Autodesk Construction Cloud: Owner Perspectives

JEFF BAUER: All right, thank you, everybody, for joining me today. We're going to go ahead and get started. First, I'd like to introduce myself, Jeff Bauer, a manager at Bridgestone Americas. I am an owner's rep, and I have about 20 years' experience in the industry, maybe a few years more than that.

I started out in design. I worked in a construction company for about six, seven years after that, and now I'm an owner representative representing Bridgestone Americas. We have facilities in North and South America, and our headquarters is in Nashville, Tennessee.

And my interests-- to sum it up, I am a digital guy, and I strive to enhance large, small project performance, processes, and gain productivity. I really get into the tech, and that's what we're going to talk about today. Generally, it's going to be about ACC, but it's also owner perspectives and how we use ACC as a manufacturing company.

So our presentation topics for today-- we're going to get into ACC as a central data hub. And let's face it-- most of our people are working from home and working from the office on certain days, and we really need that data to follow us around. So ACC has become very critical in how we operate. Since the pandemic, we're at home majority of the time, those of us in the office, and it just gets everybody on the same page. This is very important for most everybody that's listening and watching this presentation.

Additionally, the complexity working digitally and getting to our data is critical. On a day-to-day basis, we may be on our mobile phone. We may be on a computer.

And what this really does is it enhances collaboration because we are all on the same page. We will discuss some of those a little more in depth. A big one for me is project visibility, and we'll talk about that several times in different ways and how Bridgestone is utilizing the visibility of our projects and using that to get better project outcomes.

Additionally, project controls-- that's something we all live with. The RFIs, submittals, those kinds of things are a part of our day-to-day activities, and we'll discuss briefly how Bridgestone has increased the efficiency of those type of things. And it really has become kind of a standard.

We also look at quality and control and reduction of risk. As manufacturers, we do like a good report, and we do like to analyze reports. So ACC is a good tool for that. We will look at some project example reporting and those kinds of things.

I mentioned mobility already, but having the capability of picking up my phone and answering a quick notification whenever I'm available to do so is very advantageous. And we'll talk about how Bridgestone as owner is collaborating with some of our design partners.

Central data-- this is where the rubber meets the road, so to speak. We feel like as an owner with the amount of projects that we do annually that we were losing data. When I first started with Bridgestone a little over six years ago and started asking questions about how we were utilizing BIM and how we were handling construction documentation, it really was determined by the A&E or the general contractor. They would provide some type of site where they would transfer data to us.

Unfortunately, we were losing a lot of that data because the engineer at Bridgestone may move on to another company. They may change jobs entirely, and that login went with them. So we were seeking data constantly after a project was over.

So one of my first steps as a [? VDC ?] manager at Bridgestone was, how do we get control of the data? How do we better utilize the data that-- [AUDIO OUT]. And it's very important to us because we are such an active project participant, and we'll get into some of that a little bit in the next slides.

Now, some of the questions I get as an owner when we first hire an architectural firm or a design firm is, why can I not use my own site? I like it. I know how to use it.

And the reason was, one, we were losing data. Two, it didn't include the contractors that were going to be down the road. It did not include some of our equipment vendors that are part of our projects as well for equipment and mechanical design and those kinds of things. So we-- [AUDIO OUT] just the building.

So that's why the central data is so critical for us to understand, utilize, and to be quite honest, we are more interested in the outcomes of the project rather than trying to glean data from others and use it against them. We want to be a project partner with our A&Es.

So that's something we get questions about very frequently, although my best advice and from the experience I've had over the last four years with BIM 360 and ACC now is that we start off kind of-- everybody's kind of in their own folders with view access to other folders, and we just kind of grow the trust as the project develops. I think a lot of the hesitation from A&Es is work in progress. They don't want the client to see this messy drawing or this messy model or something like that.

And really, I try to express to them we don't care about that. What we care about is the project outcome, and we just build trust as we go. And generally, after the second project with a design firm that's awarded, we don't have that same discussion. We start off with a more open collaborative site that everybody has access to.

So that really means that our internal reporting-- I do work in corporate. We take that data, and we report up to our senior management. How is the project going? Are things happening on time? Are there any problems in construction that's going to prohibit this facility from opening on time-- those kinds of questions.

So in the next slide, we'll show a couple of examples of reporting that we do, and this reporting is also shared with the design teams. If it's necessary or if it's something that's going to help the project team, we share this information with them as well.

So reporting on ACC-- it's very good. However, reporting will always have more needs that-- say a senior manager may want to see something different than ACC has out of the box. So the steps we've taken in the last couple of months is looking at Power BI and some other ways to tie into ACC, and it gives us a much closer reporting structure that my management likes. ACC is compatible with other tools as well, but Power BI seems to be the one that's working for us the best at this point in time.

Reporting is kind of a touchy subject sometimes. People don't like negative reports. What we do at Bridgestone is we try to convey that negative reports is just an opportunity to improve and a way to make the project outcomes enhanced and better collaborated outcomes for everybody. So it's really not about getting after somebody or finding ways to tell a design firm that they're doing something wrong, but it's really more to have the information faster and be able to make countermeasures.

So next, we'll talk about some enhanced collaboration techniques that we've experienced and we're implementing with our project teams. So why is it important to strive for enhanced collaboration? Well, for us, it's about communication.

We have a lot of stakeholders in our projects. We have corporate engineers. We have plant engineers or operations engineers. We have several different types of engineers, industrial, mechanical, and specialty contractors and all kinds of things that we have to communicate our project needs to. So the more we're all aligned and the more we have good communication, that is really the key for us.

So another tactic that we use-- and we'll talk about this in a couple of different ways, but issue tracking-- "issue" always sounds kind of negative on the front end, but it's really an issue to overcome. It's really something to overcome and improve on and really get the trust between the team. So issue tracking is collaboration.

The way we handle it currently is we organize the issues by responsible party within our organization, and we communicate with the discipline that's in charge of that particular portion of the project or the project management from the A&Es. We consider this a positive interaction if there's a thousand issues. It sounds bad, but it's a thousand opportunities to not have the problem when it costs more to address the problem.

So the biggest worry that I have when creating issues is that they're not going to be responded to, because what I've seen over the last four years is issues that are created by Bridgestone and answered by our building design teams or our contractors. We end up becoming better clients, and we become more informed on what those various parties are trying to accomplish. And so we really become better clients, and we become better participants in the project.

[AUDIO OUT]

--is collaboration as long as they're answered and everybody understands how they work and how an issue is really just an opportunity to improve. This additionally builds trust and transparency. Issues are open. They're logged. The communication happens within the issue, and then there's an official answer. It's also pinned to the correct version drawing, those kinds of things. They seem nuanced, but they really just build trust and transparency.

I've got a couple of examples of issue tracking, clash detection tracking, and this one on the right hand side is a little bar chart of submitted drawings and the timelines and how many drawings changed from one submittal to the next. This, again, is a manufacturer's dream because we get lots of charts and graphs.

The issue on the right is a clash, but I did want to mention before I got too much further into this discussion. A pain point with issues-- I caused it myself about three years ago when we were working on a rather large project. A lot of the Bridgestone engineers came to me and said, the design team is just not listening to me. They're not hearing what guidance I'm giving them to help inform the design.

So logically, my brain went, well, we need to start logging issues, and I opened that up to about 30 to 40 people at Bridgestone to create issues. And it turned into a thousand issues, and probably 500 of them were just wish lists. And they were non-compliant project requests. I would like this type of gauge instead of this Bridgestone standard gauge, those kinds of things. So it really created a mess. Did it to myself.

But my recommendation is for those that are starting with issue logging and tracking is to keep the group of people small. Keep it project leadership in the beginning. As they get familiar with the process and get comfortable with it, they usually come to me and say, can I add these other people because I need their insights? And it really becomes focused on the people that can answer issues with the right answer, and it keeps it from getting out of control.

I do not want to cause additional work with issues. What I'm trying to get to is a better result. So just remember, keep it small. Build it from there, and you'll not have as many unanswered or useless issues like I have on previous projects. So take that as a lessons learned.

Improving project visibility-- so again, real-time access to project data. That-- [AUDIO OUT] about that anymore. Communication and collaboration-- the simplified tools in ACC really are easy to train. I find that Bridgestone engineers who are working in the plant have not had an expansion in several years or maybe not at all, so they're coming into ACC brand new-- may not have ever heard of it. So I have to be able to train them quickly.

And I believe ACC is intuitive enough that my engineers pick it up pretty quickly, and they start communicating with it within a week or two after they get a chance to navigate it and see the results from others those kinds of things. And I check back in with them pretty frequently as a team. We will always have just a couple of minutes to talk about ACCs, anybody have any trouble, those kinds of things. I think that's pretty true for most software implementations, but in ACC's case, there's not really installs or anything like that. They just have to log in and start using.

But I do think that project visibility at a base level is really about the model, and I know that's going to not shock anybody because I am a VDC manager. But I do see the results every day. My project engineers, after I show them how to navigate the ACC Model Viewer, they love it. They would rather do that in most cases than pour through construction drawings.

And that's very efficient way to handle. It's an efficient way for Bridgestone as a large multinational company with a lot of stakeholders to make decisions quicker because they can see them. They can see them in Teams or Zoom meetings. They can see them when they're on their desktop, and they're looking at the overall federated model for the project.

Additionally, we have had really good success taking myself, putting me in a conference room with folks that are in operations, people that run our factories day to day, and I just walk them through the model. And they're able to identify things that some of our smartest engineers have not thought of because they live in that environment, and they understand it. And they know what it takes to operate efficiently.

So for every major design submittal that we have, we take the time for me to sit and walk through those various areas of our factory with the people that are going to be living in that factory and working in that factory for the next however many years they stay with Bridgestone. So that's very powerful. It seems like a simple thing, but for our uses, that is where we really make strides and find the most efficient use of our spaces.

Project controls-- so what we're talking about is RFIs and submittals, and to some extent with ACC, there's quality control checklists, safety checklists, those kinds of things. We have used those on a lot of our projects. We don't consider them mandatory.

We do offer that to our general contractors to use from the field. Some of them take us up on those quality checklists. Some of them develop their own, and we implement them into the project. They are very powerful, and we hope in the future to have more and more of those types of quality control checklists in place.

We're even looking at ways to help our own commissioning with tire-making equipment, those kinds of things. So we're trying to integrate how we execute a project from one end to the other utilizing cloud-based tools, and we are getting very close to that. Probably in the next year or two, we'll have a more comprehensive quality control checklist.

One of the big lessons learned, again, is to keep the RFIs and submittals to a smaller group in the beginning, and as the confidence grows with the team and they understand Bridgestone's not watching every move-- in fact, we are contributors to RFIs if they apply to something that's Bridgestone standard or, in some cases, a preference for our factory. But keep it small.

And another key activity that I do with ACC is I create an automatic report of all RFI statuses and all submittal statuses, and I just have that emailed weekly usually a day before the OAC meeting or your weekly design review meeting. I don't know why, but that tends to make a lot of issues go away before the meeting. It's an awesome thing.

But it does keep everybody in the loop even if they're not an active participant in responding to RFIs or reviewing submittals. They get a copy of the report, and they can see what's going on. And sometimes, you can glean information from those folks as well about a particular RFI or submittal.

So that's just little lessons learned. I implement that on every project. Day before the OAC meeting, all the reports get sent out.

So how does ACC help quality control and reduce the risk for Bridgestone? Well, one is we have good metrics and good reporting. Another simple but very powerful aspect of ACC is the automatic versioning control and the tracking of the design through the documents and sheets. You can use the compare tools, and you can see when they were submitted and what revision was previous and what changed from one drawing to the next. That is critical for analyzing if there's a cost involved, if there's potential change orders, those kinds of things.

And really, the lessons learned here is, again, start small. Keep it a small crowd. Get the process understood.

Get all the players able to operate with an ACC. They can see what's logged and then grow it from there to the other project team members that need to be involved. This is used quite often in project rollouts and onboarding people. Just start small and then grow from there.

One thing in my first bullet item there is do not use outdated information, and that still happens today. We had one not too long ago where a contractor was building from an outdated drawing even though we had ACC in operation.

So I generally tell people when they first get onboarded, if they're contributing data to ACC, please do not rename your file. Keep it the same name. Let the automatic versioning happen for you and save yourself that time. And it also allows transparency, and you know what's changed in the documents or models.

So next, we're going to talk about mobility, and I really like the ACC mobile apps for all intents and purposes. It's just as fast to log into my phone or a tablet here. There is not a lot of Bridgestone activity with mobile devices other than the functionality of picking up my phone and answering a notification or reviewing something that just came through, but having that data on hand in a mobile app is pretty powerful.

And we're seeking to get more data from the field from construction into the office, so to speak, into ACC. We've got some projects coming up now where we're going to be implementing more checklists and those kinds of things, so we're pretty excited about that. In my former life, that was my sole job, was to get data from the field into the office, so I'm really excited about that possibility of data from the field coming into ACC.

Every project has punch lists and those kinds of things. We're not making it mandatory for general contractors at this time. But I think once they get involved with Bridgestone and they understand why we're trying to capture that data and how we can help them better manage that data, I think we'll be collecting a lot more field data.

So owner collaboration-- [INAUDIBLE] about the design reviews and the feedbacks that is very much a powerful part of why we use ACC, is getting that stakeholder input. The virtual walkthroughs are very powerful, and we generally walk away with issues we hadn't even thought of.

I'm very excited about that. We just implemented that a few months ago. We're also starting to roll into more maintenance reviews for moving equipment and installing equipment, maintaining large pieces of equipment, how do we move it floor to floor, out the door, those kinds of things.

We historically haven't done a great job at facility handover documentation like warranties and operation manuals and those kinds of things. With the latest releases of ACC, we're seeking to try to automate some of that into our internal systems like Autodesk Vault and those kinds of things. We haven't quite got there yet, but we are getting very close to having a way to sync from an expansion project into facility data archives. So I'm pretty excited about that as well.

And as I've said, [INAUDIBLE] we can see in the little diagram here, we've got data coming in from our general contractors, from our architects and engineers, consultants, as well as the data that we have internally, so machines, equipment, those kinds of features of a manufacturing facility that are owner provided. We are actively inputting those into ongoing designs, so we're continually trying to improve that process. We are seeking many ways to move data around.

We also try to be as accommodating as possible, and we will actually go and scan some of our facilities for as-built information. Some of our facilities are pretty old, and we don't have good drawings of them. We may have some scans of drawings that were done 20 years ago, but that isn't much help in this digital age.

So we'll go out with a scanning crew, scan the facility wherever there's an expansion happening, and we'll take that data back into the office. And we will model some of that as-built condition so we can fit in the new expansion with less problems and less cost. So that is something that we do. Every expansion project, we will make sure and scan in the affected areas and trade that information or exchange that information to our design team. So that's one way that we collaborate as an owner in addition to just making reports and those kinds of things.

So we have been using BIM 360 or ACC for the last four and a half years or so. We initially started with a couple of hundred licenses. We expanded that at the start of this year, and we offer that to our A&Es.

If they don't have a license already, we provide that. If our general contractor does not have a license already, we provide it for them [INAUDIBLE] grown about 550, 560 users in the last nine months. So at the start of 2023, we had about 200 users, so we're growing pretty quickly in that regard.

One of the pain points that we've had our is literally licensing folks who are outside of our company. That's kind of a manual task, and when we're starting up a large project, it's a time-suck, to be honest with you-- adding one user, and then the next day, you get a request for two more. And so we're working with our reseller to try to find some ways to manage that workflow of adding a lot of users intermittently.

Additionally, when you have 750 users-- 250 of them are internal-- there's a lot of training needs. There's a lot of troubleshooting just for new people. So it's kind of a growing pain. I guess having that many people in the last few months makes onboarding a little bit more difficult.

One of the ways that I cope with that is to request that I have just about five minutes in the weekly [INAUDIBLE] kind of cover a new topic each week. How do you respond to an issue? What is a clash issue look like in comparison? How do you use the filters in ACC-- just small things.

And I give them a brief update on any changes or anything like that that's going to impact their day-to-day operations. How is ACC affecting this project is what I communicate to them, and I try to do that on the front end and ahead of time. And that seems to be the best option.

Just get a few minutes to talk about your common data environment and your project site and what's happening with it and what's coming up. So that's a really good thing that I've implemented in the last couple of years and I've had really good success with. So that's definitely something that would be a lessons learned, I guess. Just make sure you have a few minutes every week to talk about something, to train on something-- very, very powerful stuff.

So next, we're going to talk about some of the future things that we're looking at over the next year or two. We're looking at some connectors from ACC to some of our other internal systems like Vault, Fusion 360, those kinds of things.

So we're really working on our internal digital processes to be more flexible and engage more people and actually look into similar systems like SAP and those kinds of things. That's kind of in our language right now. How do we connect things? But we're really getting to some implementation in the next few months. Pretty excited about that.

I realized as we grew from 200 users to 750 that I needed to have some more standards in place. I needed to have some better guidance for our design firms and general contractors and specialty contractors, just simple things like naming and those kinds of things.

I need to develop some of those standards, and without them, some of the data gets kind of messy. And that's my own fault, and that's something that I'm working on pretty diligently. Over the next few months, we should have some pretty easy-to-follow standards, and we will start getting better data, little bit better reporting, make everybody in manufacturing very happy.

And one of the areas that I'm looking at as well is the cost management module. It's definitely made for a general contractor or someone that's really pricing projects. We're going to see how we can adapt it to evaluate bidders, manage potential change orders, just do some basic cost management and financial project controls that will make reporting a little easier than it is currently and, as well, keep that project data with the rest of the project. So that's kind of where my focus is for the next few months, those top three bullet items.

And then obviously, digital factory transformation-- that's on Bridgestone's mind consistently. We have a lot of inputs to that. We have a lot of facilities, and we're seeking creative ways to understand that and figure out how we better get a digital factory and how we better keep track of our facilities.

And again, that facility handover and operations-- how do we take the data that we've gotten from all of our A&E and general contractors-- how do we bring that into our system and help better our factories, make them more digital, more flexible, more flexible in regards to what data are we getting out of our facilities and our machines, those kinds of things? So that's kind of our future state for ACC.

And then for now, this is all I've got. I hope to see you at AU. If not, please connect with me, and we can discuss more. If you've got any questions, please feel free to reach out to me anytime. Thank you very much. Thank you.