Owner Feedback in the Clouds: Using AutoCAD Plant 3D to Facilitate Owner Reviews

PATRICK FLORA: All right. So now I'm going to be really loud in here. Because it's a smaller, my voice echoes anyway, but they're recording our session today. So if you have any colleagues that weren't able to make it-- I know there's another point 3D class going on right now-- so you can come back and look at it in the next couple weeks once they post these to AU Online.

So I hope you're in the right spot, Owner Feedback in the Clouds. We'll use some Plant 3D to get owner feedback back to the design team and be able to use that information. We'll use BIM 360 and a few other tools to help us do that.

First off, an overview. We'll talk about using Navisworks, then C4P and BIM 360 Team. Then we'll go into the new BIM 360 Design, how you can utilize that structure to get comments to Plant 3D.

Then we'll talk about some new shared views, new in Plant 2019. And then we'll wrap up with some final thoughts.

First, an overview. That's my-- I don't, I didn't know what to do with my hands kind of picture. So--

AUDIENCE: Pretty good, though.

PATRICK FLORA: Yeah. Thanks. Thanks.

I'm the piping engineering department manager at Pickering Associates. We're an AEC firm in Parkersburg, West Virginia. I'm over 400 miles from Richmond. West Virginia has been a separate state for quite a while now.

I'm kind of been the instrumental person in getting Plant 3D there. I'm a chemical engineer by degree, so the CAD side of things comes a little second to me. But with what we do with piping in Plant 3D, chemical engineering plays right on there. So, yeah. I also officiate high school basketball. Fun fact.

So my learning objective, straight from the handout, let's take further advantage of collaboration for AutoCAD Plant 3D. We'll learn how to add clients to BIM 360 projects and make sure we know what they're able to view.

We get a lot of owner pushback of they don't want to accidentally click the wrong button, and then everything's gone type of comments. So we'll walk through some of that and some permissions.

We'll learn how to track comments and get them back to the design team across all the platforms we'll discuss. And we'll learn how to develop workflows for tracking those updates through completion in 3D model.

So first off, an overview. Currently, the way that our company in the Valley gets owner feedback is, I feel, antiquated. You know? You've got to get a team, 15, 20 people, sitting around a table. Full size drawings. Everyone's got their own 11 by 17 kind of set. You've got to transfer copies back over to a master.

Then what do you do with those drawings when you get back to the office? You've got to keep track of them. Scan them in. Then now they're stagnant. Anytime you make an update, you got to rescan it in, keep track of that comment.

So using some tools from Autodesk, we're able to digitize that process and utilize BIM 360 in the cloud to help us do that. Digital society, better tools.

And we're going to use several Autodesk products all together. We'll talk about Navisworks, BIM 360, my background Plant 3D, tie them all together. And collaboration for Plant, the main piece of the puzzle.

So who in here uses Plant 3D as their main software? Who uses C4P? Just the smaller group. OK. So if you're not using it, I recommend it highly. The collaboration and things that you're able to do there, check drawings in and out, all of that type of workflow, collaboration for Plant, thumbs up for me.

So the software we'll discuss, Plant 3D, Navisworks, BIM 360 Team and Design. Team is what they first pushed out last year, that they allowed C4P to be able to work on. Now they've transitioned collaboration for Revit to Design.

And through some kind of roundabout ways, you're able to get your Plant 3D project to the cloud that way, as well, though it's not quite as live as Team currently is. And then we'll talk about shared views since they're new to everyone in 2019.

So some suggested classes for those interested in C4P. I see Carsten, So Collaborate with AutoCAD Plant 3D BIM 360 Team. So that was at AU last year at the knowledge network. Great source of information, especially if you want to learn more about C4P.

And then I mentioned Quintin Contreras. He's teaching a class right now as well, You Down with the C4P. It was a good lecture last year. Between both of those classes, you can get a real good understanding of what C4P is and how to use that information to your-- make your projects a little easier.

And then this year, talking about BIM 360 Design, since it's kind of new, Working Together with BIM 360 Design, Desiree Mackey. There's two classes, one Wednesday, one Thursday.

And then Harnessing Next Generation Cloud Collaboration: BIM 360 Design with Matt Dillon, that's Thursday morning. So if you like what I'm talking about here, those guys will dive into-- and lady-- will dive into BIM 360 a little further.

So other sources of information right off the top, Autodesk Knowledge Network. Who in here uses the knowledge network, goes to it? Yeah. Great source of information, screencasts, all of that now live in the knowledge network.

The Ideas Station. Who posts all of their wish lists to the Ideas Station? So that is a great place to go and put the oh, I wish I had this type thing.

You'll be able to see you're probably not the only person in the world that wants that. OK? So whenever you see something, be sure to upvote it, and that way we can make sure that Plant design team sees what we need as end users.

And then the forum-- who was aware-- well the handful of people using C4P-- you had to do a hot fix before the end of the month. I found that out on the forum, so. Like three days before we needed to update, I'd happened to be browsing and seen that it needed to be done, so. Keep an eye on that.

And then the In the Pipes Blog, this Plant 3D team posts updates there every once in a while, especially when new Plant releases come out.

Now we'll dive into the meat of it. Who in here uses Navisworks for coordination? OK. Yeah, this is the more prevalent, been around for a while now. How we can get Revit, Plant 3D, Civil 3D, everything to talk together?

So prior to BIM 360 integration, Navisworks more common way to hold cross-platform design meetings. Handles Plant 3D graphics a little easier than Plant 3D does.

Early on our Plant 3D days, I made the rookie mistake of having Plant live doing a review meeting and, of course, it crashed. So from now on, I'm a stickler for using Navisworks in a large cloud, especially in a big Plant project.

You still have the ability to see pipeline information. All those specs, size, all that information that's in Plant 3D, you can see in Navisworks. And it's a little easier to use in Plant 3D. Not quite as bogged down with commands and things like that.

So it's really easy to navigate. You can use the fly, walk, run. Whatever you want to do to walk through your Plant models.

So setting up reviews in Navisworks. The first thing you're going to want to do is create an NWC of your model. You can do that with the NWCOUT command in Plant 3D. Of course, you can use live DWG files, but I think that NWCOUT captures everything in a nice little bubble. And it makes the NWD step that we'll talk about a little easier.

So you guys are all familiar with Navisworks. You go to append or merge those, depending on what your overlap is. And one thing that's important for using Navisworks for reviews is create an NWD.

One, it's going to allow you to take that data off site. You no longer have the NWF live links that it's trying to keep updated. And we'll talk about another reason for NWDs with the comments and tools like that. You don't really want to live model with the comments.

So I elected to do screenshots instead of the live videos. So as you guys are all aware, this is out-of-the-box Navisworks. You see we've got the NWD file loaded up here.

And I'm a big fan of the sample Plant 3D project that's been there since as long as I can remember. Very little changes, so it's the old go-to of it always works and everything's connected.

So now we've left the office. We've got our NWD model loaded up our laptops. Now we're in the review meeting. We're walking through, maybe PNIDs are our guide, maybe other construction documents.

The first step to take those notes, let's go to the Add tab-- Add tag-- in the Review tab. OK? Anybody use Add Tags in reviews? OK.

So the first thing you're going to want to do is click the point closest to where you want to put that point reference, and then click somewhere out of the way. It's going to put a big number over top of what you're looking at. So you don't want to put that right over top of the meat of the information.

And the NWD-- so comments are locked to specific views. They're not wrapped to an object. They're locked to a point in space.

So as soon as you rotate that Navisworks model, your comment disappears, for those of you that use that. So it's very important that you get the view so you can see as much information as possible before you create that initial comment. OK?

So one thing that we like to do at the office-- it helps the sorting steps we'll talk about it a little bit. We always like to put the date and then the initials of who's entering that comment before we put the descriptive comment, so that we can help filter those in Excel to see when they were created, things like that, without having to keep the big, long Excel file of extra columns.

So this is what it looks like. We went down to the little valve pad in the sample project. So this review and then Add Tag is here. I like to keep the view comments thing opened.

Whenever you create the comment, it will put the saved view down here in this pallet. If that window isn't open for some reason, you can find all of these tabs in the Viewpoint and then Windows. And you can toggle everything on and off.

So here we're talking about this valve handle. You can kind of see that that one's not on the same plane as the rest of them. Typical comment in review, maybe the owner wants all of the handles to be at the same height. So date, initials, owner would like valve handle the height of the adjacent valves.

Make sure that your comments are descriptive enough that when they go back to the design team, they don't raise more questions about what needs done. Right? The whole automation of steps is to create less steps, not create more of them trickling down the line.

So be as descriptive as possible. Sometimes during a meeting, you don't really have the time to put in that detail you'd like. So maybe that you implement that as your first workflow, to go back through the comments as a PM and add those descriptive steps from the meeting.

So we we've taken all of these comments in Navisworks. We've got good information. The owner's pleased. You know, just a few minor tweaks. Now what do we do with that information?

So in that same Viewpoints window, down in the lower right, we're going to export an XML file. With that XML file, you can take it to Excel, and then you're able to sort, filter, kind of control that information. OK?

You're going to have to clean up that file. Navisworks will spit out tons of information about those points you created, out to DX columns, so over 100 columns of data. But it's things from camera position, the skew, things that you don't care when you're tracking those comments.

So purge those. Clean them out. You'll be able to quickly see where the meat of your information is. And then we're going to be able to use that Excel files are master open, RFI, questions tracking spreadsheet.

So I've got three tabs I've created. Once you right click-- you can right click anywhere on one of the tags-- select Export Viewpoints. And then after a lot of cleanup, you can get Tag View 1, 2, and 3 that correspond to the saved viewpoint so you can always go back to the model.

And numbers them-- status, new, resolve, things like that. I think Navisworks comes out of the box with four of those. And then the comments. You know, what they are. These steps aren't needed. Review valve spec and confirm selection.

So one of the things that-- one of the reasons that it's important to use an NWD. So say one of the review comments was, "This bypass line doesn't need to be here." So we put the comment on the bypass line. Then it gets deleted somewhere down the line. Right? They do the action of the comment, remove the bypass line.

So now you're going back through a couple of weeks later, if that's an NWF model, and you just see a tag floating in space. You won't be able to see what was there previously. You'll just see the comment, as opposed to if you have an NWD file, you know, that data is locked in time when you create that NWD. So you'll always be able to go back and see that, hey, this pipe was there, and now it's deleted in the current model.

So using Navisworks for review. So we'll kind of walk through pros and cons of each software we'll discuss. Pros, easy to use. Utilizes free software. If you don't have Navisworks Manage, you can use Freedom to do these types of things. The owner can get Navisworks Freedom to be able to view the model.

It generates the historical record so that Excel file can go into project documentation during close out. You're able to see what the comments were, whether they were resolved. And you can track those comments through completion in an Excel.

The cons. One of the first things I talked about was having information in multiple places. As soon as you create that Excel file, everything now lives in multiple places once again. So as review meetings start to track up, you can see that if you're not keeping that Excel file updated, you're now going to have multiple places where that information live. So you've got to get your workflows down and be consistent about what you're doing with that information.

You can't track the comments directly in Navisworks with multiple users. The other catch of that in NWD file is if I'm updating it and you're in it, then what happens when we go to save it? It just doesn't work real well. And it's another list to keep track of.

We were working on a project a couple of months ago that we had 30 equipment RFI logs that were all Excel based. You know how easy it is to lose track of RFI comments across 30 Excel sheets? It just becomes unruly very quickly. And the last thing that I want to do, keeping track of plant design, is to add another list of something to keep track of.

So now we'll dive into C4P and BIM 360 Team. Anybody have any questions on the Navisworks side of things? It like probably the people are most-- you guys are most familiar with.

All right. C4P and BIM 360 Team. So Collaboration for C4P utilizes the cloud to organize the check in and check out of Plant 3D files. So if you're not familiar with that, definitely check out the classes. Check out the Help section in Plant 3D. It can help explain all that stuff.

So I go on the assumption that you've got a project in the cloud, whether it's team design, either/or. So definitely check out those source of information. You're able to use a built-in viewer from the browser. You don't have to have Navisworks software. You can view the DWG files right in Chrome, Explorer. I prefer Chrome, so. I think it does a little better with graphics than Internet Explorer.

Anyone can be invited to the project once they create an Autodesk account. That's another pushback we get from owners. "Oh, I don't want to create another account." But, I mean, everybody has multiple online accounts of everything these days, so what's one more?

Easy to use and assign a viewer editor role, going back to my first thing of I don't want to click the wrong button, delete all these files. We can manage that with what their roles are in BIM 360.

AUDIENCE: What [INAUDIBLE].

PATRICK FLORA: 2018, 2019. I don't think it was in '17.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].

PATRICK FLORA: Is that when it rolled out?

AUDIENCE: Yeah, 2017.

PATRICK FLORA: 2017. OK. So 2017 and above, you can use C4P. OK. Good question.

So did everybody get a chance to look at the handout? So the handout walks through these steps of adding owners to the project in both 360 Team and Design. I'll go through it a little briefly here with some screenshots, but if you haven't checked out the handout, that's the place to go kind of step-by-step instructions.

Once the project's been created, you can invite members of your own company, the owner, anybody you want. There's a nice little button. Just type in their email address. Autodesk sends them an automated email, "Hey, you've been invited to this project. " Click the link. Follow the prompts. Good to go.

Type in the email they would like to use. And make sure right off the bat if you don't want them to edit things, you can set to Viewer right there when you send out the invites. If you forget to do that, not the end of the world. Project admin, you can change all those. When they get the automated email, follow the prompts, create the account, and they will be added to the project.

So this is my sample dummy Plant 3D project I created for this. So I've got a Revit file up here we're using for coordination and then my trusty sample project out of Plant 3D. The project teams, so I'm the project admin, another guy at our office, and then my Plant 3D tester, so I could make sure the owner-- what he could and couldn't see.

So click this button after the project's created and you're inside BIM 360 Team. It will open this dialog box you see here in the middle. And just type in the email address just as you would. It says don't use mailing lists. Enter the comment-- the comma-- and it'll block it. Then you can just keep typing the rest of them.

That's the Editor button, and if you're ever confused about who can do what, if you click this little question mark here, Autodesk gives you this prompt. So there's Viewer, Editor, and Project Admin. Obviously, if you create the project, you're by default the project admin.

Then editor, you can do pretty much everything except for approve people to the project and change access levels. OK? But the editor is going to be people working in the software. Right? They need to be able write-- access that information.

And then a viewer, they can only view files, folders comments, and people. And they can add to the discussions and put things on the calendar in BIM 360 Team.

They can't edit, upload, download, delete. They can't manage, change sharing preferences. They can't do any of that.

They can only view the information that you've let them view, and that's it. They can post discussions and create calendar invites, things like that. But no deletion, no additions, nothing.

So now we've got the owner set up. We're ready to do this review. There's a couple of ways we can do this. The easiest way is to create a comment and tag the owner or whoever you want to be able to review that information inside of BIM 360.

We'll walk through that screen share. You do this like you tag anybody and anything anymore. Type the at and then type their first letter. Then you can select their name from a dropdown.

Whenever you tag someone, the good thing about BIM 360 Team is it generates all these automated emails. As soon as I tag person A, person A gets the email, "You've been tagged in this comment."

They can click the link, go to it, be able to address that information. They can review the comment and provide feedback. mark it resolved, things like that.

So the good old automated email, "Hey, Plant 3D tester, please review the expansion loop. Make sure the necessary fittings are shown." They just click this little file hyperlink there, and away it goes.

So this is what it looks like from the browser. I mean, this is straight Google Chrome. The one thing I wanted to point out-- so up here, I'm logged into my account in the screenshot. And I have the download button. If they're a viewer, that button doesn't exist up there.

But this is how it organizes it. There's one comment in the current version. Whenever you create the original comment, it takes a screenshot of what you're looking at when you do it and places it in that comment train.

And from there, the only way to do it is just keep these replies going. And that's how you track these comments through the model. And once we get to the pros and cons, we'll walk through those a little more.

But you can see there's no-- there's no real pinpoint here of where the issue is. I had to be descriptive when I was assigning that. And there's no, "Yep, this action is completed," type of information here in this stage.

So the previous slide, that works best for one-off comments, decisions. Another thing that I like to do for the full project review is use that NWD file I created. Push it up to the cloud so you can manually upload projects to BIM 360 or drawings to BIM 360.

You don't just have to go through Plant 3D. Push the NWD file up there, then we can utilize the same browser and the same interface that we're doing here. And it allows the access to additional files.

So say we're looking at that expansion loop in the NWD file, but I know a couple of days before the NWD was-- or after the NWD was created that somebody changed the expansion loop. So I can pull open that drawing right during the meeting, go to it in BIM 360, and we're good to go. We have access to the most up-to-date information all the time.

So this is what-- we're back down in our valve station. You see some of the colors are a little different here in BIM 360 Team, but it's the same premise. I actually started this one by using a-- created a markup. We'll see that dialog box in a second. Kind of just drew the arrows down to the point I was talking about.

And then I replied to that with a comment that said, "These valve handles should be the same length as others." So when it does that, when you start with the markup, it puts the little two bubble over top of it, and you're able to see that in BIM 360.

So the tools I was talking about are down at the bottom in BIM 360 Team. So the Markup Tool is the little pencil with the squiggly line. From there, you can write text, use arrows, freehand, whatever you want.

I'm an arrows kind of guy. I don't have to draw anything. I can just drag and drop. And then the comment. And that's really all all there is to do to create the review comments as you're going through the meeting.

The pros and cons. Even easier to use than the last one. We no longer have to have another piece of software. Just use your browser. Access to the most recent files.

Like I said, since the project lives in the cloud, you always have access to the most up-to-date drawings. And there's very little additional setup and training, aside from learning the Pan and Rotate commands. That's pretty much all there is in the browser.

Cons. It's easy to lose track of the comments across multiple drawings. There's not a master these are the comments you have open in BIM 360 Team.

So you've got to know I use this drawing during a review. These are where all of my comments live. There's no way to create easy historical project record of those comments, either. What we do right now is literally take a SNP, a screen grab, of that comments pane, paste it into a Word document, and that becomes our historical record.

So not a very good system there. And once again, there's no automated way to keep track of the open issues. Have these been resolved, how long they've been open, type of metrics. Which brings us to BIM 360 Design. Yep.

AUDIENCE: So you're talking about pushing into that NWD file up there. Can you view the NWD just like in [? Navisworks? ?]

PATRICK FLORA: Yep.

AUDIENCE: So if you walk in, can you take the comments--

PATRICK FLORA: Yep. So--

AUDIENCE: --put all your comments in the NWD file, push them out to that?

PATRICK FLORA: So the comments don't go with the NWD file, if that makes sense. There's no shared view in the browser. But you can view the model and create the comments in this fashion. It's not the same [? work-- ?]

AUDIENCE: There's no comment dialog--

PATRICK FLORA: Exactly. I can't-- I don't have access to all of my View 1, View 2, View 3 type thing. Good question. Anything else on Team?

So like I said, Team is still what Plant 3D pushes out of the box. You can copy those files, take your project's set, put it up in BIM 360 Design to be able to utilize some workflows.

But I'm imagining-- Plant 3D's generally a step behind the other softwares. So Revit-- Collaboration for Revit now makes you use BIM 360 Design. So I imagine the next Plant 3D release will probably be in the design phase as well. I have no information of that. That's just my gut feel of years of being second fiddle, so.

So the differences between Design and Team right off the bat. So Team is just the one. There was Team, Field, Glue, Docs. You guys have probably seen those. Design helps bring all of those together. You have access to Field, Docs, all of that inside of BIM 360 Design.

So most of what we'll talk about today would have been legacy Docs. So if you ever used BIM 360 Docs, a lot of this will look very familiar to you. You're once again able to use that built-in browser. You don't have to download extra software to be able to view models, anything like that.

Anyone can be invited with an Autodesk product-- an Autodesk account. And we can actually set kind of a next level of granularity of what they can view, edit, comment, things like that.

So adding owners to the project. So this is a few extra steps to set up correctly. I like to keep clients organized by company, so that when we work on the next project, I can load their company in. I've already got everybody set up.

It takes a few extra steps. Look through the handout. I walk through all those steps. But the effort you put in in the front end pays dividends in the back end. Right? Junk in, junk out. Good in, good out. So definitely take the time to get those settings right the first time.

You can utilize different roles in the different companies. So you can assign architect, engineer, construction administration, drafter. I mean, there's tons of built-in roles that you can assign. And each role you can set the permissions for what the architect has access to or what the owner has access to.

But then with 360 Design, you can set individual permissions. You can override those file permissions on a file level, on a folder level, wherever you want. So it allows a lot of customization with what someone is allowed to view and what they're allowed to do.

So for those who have-- has anybody seen BIM 360 Design? The same people that used C4P. So this is the project home. You get a nice little address. It was snowing at my office yesterday, so I'm happy to be in Vegas, where it's sunny and at least a little balmy.

And see, when I created this, there's no document issues. We'll walk through some screenshots of when you create an issue, this is where they'll pop up.

So to add owners to the project, you're going to click these three dots and click Project Admin as a button under there. From there, you'll get to this information and be able to set permissions. In the document management, you can see there's this first column is just View. And then there's View and Upload; View, Upload, and Edit; and then control means that you can assign those permissions. Right?

So think of all of them being the project admin, the first three being a editor, and then the last one-- or the two-- would just be the viewer. You can also set, you can maybe see this faint gray box on the other side of line? So that's upload only. So maybe you've got someone that just needs to push RFI, receive files up to that-- the folder structure. You can actually assign just an upload only classification.

So BIM 360 Team in reviews. Once again, there's a couple of ways that we can do this. For trackability and being able to get that automated list, I prefer to create issues rather than markups in BIM 360 Design.

We'll walk through some of those. And this allows you to set due dates and assign the issues, and you're able to track that through completion. OK?

So no longer are we just creating a comment attached to something in a model. It's actionable. I can assign it to someone, say it's got to be due in a week, and you're able to track those. How many are done? What's the status? Is it answered? Do I need to approve it, make it resolved? You have access to do all of that in Design.

So this is something that I ran into and reached out to a few Plant 3D folks. BIM 360 Design right now, maybe one of the reasons that it didn't get rolled out for Plant. It sometimes doesn't do a real good job with fittings. So you can see in this screenshot, it shows some of them but definitely not all of them.

So nonetheless, we'll walk through the commenting procedure. So we're in a review meeting. Maybe somebody comes into my office. We open up BIM 360 Design and we navigate to this 2P-100 DWG. And then over here in the left column is a markup-- issues, what version you're in, and then this is the history.

So you can go back in time. You see this is version 6. I can actually go back to previous revisions and see what that model looked like.

Another cool feature is here in this button, It's the sheet layout. So how many of us have sat and watched Plant 3D generate orthos for time on end? Right? Just to be able to get a 2D view of something. So now in BIM 360 Design, you can actually click this button and then hit 2D, and it creates you a 2D plan that you can look at there on the computer. So don't generate the-- go through the ortho generation just to get something if you need to look at it real quick.

But like I mentioned, I like to use issues instead of markup. So when you click this button, it'll ask you to click in the model. So we've clicked here at this point, and you get this box. It will automatically be status. Give it a title. Once again, another good description that'll live on its own, doesn't need anybody to translate, that type of information.

You're able to assign it to a user, a role, or a company. So if I just need somebody to approve the purchase of this fitting or whatever, maybe I assign it to a whole company. If I know I want to assign it to the guy that I know worked in that area, I can pick him straight from the dropdown.

I don't really use this location box. I'm not really sure what it's there for, but it's not really applicable to what we're doing here. And then, of course, the most important, set a due date. My default's usually a week. If I know it's something it's going to be a little longer term, obviously, push it out. But definitely utilize that due date. That'll help kind of trigger and track how many of these open comments we have.

So this is what it looks like when you fill out that dialog box. Please correct the piping conflict in the expansion loop. I assigned it to the plant 3D tester. Put a due date. And it even lists the version of the current drawing.

So once it gets resolved, you see this is the exact same model, just a different day and all of the fittings showed up, so. One thing that is also notice is now there's a lot more information here. There's location details, subtype, type. Last Thursday, the BIM 360 Design team pushed out unified issues. So I met with some folks yesterday and was asking some questions that came up during final prep, and they said, "You haven't seen the update we pushed out on Thursday, have you?"

And I said, "No, I certainly haven't."

So we walked through some of these, and I've got some live screenshots and we'll do some demos here that adds that next level of information to be able to track. Its really cool stuff.

But you see when it gets answered, it changes from orange to blue. When it gets resolved, it goes from blue to gray. So you can track visually and with the listing in the document issues.

Previous slide works best for the one-off comments. Once again, I like the historical record of the NWD file. It's there. Everybody knows when it was created. There's no did-this-get-updated pushed out.

You're looking at multiple revisions of DWG files all together. The NWD makes sure that everything is time stamped at that same interval.

Navigation, comments, markup tools from your web browser. Of course, if you know a drawing was updated, you have access to that since you're in the cloud. And utilizing Design allows us to track those comments through completion. It gives us that list, the due date, is it past due, is it coming up, all of that information.

So we're back on our valve station here, and you can see I've assigned these issues here. Review the valve stack, remove the stairs, [? are ?] good handle length.

The other thing that's important-- so just like in Navisworks that you can see the Plant 3D properties, you can do the same thing in 360 Design. So I know, and most of you know, that that valve looks pretty universal, and it's a place holder.

So flag that immediately. Say, "Hey, get this right valve spec." But you're able to see all of that spec, size, tag, all of that same information is in BIM 360 Design.

So the other cool thing-- so who in here would like to take section cuts in Plant 3D? Yep. So using this tool down here, when you open a 3D model, you can take section cuts however you like-- top, side, any way.

And who knew that the inside of Plant 3D pipes look like layered cakes? So, I didn't know that. But it's another cool thing that you can do in BIM 360 Design.

You don't have to wait and let your model update. You can hit Save, let the cloud refresh, have this open in your browser in another window, take that section cut and be able to look and see what the clearance is between those.

You have access to the Measure tool. So you can click snap points, be able to get the measurement. Really cool, really cool feature in there.

Kind of similar to before. When you create an issue and assign it to someone, automated emails go straight out. "Plant 3D tester, Patrick Flora assigned issue number 8 to you." Says the folder that it's in.

But the one thing that this doesn't do is it doesn't give you the description. So in order to get past just the title of review valve spec, they have to click the View Issue button. Takes them into Design. They're able to see that descriptive comment you left them.

So now we've added some comments. This is the same login page. Now this keeps track of the open issues. You're able to click in this heading and be taken directly to the master list of open, resolved, all that information.

And we warmed up a couple degrees from whenever I took the first one. And so now, this was pre-Thursday, so there's only a few columns in here. But there is the Open, Void, Answered, and Closed.

So another thing that's important to remember, whenever an issue is created, it is never deleted. There is no way to delete issues from BIM 360. And that's for good reason. Right?

I mean, if you think about it, you don't want somebody just going through a purging all of the old comments, even if they're resolved. It's good there for that historical record. So you can void things, but you can never delete things.

I found that out when I was doing this early testing. You see that they're not associated with any drawings, but I couldn't delete them. So they'll live there forever.

You can also-- if you hit this Export button, you have access to directly export a PDF or back to an Excel file. It'll generate a CSV, and it'll come into Plant 3D. A lot less cleanup than the XML option in Navisworks. But this is what that looks like, the next level of information.

Like I said, very little cleanup. I think I kind of did a Wrap Text here, bolded the headings, and that's it. I left everything else the way it was.

So whenever you're ready to close down the project, create those archives. Do a quick export from BIM 360 Design. This will live forever. Takes up minimal space. Good to go.

But equally as useful, this is the PDF it creates. Easy to read, simple, and you don't have to keep track of the Excel stuff.

So hot off the press. As of this past Thursday, unified issues was released. This allows greater visibility and options when assigning issues, who can create them, and who can see them.

You have integrated into Field parameters. Is it an RFI? Is it a necessary change? The same descriptions that you could use in Field when creating an issue, you can now do in BIM 360 Design.

And you can actually add custom attributes to that. Maybe whenever someone creates an issue, I want them to think about is their scope impact, is their schedule impact, budget. I want them to think through those checkboxes. So you're able to add all that information in here.

So now when you click this drop down menu, this is what it looks like from the inside. You click Project Admin. From there, you'll want to hit Services In the next box. And now we have this Issues button up here.

So one thing that came out of my-- of my final reviews of this presentation was someone asked, "Well, if the owner is in the project, can he see internal questions back and forth?" And prior to Thursday, the answer was yes. If he has access to see that file, he has access to see all of the comments in them.

That's all well and good when I ask someone to approve the valve, but then if I ask, "Hey, was this valve included in the estimate?" I obviously don't want the owner to see that until I figure out the answer, whether it was the in or out. So this gives you the ability to say I only want the owner to see issues that are assigned to him or he creates. OK?

So there's five options here. Basic members can always view and edit things that are assigned to them. They can view and create issues. They can view all of the issues. They can create issues, or there's the kind of few-- full control.

So what you want to set the owner to is view and create. So they can only create new issues, and they can only view the issues that are assigned to them. So we'll test that here. I've got the BIM 360 app loaded up on my iPad and my iPhone to show you how easy it is to look at the model, even on an iPad, and be able to create comments. So real powerful stuff.

And then this is that that issues type. I was talking about. Maybe you're doing a punch list. You've got the model. You're walking through. Insulation not shown on pipe. Go through the model. Click the pipe. Click the issue. Create it. You've now got your punch list. You can export that, send it to the contractor. You're ready to go.

So live example with comments from iPad. So you were talking about being able to see the Navisworks model in the iPad or in the browser. So what I've got here-- my iPad is on the left., the iPhone app is on the right.

So you can see, we've got all the issues, similar on both sides. If I click in the iPad, I get all the information, the photos, all of the comments. I'm able to edit any of that and go on.

Then the cool thing is say I'm in a pinch. I've got the Navisworks model in here. I'm able to navigate to it. Say I want to create an issue, so I tap there. It opens up the same dialog box. Title review stairs.

We won't need to add a description right now. And let's assign to-- let's generate some emails for guys back at the office and hit Create. So notice on the iPad, you also have the ability to take a picture of what it looks like in the field.

So think about that same situation of I've got the NWD file of what we issued the contractor. I can take a picture of the pipe that doesn't have the insulation on it. I can create the issue tag-- the pipe should be insulated in the model-- and it all lives in this one issue, all that information in the same spot.