From BIM to Fabrication with Forge

AMY MARKS: Thank you so much for joining us today for From BIM to Fabrication with Forge. My name is Amy Marks. I'm the Vice President of Industrialized Construction Strategy and Evangelism, also known as the Queen of Prefab.

I'm joined today by some amazing guests that are with me. We have Britton Langdon, CEO of MSUITE, as well as Brian Nickel, the co-owner of Allied BIM. And of course, I'm joined by Az Jasat, our industry leader in industrialized construction who's going to be our moderator for the questions and answers today. And challenges we always take as well.

So I think on with that, let's look at some level-setting slides so we can talk a little bit about fabrication with Forge. Let me tell you a little story about how I came to be at Autodesk. Andrew Anagnost asked me, why would you want to come to Autodesk? Like, tell me about what's so exciting for you about coming here.

And I said, listen. The future is product-led, and informed design is everything for us. And you have all the chess pieces in the world to make this happen in a platform. You also have the nicest chess board. That chess board is called Forge. It's actually Autodesk's design and make platform.

Except for one thing. I told Andrew that we really have to rearrange the chess pieces. And in order to rearrange the chess pieces, you have to look at things like manufacturing-informed design. And that has to actually lead instead of information in just design where we don't understand necessarily all the things that we're making. Next slide, please, Az.

So you can see I've rearranged the chess pieces here. And we have our operate information and then defining products, looking at our products through the lens of manufacturing, understanding how built on the cloud, built in the cloud, things like Forge, working with our manufacturing tools like Inventor, as well as-- sorry, built in the cloud Fusion as well as working with Inventor, some of our manufacturing tools, and how we could utilize those manufacturing tools to inform design and let that data move across Forge to the Autodesk Construction Cloud, which is already built on the Forge platform in the cloud. All of this is super important as industrialized construction changes the way we do business so that we can truly look across that Autodesk platform built on Forge and actually think about expanding our workflows and our connections.

Because being the platform for design make, we want to really simplify your data experiences for tomorrow, right? That's super important for us. And it's all converging here on one platform at Autodesk, which is the Forge platform.

And so we look at this different kind of workflow than it was before where designers would design something, we would pass it over to the general contractors, then it would get to be prefabricated. We're flipping that on its head. We're turning things upside down, flipping the script to have making sure that our platform enables manufacturing-informed design through defining products and what our owners truly want and so that our designers can free themselves up to do more, utilizing art tools like generative design, digital twins, to enable things like that and industrialize construction. These expanded workflows and connection are only made possible because of Forge and the way in which we can share that data across this platform for the future. Next slide.

So what's so fantastic? One more click there, Az, for me. Az is running our slides today.

It's not just that our software runs on Forge and that things like the Construction Cloud and Fusion and other tools of ours at Autodesk are built on Forge in the cloud. But we have so many amazing partners that work with Autodesk that have connected to our ecosystem. And many of them are available in our thriving app marketplace, where a robust-- of customers that are programmed to work within the Forge platform are available to you. So I like to think of this as digital glue that actually makes the Forge platform even more powerful. So that's really important to us as well.

And all of this is different than the way we've been working before. So if you look at something like Dan Miller's formula for change, you first, in order to change, unfortunately, you have to be a little unhappy about things, how they work today. After that, once you decide that you really want something different, you have to have a vision for what's possible. And I believe Autodesk and Autodesk University is that place to hear about that vision and to talk to people like Britton Langdon and Brian Nickel to hear how they embody that vision, what their vision was, and how they could change and transform their own companies as well as the companies they've worked with.

I think also we noticed that, aside from seeing what's possible out there, you need to understand some first concrete steps of action. And I'll talk a little bit about that. But my advice for those of you for Autodesk University are if you can walk away with just one or two things, very concrete steps of action for you to take in order to change the way you do business, that's really important.

It can be very overwhelming. I know a lot of people talk to me and say even talking to me is like drinking from a fire hose instead of a water fountain. Just pick two simple things you can take as your first concrete steps of action. Because all of that has to be greater than resistance, both internal resistance at your own organizations and external resistance that you may run into as you go through this transformation. Next slide.

So because of that, we decided to come up with a transformation framework. And when I was thinking about this, a lot of companies do talk about outcomes that drive adoption. I've collected a few here.

These are a little bit of what I hear from customers around the world. They like to have holistic sustainability. They want safer job sites as well as creating better products with their manufacturers. Everybody wants risk reduction and, of course, certainty of what their operations are going to be. But they also want business growth. How does this drive business growth?

And so you need a strategy in order to transform. And not just these things that you want, but you first need that strategy and you have to understand some basic things in the transformation framework if you'd like to realize those outcomes and implement that strategy, the first of which is foundational. Does your organization have the culture, the skills, and the tools and the technology and processes that are really at the core of being able to transform? I will tell you that Forge is one of those basic technology things that you need if you want to get across a platform and create seamless data flow, especially if you want to connect the Autodesk products to each other and the data to gain some insights for yourselves.

The second thing in many of our talks, if you look at industrialized construction or prefabrication as some of the topics at AU when you search on the content available, a lot of things are talking about industrialized construction. We say productization. So we're evolving prefabrication to think about a product in the physical, right? Both the physical prefabricated product size piece part but also the workflow that's attached to it that we're going to talk a little bit more about that when we think about Forge with my two guests.

Because our mindset has to change for-- to drive data re-usability, right? Because once we can attach that data to productization, both physical and digital, we can digitize these things, repeat them, and then automate them and connect them together. That's one of the beautiful things about Forge is it allows us to connect this data in a way that it's never been connected before. That's really what platform thinking is.

And it's enabled by the cloud, the way in which that all the information can be shared across to multiple stakeholders around the globe and give them access to the information that they want and need in real time so that we can use some of the optimized tools and methodologies like generative design. Once you productize things, you can actually use generative design to pick the right combination of products and attach things like IoT sensors to those products so that you can have things like digital twins, as well as manufacture those and utilize industrialized construction to optimize the way in which we build our buildings. Because we're all looking for circularity, not just from an environmental perspective, but digital waste exponentially leads to physical waste. And we want to make sure that we can reuse these things in our digital world so that we can learn from them and get better analytics and insight from them so that we can be predictive in what we're trying to accomplish. So we want that digital and physical reuse to reach this new possible. Forge really enables that. Next slide, please.

Because at its very core, if you're thinking about manufacturing-informed design, we want to look at something like a multi-trade assembly and not just understand it in its static form, meaning just the product by itself that is one-for-one representation. But we want to have dynamic multi-trade assembly representations, so parametric, so that we can figure out, what's manufacturing going to allow you to change and make bigger, larger, smaller, what you can swap out so that architects and engineers can then customize those manufacturing pieces and parts, those multi-trade assemblies in this example, and integrate them into their designs with an exception that they're constrained to ensure manufacturability. We want to make sure. And in our manufacturing tools, that's possible.

Some of our design tools don't allow for that, and allow you to actually stretch something larger than it can be made or change things out within that assembly. We want to ensure down to the manufacturability ability to inform that design of what that manufacturer is allowing you to customize so that we can have better project outputs and automate things like the data that we want to achieve to have, again, better predictive insights. So delivering that manufacturing-informed design and working across the Forge platform and the Autodesk platform is really what the future is looking like.

So at Autodesk, our industrialized construction mission really, to start within that data, is to have manufacturing-informed design. As I said, making sure we put the make into design, and so that building information modeling and models are not just information, but they become intelligent information, intelligence that we can really understand and customize and make sure that things can actually be produced in that way for better outcomes that you saw down below when you thought about the transformation framework that are design outcomes and construction manufacturing outcomes. Just better business outcomes overall for a more sustainable world.

And we're working on those initial capabilities alongside with the thought leadership that you see here with some of my friends from industry. As well as there's a Convergence Consulting Group that their basis is about manufacturing converging with construction and how do we evolve to apply manufacturing techniques and help our customers on their journey, get their data to move across not just the technology, but change their behavior and understand these workflows that will make them successful. Next slide.

So with that, I'm going to pass it off to my friend at MSUITE, Britton Langdon. And Britton, I would really love to know how Forge is helping you to enable new things at your business that you were not able to achieve before coming and working with Autodesk as a partner. So with that, I'll turn it over to you.

BRITTON LANGDON: Thank you very much, Amy. And first of all, thank you, Autodesk, for having me on. And thank you, Amy, for being here and guiding us through this.

Yeah, so MSUITE is a cloud-based management suite of software for BIM, Fab, and Field team. If you think about what we do from a high level, we're connecting the model to the manufacturing floor to the field. And with Forge, we're allowed to do that, or we're able to do that by giving access, sort of a window or transparency, into the BIM world for those people on the shop floor that are manufacturing the products.

And the biggest part of that is the feedback loop for us. We are data first. Everything about us is the quality of the data. So when you begin to look at how we help our customers transform their facilities from piece manufacturers to product manufacturers, we're looking at the ability to assess their process, create a model for what they do, execute on that model, analyze the success of that model, and then improve it back with that data that we're giving them.

So we do that with three products called BIMPro, FabPro, and FieldPro. BIMPro is our Revit-based add-in that connects to Autodesk Forge and gives that model view to the shop and to the field. The field and the shop are able to connect in there, prioritize what needs to be shipped out, look at what they are doing from a productization perspective.

It does-- we expand it further. Can we take bigger advantage of what we're doing, or is it good enough where we're at? And a lot of that is financially-driven. Does the labor make sense, right? Does-- I always hear is the juice worth the squeeze.

And a lot of times, I think people side on the-- well, they side on the error side, the caution side. And I think a lot of times we got to really push the limit. Az, if you could, go ahead to the next slide.

We do that by basically allowing them to collect all the data in real time without having to manually input anything. So we're taking model data straight from the Revit model, or really anything they're using on the Autodesk platform, into Forge. And we're allowing our users to see that information do their work.

We're not trying to tell them how to do it. We're trying to show them what happened when they did that so that they're able to make educated decisions based on what they do. And so we're using Forge to connect people, processes, and data into one spot. As Amy kind of said earlier, we feel like Forge is a really great glue for bringing all that information to the one spot and allowing people to collaborate on good decisions and opportunities for improvement.

So our customers access their 3D information as well as 2D sheets, so that large plan view drawing right next to that 3D model in one spot. They're allowed to create advanced work packages. So what makes sense for the shop to fabricate in a manufacturing standard may not make sense for the field right away. So it's helping collaborate those two entities to make that make sense.

And then we allow them to create fabrication assemblies in that same environment, so helping them understand as a group what should be that fabrication assembly, what is that module, what is that rack, what is that carrier, what is that wall panel. And then sending that work instructions straight to the shop floor, straight to the machines so that the fabricators on the shop floor or the manufacturers on the shop floor can connect it right within our same platform directly to the machines. So at the end of the day, it is a real-time access to that information, and Forge helps us do that.

Az, you can go on to the next slide. Amy, I'll kick it back to you. Or to Brian, whichever one you want.

AMY MARKS: Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. And we'll get to some more questions from the panel. By the way, if you have audience questions, please make sure to put them up there because we're going to be answering lots of audience questions as well about this. And this is your opportunity. So Brian Nickel, if you could take it from here, that would be fantastic.

BRIAN NICKEL: Yeah, thank you for having me, Amy. Thank you for everybody that's attending. My name is Brian Nickel. I'm the co-owner of Allied BIM. We are a software company based out of Boise, Idaho. Our mission with what we're producing with Forge and through data-connected workflows is connecting fabrication design directly to machine control all through Autodesk Forge.

So we follow up process. We follow an assemble, spool, and publish process that gives our modelers, whether they're in Revit, SolidWorks, Fusion 360, any sort of design software, the ability to basically publish directly to a Forge cloud database. In the Forge fabrication center, which is what we call it, we have an enterprise resource planning tool that gives the users the ability to basically fabricate and procure at a machine control level.

So what Forge has enabled us to do is to partner with companies like RazorGage, PypeServer, TigerStop, and SD Frame to begin to get digital connected workflows to machines that otherwise wouldn't be-- wouldn't exist. The traditional way of passing this information is through a thumb drive with a CSV list. And what we're able to do is now pass that information directly to the machine through the connective tissue that Forge gives us the ability to do that. Through this, we've built alliances, which has enabled us to connect to cloud connected machines with additional partners. So our mission is to kind of expand this portfolio out with other like-minded companies, forward thinking thought leaders that want to embrace a cloud connected list. Go ahead, Az.

Forge powered fabrication gives us the ability to eliminate material waste, tracking assembly procurement as they're passed through our system, and communicating directly with various cloud connected machines. Our success has been with a client of ours up in the Bozeman, Montana area that traditionally would send out ten PDF spool sheets a day to their shop. And they were perfectly content with that.

What we are stating is that traditional spool sheets are dying. PDF drawings that convey fabrication intent are tedious, time-consuming, and they waste a lot of time. And so what we're able to do with our tools is we're able to pass those into Forge to enable cloud spooling. What cloud-published spooling enables us to do is it eliminates the PDFs to the shop floor, where you can see we've now passed 80 assembly drawings instead of just ten.

In doing so, we sent one package. The package is made to order. These packaged assemblies allow for a quicker procurement from suppliers, enabling a supply chain to get materials categorized much more efficiently up front. And it increases the ability to increase the throughput by 800% for that shop. Go ahead, Az, to the next.

So this is our setup of a machine connected directly to our system. This has enabled us to now dynamically send the list via Wi-Fi directly to the machine controller. And we are able to pass that list without having to hand off a thumb drive. It creates disconnected data when you're passing off just a CSV list. So this has enabled us to track that list as it's passed to the machine level. You can go ahead to the next slide.

So this is a video of the shop foreman utilizing our system via basically a cloud based connection. What the user will do is they'll go into a three dimensional environment where the spools live inside of the fabrication center that's directly connected to Forge. This connective tissue eliminates those USB thumb drives with cloud lists that are directly connected to the machine controller. The machine control now can pass information back and forth, or data, from the machine through the fabrication center directly into our BIM designers pockets. They can basically understand exactly where those lists are through this enablement of Forge.

We're able to pass as well labels out for the procured material. We dynamically pack optimize that list to provide a fabrication plan for these planners. We have an immense decline in trade shortage right now. And Forge enables us to bring that decline in trade shortage up to speed with a list of instructions to procure something with a less-skilled tradesperson.

Feel free to join the alliance. You can visit us online. And we'd love to talk to you further. Thank you, Amy, and thank you, Britton.

AMY MARKS: Fantastic. Now I have some questions for the panel. And then we'll go back to that in a minute, Az. But there are some-- we'll end with that so people can see some of the other forged classes when we're ready.

But I will say this, that's amazing to see both what you're both doing right now, powering your digital transformation today with Forge. I know that Forge really lets you automate and connect and support complete industry workflows like you're showing there. And it's got a really great growing ecosystem of pre-built APIs and services that you have both been really able to customize and implement fast. So with that, really, tell me, and starting with Britton, how has Forge really enabled you to connect with other partners even outside the Autodesk portfolio to serve your customers?

BRITTON LANGDON: That's a great question. One of the things we love about Forge is the fact that the API is so easy to use. And it does connect a lot of different companies.

So the marketplace, for example, the App Store. The number of companies that are there is astounding. And what we're seeing is that our customers are actually connecting our system to other entities that are within their-- not even-- they don't even need us to do it. So reality capture and many other different apps that are in there, they're able to connect our systems together.

On top of that, we're working with our own partners to make sure that we're leveraging the power of Forge with those machines. Very similar to what Brian was saying in the sense that if you're taking model data and then exporting it out to a spreadsheet, and then taking it to the machines, and then trying to get the machine information back to your system, none of that is very valuable if it's all manual. If it can come straight from the system, through Forge, back to the system, then you have that full feedback loop like I was talking about earlier. So being able to connect with not only the people that we partner with every day and Autodesk, but letting our customers connect our system to whatever they use has been huge.

AMY MARKS: That's fantastic. I love hearing that. And Brian, tell me-- tell me about your experience in connecting to other partners.

BRIAN NICKEL: Our experience has been great with connecting with other partners. Just having the Forge capability alone has given us a lot of bargaining power with our partners to be able to create workflows that would not exist without it. We're able to basically directly connect the machine control software to the connective tissue that Britton's talking about with the CSV lists that we're exporting. Like traditionally, a thumb drive going out to the shop floor is completely disconnected data. It's what's causing the problem at the shop level.

So what Forge enables us to do is to start to track the shop level. We can start to understand what's happening logistically at that shop floor, what's happening with the statistics and speeds and times of the material that's being cut, how much waste are we throwing away. What we found to be astounding is with the CSV thumb drives, there's no tracking of that waste. That's what we find from a lot of our customers is they're wanting to capture how much waste are we actually going through, what's the speeds, what are the efficiencies of our shop. And with Forge, we can actually now create timers that pass that information back to a central database where the data is now in one platform. It's not passed on.

Another thing that Britton alluded to was with the Autodesk partner network we can actually connect. I attended five different accelerators at the beginning of the year. The community for Autodesk's Forge platform and learning it is a great community. And being able to be a part of that is huge. So definitely take a look at it because there's a lot of opportunity there.

AMY MARKS: I think there are a ton of opportunities at Autodesk across not just boards but especially in industrialized construction. If you didn't catch our last-- the talk that we just did, we talked a lot about convergence consulting and research and working with the design make operate sides of our business on the product side. There's so many opportunities here at Autodesk that you can get involved in.

And really, I love Forge because you can sort of create your own experience really because it's sort of, in some ways, it's up to you, right? The power is within your own hands to simplify your data experience of what you're looking for tomorrow. I mean, I think the why we're talking about this in terms of industrialized construction is that we talked about convergence, right?

And the fact that we're tearing down the barriers, everything's merging together, we're seeing people that are not just contractors anymore, not just subcontractors anymore, not just manufacturers willing to participate as just to supply. And owners are looking across as well. And they're converging their operate models to even make their own things. I know architects that have opened up their own fabrication facilities now. That would have been unheard of five, ten years ago.

I think the coolest thing about Forge if I could-- hey, I'm 50. I can still say cool, I think, right? But it's that it's really tearing down the barriers between roles and projects and industries that have typically really slowed down teams and hampered innovation in the past, right? This really empowers you to fully unlock the value of the data across design make manufacture and really operate but still let you have sort of granular, standardized, and very transparent data that you can use for that data re-usability that you have within your own control.

And I think that's super important because as we move to more of a manufacturing-informed design world, lots of these customers are at different levels of that transformation framework, right? And that moves the upfront in the process. And we really have to connect that ecosystem. How are you both seeing industrialized construction help as a business case tear down some of these walls and the need for Forge to be the platform and Autodesk as the platform to enable industrialized construction? How is that working in you? Let's start with you this time, Brian, and we'll go to Britton next.

BRIAN NICKEL: Yeah, so industrialized construction and breaking down the walls, what Forge has enabled us to do is to have a much higher level discussion with some of these partners that we're connecting with. We can illustrate a bigger vision to them. What we're finding out is that a lot of the machines that we're working with have a lot of antiquated technologies that have been around for 30 plus years that they've just continuously maintained. And what Forge is enabling us to do is to connect to some of these antiquated technologies to bring them up to speed and make them more robust.

With one of our current partnerships, we've actually been able to negotiate into designing the machine controller interface and optimizing the waste and some of the algorithms that they're using that were built 20 to 30 years ago. And so I mean, really, that to me is industrialized construction because we're being able to kind of come in as a software company, or a computer engineering company, and interact more face-to-face with a machine control company and to have a much higher level dialogue to enhance what we're doing. So to us, that's really accelerated our ability to have those communications and to advance our industry towards the focus of industrialized construction.

AMY MARKS: I love that. Britton, let's go to you on this conversation.

BRITTON LANGDON: I could talk about this for days. So the first thing is at MSUITE, we always kind of have a colloquialism that good decisions are frequently made off good data. And everyone wants to make good decisions. And the better the data, the more comfortable, the more confident, the more assertive people can be on those decisions, right?

A lot of our customers are still dealing with should we fabricate this, should this go to the shop. The field is upset. They don't want to be-- they're pipefitters. They don't want to be pipe installers, right? They want to understand what is there.

AMY MARKS: Wait, are there-- hold on a minute. Are there pipefitters left? I just want to know. Are there enough pipefitters?

BRITTON LANGDON: Oh yeah.

AMY MARKS: OK, just checking. Like, I just--

BRITTON LANGDON: There's many.

AMY MARKS: Some--

BRITTON LANGDON: If go out on any job site in the world, they'll tell you they're growing.

AMY MARKS: I'm looking for them. I'm looking for all those skilled labor. I want them.

BRITTON LANGDON: It's going away very quickly. But the problem is the value of that to them, other than skilled trades are going away, has to be portrayed. And making them have a safer environment on the job site, right, assuring them that they're going to go home to their families with all their fingers and toes every single day, understanding that building it off site doesn't mean getting rid of labor, it means maximizing labor, it means making the construction project more efficient, more profitable, right? And if it's more profitable to the owner, guess what? They're going to build another one and another one and another one.

AMY MARKS: Yes.

BRITTON LANGDON: And our vision for the long haul in doing this is using the data that we collect, using that to help people make those good decisions. And ultimately, our vision is to help make places where people live, work, and play more accessible. And if we can make things more predictable, if we can make them less complex-- a product is way easier to build and install than 17 different components that change every single time you want to make the same product.

AMY MARKS: Right.

BRITTON LANGDON: And for us, we're trying to teach and help our customers uncover their own journey. Because it is. It's a journey. It's not a project.

And they have to understand that there are many different ways to skin this cat. And what might be best for them may not necessarily be best for the next company trying to do the same thing because of the way their facility's laid out, because of their equipment they have, or their resources they can put in play, the trades that they do or custom with or can partner with. All of these things play into it.

And when people use our system, they're able to see in a 3D model exactly what they're supposed to build, whether it's at the cut station, the assembly station, weld stations, wall panels, doesn't matter. It's helping them understand what they are trying to build from a more holistic approach. And if that thing ultimately ends up being a wall, why are we building all the studs individually and shipping them out?

AMY MARKS: Right.

BRITTON LANGDON: Why aren't we putting conduit in the wall? Why aren't we putting piping in the wall? Why aren't we putting drywall on the wall? Put up green board so it stays within the weather. Wrap it, whatever it is that might make them more successful. But ultimately, our sort of philosophy, and you and I have talked a lot about this in the past so I'm probably stealing this from you, but--

AMY MARKS: Right.

BRITTON LANGDON: My experience was about three years ago, I was actually at AU. And I was in Vegas. And I was going to bring back a present for my son. He's a big football fan. And ultimately, what I wanted to bring back or what I found was a LEGO helmet at Walmart. It was one of those where it has these a million pieces, right?

And I'm talking with my developer when I get home on my iPad on a teams call. And he's sending me pictures of automated dimensions in Revit. He's trying to get dimensions to be perfect, so out-of-the-box so that no one has to move them around. This is in 2018.

And I'm sitting there building this LEGO. And by the way, it took, like, a month. So it wasn't just this one right.

Building this LEGO helmet, and I'm looking back and forth at this conversation and these screenshots. And the one thing I'm noticing is that my LEGO instructions have no dimensions, right? There's a one piece, there's a two piece, there's a four piece, there's a quad piece, there's an eight piece. They're standardized pieces. They're productized so that anybody from me to my at that time seven-year-old son could build this by themselves.

They don't have to cut the pieces at three-eighths of an inch and try and put them together at the corner. No. It's all done for them.

Now, construction is exponentially more R&D than that. It's not a LEGO helmet every single time. But at the same time, it's still a building of a certain shape and height. And there are ways to standardize that. And in our world, we're helping facilitate that.

If I can add one more thing, I had an experience this morning. I was at a contractor's Fab shop. And he's looking at productizing. And he's taking his first steps.

They buy 42 foot pieces of pipe every single time. And he said he knows that he can get 13 foot ten inches, three pieces, 13 foot ten inches out of that 42 feet. So they cut in 13 foot ten inches and they stick them on the wall.

And I said, that's your eight piece. That's your LEGO eight piece. Now where's the one piece and the three piece and the five and so on?

And he said, you know what? I think that we could build about 80% to 90% of what we do with that little Fibonacci one, two, three, five, eight, et cetera sequence. And then they can just pull them off the wall and put them together.

And so even with those little baby steps, we're helping them get to did that-- was that a good decision, right? Did that improve productivity or did it decrease? Did it remove material costs or did it increase material cost? And so at the end of day, we're leveraging the model within Forge and the data that we're collecting to help people make better decisions like those.

AMY MARKS: By the way, I think that's such a great story. You know how I feel about productization. What's really cool about that, I told you this before, I'm passionate about productization is the single most important thing we can do for sustainability on this planet. I don't just mean the waste in our landfills, 40% of which is from construction. If he can now make those products within 13 11, everything he makes, he doesn't have to cut anything, which means nothing goes in the dumpster, which means nothing goes in the landfill. By the way, we don't give points for waste avoidance, unfortunately, but we should.

And so what's great about that is-- and I think this is the part that sometimes construction and designers get caught up on, right, is that the whole building doesn't have to be those pieces and parts. You can use those pieces and parts interchangeably with things that are custom if you productize them in advance. Don't tell me we can't do that. We have generators all day long that are productized, that we integrate into different systems all the time in custom buildings, right? So it's like taking that one product at a time and evolving lots of different products to make them connect to both themselves and to institute bespoke situations, right?

Like, I think Brian, share with me. Because I know you as well-- by the way, Brian and I, I want all the pipefitters in the world. I want new pipefitters. I want young pipefitters. I want people that change industries to come to our space.

Brian and I are talking tomorrow at an education panel in the afternoon just about that. The more you can bring technology to the space and productization with these customers, and really understand how that data and the technology can be built on Forge, the more young people you're going to get into this space because they want to be in this space. They want to do more. So Brian, talk to me a little bit about productization and industrialized construction, how that's impacting the business you do and how Forge supports that.

BRIAN NICKEL: Yeah. So great point, Amy. I hope everybody comes tomorrow because it's going to be fantastic.

I'm actually-- I teach as an adjunct faculty at Gallatin College up in Bozeman, Montana remotely through teams out of Boise, Idaho. And what we're seeing is a huge push for these students to enter this industrialized construction workforce. And what we're trying to do, and what we're attempting to see, is that students are really engaged with this technology. And they're not aware of the opportunities that exist within the trades. So that's a huge part of what we're doing at Allied by creating these digital lists of instructions is to be able to educate those that don't have any trade experience to be able to build it, just as Britton said, as a LEGO set or a LEGO kit.

So what we're seeing is as these students finish their two year or their four year and they start to look at these opportunities that exist in a plumbing or mechanical shop, we can bring them on with this new technology much easier. We can throw on a VR headset. We can walk them through the building. We can get them into reality capture and start to understand how all this data translates and interacts with one another. It's almost like gamification of construction is essentially what's happening.

What I think is ultimately helping us is that by digitizing these plan sets and connecting these to the machines, we can get-- we're not putting a machine in to replace a person. We're putting a machine in because there's not enough people to do the job. We still need them. We still need a person to actually operate that machine and dynamically run pipe and grab a piece of pipe and set it on the machine and hit go and have it fed out. And they still have to peel and stick the labels and get them in the correct bins throughout the shop.

But through this productization space, they grew up using LEGOs. So we're actually starting to have a much more diverse discussion with these emerging tradespeople to be able to educate them much more quickly than you traditionally would. And so that's where we're seeing a huge benefit is we get the machine in place, we can get a less-skilled tradesperson to operate that machine.

They can come in and they're energized at that point. They're using new technology that's beyond what any other shops traditionally are using other than just manually chopping it. And they're able to ask questions that just blow our minds sometimes.

And it helps drive the productivity and our data capture with Forge. It helps drive and make those decisions for us. We can have a much deeper discussion in regards to that. So that really connecting into our community colleges and getting them into this industrialized construction workforce, that's helping us drive our businesses much quicker and more efficiently.

AMY MARKS: By the way, I'd like to stop saying-- I'm saying this for the first time ever. I'd like to stop saying less-skilled labor. I'd like to start saying digitally native labor.

BRIAN NICKEL: Yes.

AMY MARKS: Right? Like by the way, they might not have the experience of the guy that's been in that shop for 30 years, but they are digital natives that actually know better than some of the people in our suite how to actually work within these tools. Every shop I go to, if you watch the Queen of Prefab series on Autodesk's YouTube site, every time I do that series, I walk up to the most automated piece of machinery and tooling in a fabrication facility, and inevitably, the person that runs it is under 25. Every time. Every single episode.

And they are diverse populations, digital natives that are now the most experienced person connecting the data through machines and tooling and the design. Because they're digital natives. We should stop-- I'm going to take that out of my vernacular today. I'm not going to say less-skilled anymore. I'm going to say to these digital natives.

And what we need to do through Forge is connect the experience information through the technology that you guys are building to get out of our heads, to get out of the people that have been experienced and not necessarily digital natives of this time, and put that data into the technology so it can be re-utilized. We can use machine learning and AI so that our digital native new workforce, right, can actually take that and build some amazing things. I think I'm going to start that trend today for myself. By the way, we learn all the time. Continuous improvement. And I'm going to take that one from you today, Brian.

BRIAN NICKEL: Thank you.

AMY MARKS: Really, by unlocking and unleashing design and make technologies across industries and around the world, I really feel like Forge is powering entirely new ways to innovate and solve challenges of all shapes and sizes. We just went from pipefitters to community college to digital natives versus giant shops that I know Britton's working in and so am I. And all of us are working through. That's so important because honestly, you guys are both very different sized companies, right?

So I mean, I'm not telling you anything you don't know. We talked about this in advance. Britton Langdon, he's been around a long time. He has a very robust business that's been there.

Brian Nickel, you can do this as a startup. Essentially, you started and you taught and took classes and created this amazing startup. So really, what advice do you have for companies large and small that really want to take advantage of Forge and start developing their own tools digitally?

By the way, before you answer, I was just at a conference. And a young man walked up to me and he said, I have a business that's very small. And I was at the booth. And I said, tell me all about it.

And he started talking about these very complex workflows that were, like, things I never heard of before almost. And I thought, oh my gosh. This is why we need digital natives that are thinking about these things. The guy had to be, I think, 28 years old. And he's thinking about things in a different way than I would at 50 years old having been in the space because he doesn't-- he's not thinking about the way we've always done things, right?