeoff.

So if we can take that part and let investigators really focus on what really matters, which is the numbers, their great expertise, that could take that load off. So I see that has added a great engagement between VDC and collaboration and the estimating team supporting it. Our VDC team goes, and they make sure all the categories are named correctly. So when estimating team can see all the categories, it's very accurate.

Also, the 2D aspect of it has been very helpful in terms of that. So we upload-- we work on both the 3D and the 2D. And I agree with you. When it's all updated in real time, so that's a great communication tool as well.

NATHANIEL COOMBS: Similar, different at DPR?

JOHN PRIOR: Yeah, I think our VDC teams support our [? pre-con ?] teams throughout the design phase typically. And so we'll see that in ACC project setup. We'll see that in model quality checks.

So we run a model quality check on every project, and we do a complete download for the project team so they know what they trust and what they can't trust. We do model conditioning to Uniformat, CSI Uniformat, to help with the consumption of the models in Assemble. So we get a lot of support from VDC, and this is just enhancing the conversation, I think, to have it in the same platform.

NATHANIEL COOMBS: Heck yeah. How are we doing on time, Johnny? Oh, cool.

OK, all right. This one, once again, open to the whole gang. How do you encourage estimators to integrate new technologies in your workforce? Actually, I'm going to starred with Kevin because he's talked so much about the crusty old ones.

KEVIN LUCHT: Well, it wasn't that they were opposed to it. They knew they needed the change, but they just didn't know what to do. And nobody in there actually came in and actually said, we have this tool, and we can do it. So we always think-- I think everyone's [INAUDIBLE] you know, crawl before you walk and walk before you run.

So we didn't want to throw too much at them all at once, and we wanted to make them successful. So it allowed us to be able to get them in there, do things almost similar to how they're doing them today by just taking the tuning drawings and getting their Takeoffs from them so that they can get their quality. They go do their estimate.

And it [INAUDIBLE] in one place that, again, somebody can come in and check or [INAUDIBLE] check. And we had an example that I showed yesterday in one of the drawings. The scale was wrong, and we were able to go back and just change the scale, and the quantity changed.

So it was just very, very easy. They took to their new processes and new ways of doing the workflows, and again, it was small and simple and just doing baby steps to get them there. Hopefully, we're going to eventually get the models, but we'll get--