Leveraging data driven decisions utilising Autodesk Construction Cloud

CAROLINE SHAW: Welcome, everyone. And thank you for joining our session today, leveraging data driven decisions utilizing Autodesk Construction Cloud. My name is Caroline Shaw. And I'm one of the Autodesk Construction Solution customer success manager here at Autodesk.

MARK DANAHER: And I'm Mark Danaher, technical services manager with Kirby Group Engineering and Construction.

CAROLINE SHAW: So, today we're going to be talking about one of the hottest topics in construction, which is data, and the journey to digital project delivery. We all know one of the biggest challenges we've had in the construction industry is that we're late to the party when it comes to servicing the sheer volume of data captured across construction projects. In the basic form, we all know that teams are often disconnected due to the use of multiple apps or complete lack of digital adoption.

Not only does this create a huge amount of wasted time but, also, the disconnection between the office and the field accounts for a massive amount of avoidable rework, which impacts project cost, program, and quality. Now, if we go up a level, the impact on our overall business is huge. The construction industry urges for more connection from people to data. And technology plays a key role within this opportunity.

The great thing about my role as a customer success manager is that I'm fortunate enough to work with some of the most innovative stakeholders in the construction industry and none so more than the team at Kirby engineering. Due to their hyperscale rate of advancement from paper to digital, the team are focused on enhancing the way information is shared, integrating systems and workflows to become a more data centric business. I'd now like to hand over to Mark Danaher, who is going to talk to you about Kirby's digital construction journey. Over to you, Mark.

MARK DANAHER: Thanks, Caroline. First of all, I would like to discuss just Kirby Group Engineering's history and justice says that at a glance, as it were. So Kirby's was founded in 1964. We're a family-run business. And we employ 1,200 people across Europe and Ireland.

We also subcontract in a number of people. And in total, our business has 2,400 people working for us. We work across a number of regions in Europe and Ireland. And our sectors include data centers, life sciences, industrial manufacturing, power and energy, and commercial.

And some of the services we provide are H and MV power, which would be our high voltage transmission, electrical instrumentation, commissioning systems, mechanical services, and offsite manufacturing. One thing that Kirby's are very proud of is our core values. And our core values are something that drive our business.

So our core values are people, safety, quality, delivery, and value. And I joined this company in 2012. And at that point, there was a turnover of 60 million. Today, we have a turnover of 360 million, which is a large expansion of our business over the last 10 years.

So how have we coped with that expansion? Well, the journey starts at the very beginning, before we had any sort of digital or data environment within our company on our operations level. As I said, I joined in 2012 as our first BIM engineer on a specific project. Kirby's wanted to employ 3D design at this stage in a view at winning more work, bigger work. And at that point, our largest project was a 6 million euro project.

We had just secured that as our biggest project in the history of the company-- again, 10% of our annual turnover. Since then, the company has obviously grown. And at the moment, I lead a Department of 60 BIM engineers and MEP coordinators. So, what was it like at the beginning when I joined?

Kirby's utilize paper-based approach to documentation. One example that I can give is our drawings were done in our Dublin office and then were couriers-- [INAUDIBLE], printed, and couriered by paper to the local site. Now, that wouldn't necessarily be too local in Ireland. It could be a two-hour drive. So by the time the drawings got to site, it could be outdated.

We also employed a traditional onsite build, where traditionally the construction industry used an awful lot of people on the construction site to deliver the projects. Smart thinking and building offsite wasn't really a part of our process at this stage. What did this result in? Well, it resulted in slow release of data from our design and our base offices to our construction sites.

It also meant that change management was not streamlined. So for instance, if there was a change in a design, that change may not get filtered back to site for 24 hours. So real time information was not available. And it resulted in reactive decisions rather than proactive decisions.

So we secured, in 2019, our first hyperscale data center. And what did we want to achieve with this? Well, we knew that this data center was the largest project that Kirby's had ever contracted-- 70 million euros, which at this stage was a large risk to our business. And we had a number of challenges in delivering this project successfully.

To meet the demand in schedule, we had to employ an offsite manufacturing approach. This would allow us to build in a safe environment offsite while also building sections of our scope before the building had even been built. We could then build in a modular format and deliver it to site just in time.

This would mean that the flow of information from design to manufacturing and to the site needed to be centralized. And it needed to be live. The modules would end up being the largest modules of electrical switch rooms in Europe at the time. So we have a large risk to this project in delivering these.

So how did we deliver them? Designing and modeling the modules began at the very beginning of the project. Kirby's were involved with the design team very early on. And we modeled in 3D all of the switch rooms. And we coordinated them with the civils and structural elements of the building within the 3D model. At this point, the foundations were only being dug.

Once we were happy with our customer that the switch rooms were the way that they needed them to be and they fit the design principles, we sent them to our manufacturing facility 400 kilometers from the site to be built. So, in essence, we were building 12 of the largest modules before the building was even built. So then the modules were built and were stored within the warehouse, ready to be shipped as soon as the building area was available to us.

So we had a number of challenges again. How did we know that what was being built on site and what was being built in the manufacturing facility could actually work? It wouldn't have worked onsite if these modules were craned in and then they wouldn't fit. That would be disastrous for our project.

So what we did was, again, using technology, we used we took a 3D scan of the finished module in our manufacturing facility. We took a scan of the building envelope that had been built on site. And we merged the two within the software. So by using Autodesk Construction Cloud, we were able to take a 3D scan of our module, a 3D scan of the building, merge them, and overlay them within our Readit software. This gave us 100% guarantee that the modules, when they arrived onsite, could be installed successfully.

So then this was the case. These modules were installed. They worked within laser-guided robotic stations-- again, coming from the 3D model. It was all geolocated.

And, in fact, a little robot on skates brought these automated into the building. So they skated them in by laser-targeted robots, which, for Kirby's, was a far cry from where we had begun with paper-based solutions. So what were the elements that we really employed on the project?

So we centralized our BIM data with a live feed of information directly to the site. We delivered our OSM approach that I spoke about. We digitized our redlining process, allowing for live feedback. This was very important.

The flow of information had to be two-way. And it had to be live so that when something changed onsite, that information was fed directly back to our engineers within the office, who were able to update, check, and clarify, and reissue drawings instantly to site. We also introduced digital EHS and QC forms. So our quality and our safety were standardized on site.

We originally did this in order to keep the same information across all areas of the project. There were still 200 people on this site at any one time. So a number of different people were taking-- were conducting QC and health and safety checklists. And the old approach was that each person would do them on a paper-based or an Excel-based.

And then the information was either getting lost, corrupted, or not standardized and completed in the manner that we wanted it. So what we had then was a lessons learned. And this was very important for us because what we wanted to do was decide, how could we employ this on all of our hyperscale data centers? And it's quite difficult when you're working on these large projects to be able to implement a digital technology across all of the functions within the project.

So we set about digitizing our operations across three more of these pilot projects. And rather than just sharing the data, we saw an opportunity to data mine. By capturing all the information in real time, we were able to create dashboards-- this was the idea-- that we could give to our senior management.

So I liken it to when you're flying an airplane. The autopilot is on, which for us is when construction is going. You have little input. Everybody should be doing their job. The plane is flying itself perfectly fine.

Well, at that time, there's sensors all over the airplane that are taking different measurements. And they're displaying it on a dashboard so that if something happens, the pilot can take proactive course in order to rectify something that will go wrong so that the plane doesn't crash-- similar to a project. We want to be proactive. We want the pilot, who would be our senior management team, to review all of the information in real time and then make these proactive decisions that would help the project and deliver better value to both ourselves and our clients.

So what we did was we broke out all of the functions within the operations. And we decided on key functions that we would digitize over the course of the separate three projects. The first thing we did was we decided that we would digitize all of our document control. So we have a serious problem with document control.

Documents weren't standardized. And they were being stored in numerous locations-- so desktops, hard drives, servers. And the problem was only that person that created the document knew where that document was. So what we did through Autodesk Construction Cloud, we were able to store all of our standard documentation within one centralized area and then allow access of our teams to those documents to edit and automate our revision process, share information, comment on the documents, review the documents, and then finally issue the documents for construction to our construction site.

We also have to standardize our RFI and submittal process. So for Kirby's, as a technical, mechanical, and electrical engineering company, we need to provide the technical information to our customer. And our customer needs to approve that information before we go and build it.

So, again, our customer wants to see standard information. And we work with some of the biggest organizations and tech giants across the world. So these guys were expecting to see digital information coming through to them. So we standardized our submitters and our RFIs. And they were captured again through these templates in real time.

We then looked at what we could do with our quality control on site. So as the construction site develops, there is going to be numerous people installing systems, both mechanical and electrical, in different areas of the project at one time. So the way we work it is we have a site supervisor for each area of the project who monitors the quality of the installation that is being put in by either our subcontractors or directly ourselves.

So again, these field checks can be walked and captured in real time through my mobile phones, tablets. And that information is sent directly back to a centralized area and fed back into a dashboard. We also continued to house, share, monitor, and control all of our model and drawings within the projects. Again, sharing of drawings and models is vital to our construction teams. And they need to see this pretty much in real time.

So what we did when we spoke about-- when I spoke about dashboards, for us, quality is the main driver within-- quality and safety would be the main drivers on a construction site. And we needed to give that information. So the documents and templates that were standardized were created into a dashboard. These dashboards were Kirby-specific dashboards created by us but with a live link to the Autodesk Construction Cloud.

This meant that the information on a senior management's phone or tablet was real-life information. Full document control through the cloud, technical submittals, offsite modular QC and progress could be tracked. So all of our large assets that we would offsite manufacture now are controlled through a process on the cloud by the way-- means of us tracking them. So we can tell how many are in design, how many have gone for manufacture, how many are in packaging, in distribution, or received on site.

And then finally, what we can do is we can then track that that system or module has been installed on site. And then, finally, within our operations, the biggest value that we saw with regards to time-saving, that I disclosed it later, was the commissioning to a digital process. So in the old days, our guys would go down, be it mechanical or electrical, and they would go down on our construction site with their notepads and their checklists. And they would do their tests on all of our systems.

They would write in their notes. They would capture all of the information. And then they would go back to the head office. And they would retype all of that information into Excel or some other platform.

And then that information had to go to a data analyst who would take it all, collate it, and then produce graphs and the final commissioning procedures. We also have-- now that we work on large projects, our largest project at the moment, which is 160 million euro-- tracking the different levels of commissioning and the different levels of levels of systems, it's quite onerous. So again, by using Autodesk Construction Cloud, we can give live information to our commissioning team as to the status of how this has been commissioned, which, again, brings value to our customer. We can share this information with our customers who can then use this information for their own look-ahead to when their facility may be up and running.

So, what were the time-savings that we had? So what we did was over the course of the four projects, we interviewed the guys on site. And we got our quantity surveyors to chaperone some of these guys and track how long it was taking in hours to do it the paper-based way, or the old way, as we would call it. And what these guys did, they calculated a time on each project that was spent doing this.

We then tracked through the software how long it was taking for us to do it by using Autodesk's Construction Cloud. And these were the time savings. So on average, across the four projects, are digital snagging save 2,000 hours. Our commissioning team, on average, saved 3,000 hours. And our digital quality audits saved 1,000. And our digital redlining saved another 1,000.

So the information coming back to the office, we saved 1,000 hours just on that alone from site. And what's interesting on this as well is we saved a further 4,000 hours on reworks that would have been done on site, that we eliminated through an offsite manufacturing facility. We also then reduced hours and people from site and brought them into a safer manufacturing environment.

All of this was only possible due to digital construction, gathering data, and compiling the data in real time. So what would I say to somebody who is on there digital data journey? Well, what we did, we mapped out an implementation plan of how we could implement Autodesk Construction Cloud. And the way we did this, we looked at our operations and how fragmented each function was on the projects.

We also determined that we were utilizing eight apps within one project to gather information, control information. That side [INAUDIBLE] to the paper based approach that we were taking. So we then had to look at how each of the functions within the operations could adapt their process to allow for a leaner approach, which could aid the use of Autodesk Construction Cloud. At

This point, we collaborated with Autodesk customer success team, who provided analytics and data, such as user information, software functionality, use, and how we could better adapt our systems to fit a more digital process. So, without the help of the customer success team, we wouldn't even have been able to get this off the ground on a pilot project. We were then given access to development teams within Autodesk that would help us with any of the needs that we encountered with the software.

So if we look at what we first did, our business requirements were analyzed. Cross-function requirements are documented. And potential solutions developed through the software. So we looked at what the software's capabilities were. We spoke with Autodesk customer success team. And we spoke with our own internal operations team. And we came up with a plan that we needed in order to-- we came up with the problem that needed to be solved.

So we weren't digitizing for the sake of digitizing. We wanted to streamline and save hours. So we then went to our function-- or our project processes. We analyzed and mapped all of our processes within each function on the projects. So this is literally just operations for us. We didn't go into the in-house back office items of Kirby's here. This was our operation.

So we wanted to digitize our operations, as that's where the most value is to our customers. So then once we had decided what our process flows were, how we could streamline them, we looked at getting the software and the processed foods marrying up. So we call this our development stage.

And this is the stage where we interacted with Christina, within the customer success team, and where any of our questions or any of the issues that we had were solved pretty much on a day-to-day basis. So we had weekly meetings. And then when we were ramping up with this, we actually had daily meetings with Christina just dropping a note or a text just to see how we were getting on. Was there anything further that could be done?

So when we passed the development stage and Kirby's were happy with the software and our processes were pretty much aligned, we then went to the pilot phase. And that's what we discussed in the last four projects. So a number of the projects we used to test and address any potential problems within the software.

Again, the feedback from Autodesk was vital here. We were able to see the users that were logging on, the functions that they were using, how often they were using it, the documents that they were using-- vital information for us on a pilot project. We also did some investigations ourselves on how the teams on site found using these processes and what they felt could be done a little better ourselves or with the software. So then once we have this development plan bottomed out, we then decided that we needed to train all of our operations team on the software, how to use it, how the workflows work, how they interact with it.

So a training plan was developed and rolled out and designated to the projects and the functions. So at the moment, we have nearly half of our operations team trained on Autodesk Construction Cloud features that we use. And we have a thing in Kirby's called the Kirby Academy or the Kirby Way. And what this does is this teaches, through our Academy process, how Kirby's deliver projects safely at high quality to our customers.

And what we've done is, with the help of the Autodesk customer success team, we have merged a training program, which we use on our Kirby Way initiative. So each team member will get a full training program, which is class-driven for an hour and then online with some questions and testing that they need to do. This enables everybody that's going to use the software to be fully versed in how it works.

Currently, we are planning on launching the Autodesk Construction Cloud across all of our projects. So the pilot phase is over. The training phase is nearly done. And we're ready to develop this digital approach to operations across our business.

So what does that mean for Kirby's? It means that our teams-- if we go back to our core values, our people are working smarter, not harder. Our information is flowing quicker, which allows for better quality and a safer way of working.

We deliver to our clients and our customers with the highest value that we can to them and both internally. We also have a value proposition now that when we sell our services to our customers, that we can show them that Kirby's is on this digital journey of using data-driven decisions to deliver their projects for them. So my advice to anybody who is either on the path to this or beginning their digital journey is to look at the amount of apps you're using at the moment, look at the functions you're using, and start from there.

Can you consolidate this into one platform? For us at Kirby, that's what we've done. Our operations have reduced from eight applications to one. And that's going to be rolled out in quarter 2 of next year. So, hopefully, what I have discussed was insightful and that you can take something from it on your own journeys.

And I'll hand you back to Caroline, who can discuss the software in more depth.

CAROLINE SHAW: Thank you, Mark. That was fantastic. OK, so looking at Kirby's implementation and adoption of Autodesk Construction Cloud, it's highlighted the power of the connected workflows, spanning from design, plan, build, and operate, sharing data across those phases of a project.

Through their use of build, the Kirby team have implemented robust document management workflows, enabling the team to capture and maintain all project documentation in a central location. What's really powerful is that all members have controlled access to the latest information, whether they be on site or in the office. But also, incorporating their quality and safety inspections, Kirby have been able to ensure their entire team can maintain quality and safety standards from any device anywhere at any time.

By deploying a centralized issue management process allows their functional teams controlled access to design, quality, and safety issues from one unified location. Kirby also leverages build to manage their RFI, Request For Information process, between the supply chain and the contractor to achieve an effective communication and collaboration between team members during the review process. And, finally, utilizing assets has allowed Kirby to track manufacturing commissioning processes for mechanical and electrical equipment by connecting quality checklists and recording issues, but also assigning QR codes to each asset to streamline the process of locating each asset within these mammoth projects.

I spoke to you at the start about how disconnected and fragmented the construction industry is in its most simplistic form. That is evident when our customers start to look at the volume of construction applications being used across their organizations. My parting ask for all of the attendees of this session is to take the time to act to assess your technology landscape and evaluate the number of solutions being used across your business.

Simply start by booking a 30-minute slot in your calendar and pick up some post-it notes. On each post-it note, detail the required workflow within your function group and the current technology solution you're currently using to house those workflows. We put some more details about the next steps in the handout to start that conversation with other stakeholders and how to repeat the success Kirby has had.

This concludes our presentation today. I'd like to thank everyone for taking the time to join us. And thank you very much. Bye bye.