Digital Innovation: A Three-Step Approach to Digital Transformation

CHRISTIAN FRANZ HAMMERL: Hello, everyone. My name is Christian Franz Hammerl. And welcome to the Autodesk session "A Three-Step Approach to Digital Transformation." This presentation will not only introduce you to the three phases of digital transformation of one of the most successful general contractors in Germany but will also provide you with the general principles so that after this presentation, you will be able to define your own digitalization strategy in three, four, or five steps for your company.

At this point, I would like to say in advance that a digital transformation is never complete as it is a process that is constantly being redefined by innovative technologies. It is therefore important that you define for yourself what you understand by digital transformation in the context of your business processes and when you will have achieved it.

According to the guiding principle, think ahead but take small steps. Once you have completed your digital transformation in one area of your company, you can move on to the next one. But before I get too far ahead of this presentation, let me introduce myself. As I mentioned at the beginning, my name is Christian Franz Hammerl. And I am the department manager at one of the most successful general contractors in turnkey constructions in Germany.

Strictly speaking, however, I'm not a computer scientist, although I'm not unfamiliar with systems and programming languages. First and foremost, I'm a civil engineer. I completed my bachelor's and master's degree at the Technical University in Dortmund, where I was also able to gain important experience from the unique educational concept of this University, the Dortmunder Modell.

The Technical University is unique in Germany with this educational concept and combines the study subjects of architecture and those of civil engineering. Accordingly, during my academic career, I had already carried out several projects in which the interests of architects, investors, project coordinators had to be continuously rated against each other. A collaboration way of working was already very important at that time, where especially BIM or building information modeling can strongly support.

However, since BIM was not yet so firmly established in the universities at that time and only occasionally made its way into lectures, I had dedicated my master thesis to the topic of how BIM can be implemented in a company taking change management models into account. I did this work together with a company so that they ended up with an implementation strategy that suited them perfectly.

A very often underestimated factor is the human being, which must always be picked up in all change processes. Because every implementation, no matter how well it is technically prepared, will fail if the employees do not join in and do not accept and implement this new change. In management terms, this always means top-down and bottom-up. Long story short, in the end, this master thesis was honored with a special award. And I graduated from the Technical University as best of the year in the study program Construction Process Management and Real Estate Management.

I started my professional career as a BIM expert in the Bremer Company Group, where I defined the BIM standards, especially in Autodesk Revit in a team with other colleagues and communicated them to the executing architects. After several developments, which I would like to spare you at this point, I'm now the IT department manager of the Bremer Company Group and have dedicated my focus away from the single BIM software Autodesk Revit to the entire value chain of the company and the associated corporate processes.

Together with the board of directors, these subsequently resulted in a plan for the digital transformation at Bremer, for which I quickly learned to program myself after not receiving a satisfactory response from several IT service providers regarding the implementation plan. For this programming, which supported the implementation of BIM 360 in our company, I was recognized by Autodesk with the 40 under 40-- Champions of Construction Award. So I'm standing here today to give you this presentation.

I hope that's enough for you to know about me so that we can get straight into the learning objectives for this presentation. This presentation will cover four learning objectives. The first one is create your own strategy to lead your company into digital transformation. This learning objective is self-explanatory. In the second one, you will learn what a CDE or a common data environment actually is, and how you can leverage its full potential.

It is also important to understand that a CDE can consist of multiple platforms from different vendors or in parallel with your internal on-premise systems. This is also not a contradiction in terms of single source of truth, but we will get into that later as well. Once you have decided on a strategy, you will learn in the third learning objective how you can either break down the existing data silos with regard to the selected CDE or link them with each other. This will focus on IT infrastructures and interfaces.

Last but not least, you will get an insight into the world of Bremer, and throughout the presentation, tips and tricks that have emerged from our years of experience, whether you use them or adapt them to your company is up to you. Back to the first point-- create your own strategy to lead your company into digital transformation. The first question you should ask yourself before creating a digitalization strategy is, how digital is your company currently? And how do you find that out?

The BIM maturity model is the best way to determine how digital your company is. This model is specially adapted to the construction history and represents a total of four levels in which a company can be classified. Level 0 on the far left of the graphic represents the lowest level of digitalization, while the level 3 on the far right of the graphic is the highest. In the following, I would like to present an example to illustrate the technological breakthrough.

Imagine you are in a construction meeting with architects, owners, and MEP planners and want to discuss this floor plan. Each project member has the same plan in front of them, and yet misinterpretations can occur among themselves because each project member interprets the plan based on their own experience. If, for example, the chairs were not drawn at this table, an architect would still immediately think of a table when he interprets this rectangle of lines correctly.

An MEP planner, on the other hand, would misinterpret this rectangle in the room as a cooling or heating element because of his profession, which reveals the core problem of conventional planning. The interpretation of individual lines takes place in the head of the respective viewer. Likewise, it is not possible for building owners who are unfamiliar with construction to know all the symbols of all disciplines which means that misinterpretations is almost unavoidable.

And it is precisely this problem that is solved with the BIM method, or more precisely, by the additional object information inside the model. Because this means that the table itself knows that it is a table and not a cooling element, regardless of whether there are chairs in the room or not. The very fact that the interpretation is no longer in the minds of the viewers but is taken over by the respective BIM software ensures that such misunderstandings cannot arise in the first place.

If you are already using BIM software in your company, this does not immediately mean that you are in level 2. Because BIM is all about the information content that the model possesses. So if you are using BIM software to create 3D models without assigning additional information to the objects, the information content still tends to be at level 1. Simply buying BIM software does not mean that you are automatically creating BIM models. It means that you have the software to apply the method.

Last but not least is level 3, which is defined by the new innovative technologies that currently exist, making this level the future. We don't know what technologies await us in the future, but one trend can be identified. Everything is becoming more digital. And the digital transformation of companies starts with the BIM method because this is the basis for interpretation by the computer.

With an eye to the current developments, especially in artificial intelligence and the development of neural networks, I believe that in the near future, the interpretation of point clouds will actually reach the point where proper BIM models can be extracted and generated from these point clouds at the push of a button. But this is currently not yet the case. Regardless of this, I hope that it has become clear that many innovative technologies have the opportunity and potential to restructure the construction industry as a whole and trigger cross-industry change.

So what have we learned? The strategy for digital transformation depends heavily on the degree of digitalization, whereby digitalization begins with the BIM method. This means that if you are still in the conventional planning stage, you should buy BIM software and start creating BIM models, although these do not need to contain a lot of information at the beginning. The next step is to look at your own business models and see what information needs to be in the model, in the BIM model, to make your own business units work.

Once you can work productively with your BIM model internally, you can then prepare BIM use cases for your customers and generate added value from them as well. If you're already creating BIM models, then you should focus more on increasing the number of BIM use cases, which can also mean, for example, networking the BIM model with information platforms.

Currently, BIM use cases in the area of facility management using IoT sensors are very interesting in terms of the digital twin. Next, I would like to explain what CDE or common data environment is and above all, what you need to pay attention to if you want to introduce CDE in your company. Similar to the previous topic, it is also crucial that you know your own business processes in order to be able to define the requirements for your CDE.

In order to understand our way of implementation, I would first like to introduce you to the family company Bremer. Bremer is one of the market leaders in Germany in turnkey construction with precast reinforced concrete elements and generated a turnover of 1.2 billion in 2022. The company generates approximately 80% of its turnover through construction projects which Bremer carries out as a general contractor for a large number of well-known customers.

Bremer realizes objects of any desired size for customers from industry and commerce. The project spectrum includes office buildings, furniture stores, cold stores, logistic buildings, production buildings, and consumer markets. Not only the project spectrum is extensive, but also the services that the company performs as a general contractor. At Bremer, every customer receives all services from the planning to the economic operation of an object centrally from one source.

Since the company was founded in 1947, more than 4,000 projects have been completed. At Bremer, we stand for first-class quality, professional execution, cost reliability, and punctual delivery. Our efficient plans in Paderborn and Leipzig together produce approximately 137,000 cubic meters or 180,000 cubic yards of concrete each day-- each year, sorry. This amounts to approximately 150 precast elements per day.

The size and type of our main plant in Paderborn is unparalleled in Germany. Due to the high production level of Bremer with our own iron-bending facilities, metalworking, and concrete mixing unit, which meets the highest quality standards, not only the material quality is in our hand, but we are also able to react extremely flexible in terms of scope and execution to the demand. Logistics are also a challenge.

Also, in the interest of sustainability, we can load our prefabricated parts which can wait up to 120 tons on our own rail terminal and send them to their place of use. More than 1,300 employees work at Bremer at over 13 locations in Germany, ensuring that our customer projects are handled smoothly so that the customer can concentrate fully on his own core business. I have brought you a short 2-minute video so that you can also get a visual impression of the Bremer family business for yourself.

This is the head office, and this is our main plant in Paderborn. We have over 13 locations in Germany. And you see here a few of them. This is our iron-bending facility. We built actually a new one in 2021 with an automatic mesh welding system and driverless transport systems. Here, you can see how our fabricated parts are produced. The main material is, of course, concrete.

This is our storage with more or less [INAUDIBLE] system. We are currently developing an innovative storage system in cooperation with the Technical University with artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithm. This is also a very interesting digital transformation in that business unit. Here, you can see how the elements are prepared for the transport by road and brought to the construction site.

We produce approximately 150 of these elements every day. And they weight up to 120 tons. So our assembly workers install them with the utmost precision as you can see here. Many companies working hand-in-hand with us to build these buildings. And there, you can see the result in the end. I would like to conclude the company presentation with this slide, which shows a small selection of our projects.

At the bottom left, for example, you can see one of our projects, which is currently in the news, because this type of building will be the first in Germany to follow the cradle to cradle sustainability concept. Bremer, as a general constructor, is responsible for the turnkey construction. And that is a distribution center for Levi's. So this slide shows the current three phases we have identified for ourselves to digitize the entire company even further than it already is.

The first step is to implement a common data environment to provide a centralized data repository for all of our projects that can be accessed by our internal staff as well as external project members. This is the only way to ensure that a single source of truth approach can be implemented. This is not easy, especially in the construction industry, because not only are the projects very different-- and so are the execution processes-- but each project also brings together new constellations of project members.

In order to be able to generate a standard or a change at all in this environment, a stable constant is required. And this concept is the common data environment, which is why Bremer, as a general contractor, has decided to provide the CDE for each project itself for all external project members. Because of this decision, Bremer is now one of the top three largest BIM 360 users in the world. The implementation of the CDE also enables live communications on plans, models, and documents between all project members as well as full versioning of all project files.

In addition, it was important to Bremer not to dissolve the internal project rooms through the implementation of the CDE, but to add the advantages mentioned before in a meaningful way. Accordingly, Bremer has one project space on the intranet and another one on the cloud in BIM 360. However, this is not a contradiction to the single source of truth approach because this approach refers to the file level.

And at Bremer, there is, for example, a document policy that ensures that the same files are not stored in both project spaces. The CDE at Bremer, therefore, combines the high security requirements in the intranet and the need to outsource certain data to the cloud to share with external project members. Well, this also simplifies the use of cloud applications for communication with external project members.

In a second step, Bremer intends to use the data from the CDE to digitize its own construction sites and simplify communication between the construction site and the office. After that, the models in the will be automatically clashed with each other, and collaboration with external parties will also be expanded. But the basis is the introduction of the CDE, which must be integrated into the Bremer IT infrastructure, which is why open interfaces such as APIs are particularly important, which can only be programmed in the IT department.

For this reason, consult your IT regarding your digital transformation at an early stage. And check whether your requirements can be implemented at all in your current IT infrastructure. It is not uncommon for you to first have to adapt your IT infrastructure in order to be able to implement a digital transformation. Since the IT infrastructure of every company is fundamentally different, I would like to explain below in a highly simplified way the general steps we have taken at Bremer.

Please think of a circle. This circle symbolizes your infrastructure or your company. Everything inside the circle is in your corporate network locally at your side or at the data center you trust. Either way, all software applications, servers and so on are under your or your administrator's control. Everything outside the circle in this example should represent external solutions such as cloud applications to which you generally have no administrative access in a stricter sense.

For large software vendors in particular, this is the desired situation, by the way. A company only uses one software from one software provider regardless of whether it's operated in the cloud or locally. However, this is wishful thinking. It is not realistic because there is no software provider on the market that can really cover all business processes completely, neither in the cloud nor locally.

This is a more realistic illustration. Every company has a large number of different software applications in its portfolio, some of which have grown historically and some of which have also cloud connections. Some software applications date back to the last millennium, and the others are only offered in the cloud. The different software applications are represented by different colors. Most likely, you have Microsoft licenses.

For example, which means you usually also have access to individual applications that can only be operated in the cloud, such as Microsoft Forms. Regardless of whether you use these applications or not, they should be listed in a status quo of your infrastructure since they are already included in your license. And only in this way, you can get a comprehensive overview of your potential new infrastructure.

The question of cloud, on-premise, or hybrid solutions must be answered for you in any case in this course of the digital transformation. There are advantages and disadvantages to both options. My personal opinion, however, is that a hybrid solution are the best choice because they allow you to keep, manage, and secure business critical data in-house and at the same time outsource the data that needs to be shared with external parties, for example, in order to ensure the completion of the project.

In the next step, you should group together those applications that are either from the same vendor or have native interfaces with each other. Maybe you have already noticed at this point that you use specific software for certain business units so that you could even sort the individual software groups into a chronicle sequence of your business processes. Look at your software groups and consider similar to the BIM method which software requires which information at which time in which form.

If you have done this work, then the next step should be to check whether the software applications within the software group allow vendor-neutral export or import formats, or if there are other possibilities to connect these software groups with each other. The last thing to do is then to draw the individual connections between the interfaces of the individual software groups that currently exist.

And with this, you already have a first initial picture of your infrastructure. But how do you bring these data silos or software groups together if there is no obvious interface? Basically, there are only two options. First, you contact one of the manufacturers or vendors and ask for a creation of an interface program. Or secondly, take the program into your own hands with your own IT or an external service provider, whereby an external service provider must first understand your processes before they can actually become active.

From my own experience, it is no use waiting for the vendors to come up with an interface. Be proactive and solve your problems yourself because this is the only way you can be sure that the interface will work exactly as required for your business processes. Therefore, when purchasing a software, make sure that it can be integrated into your overall IT infrastructure.

For cloud applications, interfaces can usually be set up via so-called API, application programming interfaces, which we use, for example, in BIM 360. Basically, this is the one you see here. We wrote our own middleware for the implementation of a CDE, which brings together the information from different software groups and then transfers it to BIM 360 Docs in a structured way.

The decision to go with BIM 360 Docs was obvious because we were already using Autodesk software in the company. And Autodesk also provides a public API for BIM 360. Basically, you should always check your own IT infrastructure to see if it can be expanded before you buy additional software that has to be integrated extensively. I don't want to show you any more in theory than that, which is why I will now show you an example.

Of course, I will not show you our internal intranet and its structure. But I will show you one of the functions of our middleware, which is displayed on the left side of the screen. On the right side, you see the standard BIM 360 project admin area. The most important feature of the CDE is the single source of truth approach and the accessibility of the filing system. It must be clearly regulated which plans, models, documents are located where exactly.

Only if there is a primary filing system, it can be ensured that all project members also work with the most current versions. The first obstacle was to give the employees the possibility to register themselves into the relevant project rooms in order to store and maintain the project files there in accordance to the company standards. This is not provided in the pure BIM 360 solution.

For example, according to Autodesk vision, there's a separate project admin for each project who adds the members or the staff manually. This may be correct for adding external project members but not for internal collaborators or your own employees. Therefore, our employees have the possibility to register themselves directly into the desired project in BIM 360 from our internal projects room.

The middleware already recognizes yourself or the user and gives the employee, if necessary, a few more hints and simply provides them with a button for self-registration. By clicking on this button, the employee's relevant data is displayed, which the user briefly checks again. It is also briefly explains to the employee, which permissions he or she will receive on the BIM 360 platform.

And after another click on Confirm, the employee immediately gets a receipt, a feedback, which in this case was successful. The employee is shown, again, briefly exactly which project he has requested and what kind of email address was used in the background by the API. When you now switch to the right side of the screen and refresh the page of the project admin, you can then see that the user, in this case me, was implemented in this room or added in this room with the right name, the correct email address, the company, and the role in comparison of my position.

And now, on the other side, the middleware recognized that I'm already inside this program, or in this project, and gives me lots of possibilities and lots of functions with other buttons. One of the buttons we have shown here is the direct link to the platform. So our employees don't need to log on into BIM 360, search for the specific project. They can already, from our internal project room, navigate or have a direct link to the project in BIM 360.

That was a short presentation of our middleware to show the principle of implementing a CDE in existing systems by preparing the infrastructure so that the required data from various software groups can be used automatically. During the whole process of implementation, of course, we also encountered lots of problems. So we contacted Autodesk to solve these problems together.

The current platform in BIM 360 has already improved enormously compared to when we started in 2021. Critical suggestions for improvement were solved together with Autodesk, which made BIM 360 usable for us in the European region at all. However, we ourselves could not and did not want to wait for Autodesk to implement all our requirements, and therefore checked whether we could solve some critical problems ourselves with our middleware via the APIs provided.

These workarounds, while not perfect in the long run, are essential to keep our staff working. For example, a bulk export of PDFs with markups is something we have programmed ourselves and BIM 360 as unfortunately, this is only available exclusively in the new ACC platform. We have also added another function to BIM 360 called IssueNumbering per IssueSubType, which Autodesk, unfortunately, does not offer in this form as this is a very Central European-specific approach.

Nevertheless, we are sure that we will find a solution with Autodesk for this as well. We are pleased that we have formed a strategic partnership with Autodesk, and that we have regular [INAUDIBLE] fixes where we jointly drive forward the digitalization of the entire construction industry in Germany as well.

A current topic with regard to the new CDE from Autodesk called ACC is an urgently-needed migration tool to be able to transfer our existing projects from BIM 360 to ACC. A parallel operation of both platforms is simply not feasible and also not satisfactory for all users. We are curious how this will be solved in the future.

As mentioned before, Bremer is actively driving the digitalization of construction industry in Germany by providing the project platform BIM 360 as a CDE for all our external project partners. Through this, we have already brought together over 3,500 project members on BIM 360 who are active in over 1,000 different companies. Currently, we also have about 200 active projects on BIM 360. And our middleware that I showed you earlier has already grown to over 10,000 of lines of code.

We are proud to be in the top three of all BIM 360 users worldwide, who use BIM 360 to the extent and especially in this stuff that Bremer does. So what did we learn? It is often not advisable to completely replace all historically grown system that have adapted to your business processes over the years. Instead, you should check your own systems, and if necessary, optimize them or make partial adjustments.

The new normal-- technically not particularly difficult in most cases, often just very time consuming. Breaking down data silos usually changes processes that your employees have to get used to. This is very, very important because never forget that employees need time to adapt to a change. Yeah, this is really, really important. It's so important that here in Bremer, we have our own Academy for our employees. So just have that in mind.

This was the first step in our implementation strategy. The next two will follow as soon as we can complete the migration to ACC, since they are the dependencies. Autodesk Build, in particular, is based on Autodesk Docs. And we currently still have our projects in BIM 360 Docs. So they are not compatible. Accordingly, migration tool from Autodesk is mandatory to enable a migration to the new platform as lossless as possible.

Nevertheless, I would like to give you a small insight into how point clouds can be used on the construction site, for example, to record the build status of the construction site, and then to align the as-planned BIM model with the as-build point cloud on this basis. We have prepared two short videos for you in Autodesk ReCap Pro and Autodesk Revit. As you can see here, we first check how to create a point cloud.

As you have surely noticed, you don't see a construction site here, but a normal office room. Regardless of this, the basic principle of point cloud creation is identical. You select the same surfaces in both scan locations and allow the software to match the internal position data so that you will end up with a combined point cloud as you can see here. This point cloud can then be rotated, can be cropped. And this is then the as-build model we will now use in the next video.

The next video is the comparison of the as-planned Revit model and the as-build point cloud, and how we compare them. And what we are doing now, I will show you. If we now want to compare the point cloud representing the as-build state with the as-build planned BIM model from Revit, we simply have to load the point cloud into the BIM software. This is quite easy. You will see it right here.

Usually, there are always minor deviations between the as-planned BIM model and the as-build stage, which is why the as-planned BIM model is typically adjusted afterwards in such a way that it corresponds to the current as-build state. By adapting the as-planned model, all information is preserved, which makes much more sense than creating a new BIM model based on the point cloud. So in the end, you will see now we have modified the as-planned model to an as-build model with all the information preserved.

So with this slide, I would like to thank you for attending this presentation and hope that Bremer, with over 76 years of project experience in German and Polish markets and hundreds of satisfied customers, was able to provide you with interesting insights. If you have any questions or want to realize a complex construction project in Europe, please do not hesitate to contact us. You see the URL in the slide. Thank you.