Rooms as a Product: Enabling Prefabrication for Hotels and Multi-Family Structures

DACE CAMPBELL: Welcome to Rooms as a Product, enabling prefabrication for hotels and multifamily structures. My name is Dace Campbell, and I'm joined by Andy Akenson. I am honored to speak with you today as a leader at the intersection of the AEC industry and innovation. I'm an architect with deep expertise in strategy, consulting, and hands on project experience in industrialized construction. I help AEC firms gain business value from their investment in emerging technology and processes, and I help tech companies land and expand in the AEC industry with their solutions.

I'm currently an industry advisor for RaaP, a context startup developing technical solutions to make prefabrication viable for multifamily residential and hospitality projects. And as I mentioned, I am joined by my colleague Andy Akenson.

ANDY AKENSON: Hey, I'm Andy Akenson. I am a distinguished software architect at Autodesk, focusing on industrialized construction challenges. Bringing together Autodesk portfolio of construction and manufacturing products and services, to help meet the needs of the industry. One of the things I'm focusing on right now is an initiative we're calling manufacturing informed design to help bring productization to the construction space.

DACE CAMPBELL: Thanks Andy. So from this presentation, we've got a handful of learning objectives. We want you to be able to identify the benefits of prefab and modular volumetric modularization to address industry crises. We want you to be able to identify the risks of prefab and volumetric modularization. Understand some of the proof points to de-risk prefab, to ensure project success, if you're using industrialized construction.

We also want you to appreciate the benefits to key project stakeholders of developing and embracing a rooms as a product approach to prefab. And then finally, we want you to be able to learn how manufacturing inform design solutions at Autodesk help enable industrialized construction strategies and workflows. Our presentation is primarily in three major parts. We'll start by reviewing the industry and some of the crises that we are facing and also creating in the construction industry, discuss in depth a rooms as a product approach, and then finally close out with a discussion around manufacturing and form design.

So let's get started here talking about the crises and opportunities as relates to the AEC industry. And the way I see it, and the way many see it in industry, is there's really three big crises that we're facing. Those are insustainability, inequity, and affordability. So from a sustainability perspective, the construction industry is filled with waste, and we have a direct impact on global sustainability like no other industry.

Literally half of the energy in our buildings is wasted, and we are responsible for half of the global waste contributing to climate change. There's a lot of room for improvement in sustainability, of course. That is coupled with a crisis around equity. By and large the construction industry both in North America and abroad globally are dominated by pale male individuals. That is, we are an exception compared to the overall workforce biased towards a strict bias, or a strong bias towards male workers over a gender equity, and certainly a vast majority of the workers in construction, especially senior individuals in construction, are white.

There's also an age crisis, as well. As you can see in the graphic to the right. Mid-career individuals and entry level individuals in construction have been consistent now for a number of years. However, the more senior individuals in our industry are aging out. That is, our workforce is getting older, and it's getting smaller due to attrition and retirement, and we do not have the workforce backfilling that attrition. So there is a-- we're reaching a crisis point from an age perspective as well.

And finally couple that with the third crisis of affordability. It's no secret that construction is expensive. It has been getting more so over the past several decades and years. And when you drill into specifically the multifamily residential markets, and the hospitality markets, it's even more so. This has been going on since before the pandemic, and has only gotten worse since the pandemic as the cost of construction continues to rise and outpace the incomes of those who would become occupants in those buildings.

And to make matters worse, while we have only recently gotten a good handle on inflation, that comes at the cost of rising mortgage rates and interest rates, which are driving up construction costs. And quite simply the pace of being able to afford construction, the price of affordable construction, is outpacing the affordability, the income of those who would occupy those buildings. And this frankly compounds the equity crisis. So it's not an equity crisis just within construction, but in society at large because of the affordability of construction. And that's where we need to focus our attention.

Now a lot of this is due to being beholden to a traditional mentality in construction. There's this-- it's been described as an iron triangle. That is if there are three dimensions to construction and cost, schedule, and quality. It's often thought that you can get two of those, and only two of those at the expense of the third. That is not an acceptable mentality, and we need to find ways where we can address and hit on all three legs of the triangle, or all three legs of the stool, to get less expensive, better, and faster buildings.

Now this shows up in a number of ways in traditional construction. We simply we can't get estimates soon enough in construction, or reliable enough. They're often inaccurate, they're changing. There are workaround processes like value engineering to try and get past the limitations of our construction estimating. We struggle to find on site skilled labor resources. This goes right hand in hand with the equity crisis mentioned before. And finally this is a difficult process to undergo, because there's difficulty in coordination in design and construction workflows. And it's worsened by poor communication between stakeholders.

Now while that's true of construction in general, it's a complex problem. I'm not going to try and pretend this is-- I'm not trying to oversimplify it, but I will also try to distill it down. Specifically around the housing and hospitality markets, they are arguably broken because so much housing and so much hospitality is not affordable for the intended occupants. I think we've made the case here that's due in part because construction as an industry is broken.

Now pivot from there to a bit of a hypothesis. There are many who think that prefabrication and industrialized construction could help construction out, and I would certainly support that, although-- and I'll argue here coming up-- prefab itself is broken and not consistent. And I would argue that that's the case simply because there's inadequate solutions, both technical solutions and processes, to really make prefab viable so that construction can be fixed, so that housing and hospitality can be fixed.

So a lot of layers to the onion here. But bottom line we have a number of crises that we're facing, especially in affordability crisis. And this points the way to some opportunities for us to check ourselves and see if there's a better way to go about construction.

So with that I want to introduce this concept of rooms as a product. And to start there, I want to pick on industrialized construction, or at least the way we've thought-- tend to think about industrialized construction up till now. And when I use the term industrialized construction, I use that-- right or wrong, I use that synonymously with prefabrication and volumetric modular construction. So I use those a bit interchangeably.

But anybody who's been around industrialized construction can tell you the theoretical benefits of doing so. I mean, first and foremost, you'll hear about lower costs, faster schedules, sometimes associated with lower costs. Higher quality construction, less waste, better sustainability, safer working conditions. The list goes on and on of what theoretically the benefits are from industrialized construction. And frankly with apologies to REM, you will hear about shiny happy people holding hands.

Now this hypothetical or theoretical set of benefits can in exist, can be true, but it can't exist in a vacuum. It needs a lot of care and support to ensure that that happens. Because unfortunately successful prefab is still the exception rather than the rule. This is especially true in the multifamily residential and hospitality markets. If you, especially and even going further, if you kind of pick on the suburban developments or the exurban developments outside of complex downtown sites, the developers-- and I'm stereotyping when I say this-- but the developers top priorities are typically centered around cost, whether that's first cost, cost per square foot, cost per key. They're very, very concerned about the cost of the project, and often their concerns stop there.

Other benefits to an industrialized construction like time to market or meeting and exceeding quality standards those are important, but those are often distant second priorities for developers in these markets. And sad to say, stereotypically the potential benefits that industrialized construction bring into sustainability and safety are simply not on the radar of many hotel and residential owners and developers. So a story about those benefits doesn't ring true, and they're not willing to invest in a prefabrication approach, because they don't see the merits of what it could offer.

So there's a lot of risk of embracing industrialized constructions if you're a developer, especially a developer in multi-family residential and hospitality. True, industrialized construction prefab may be at a lower cost, but they often don't know that. We often don't know that until the project is complete. And we need to have earlier proof points or ways to measure the success of prefabrication along the way, rather than waiting three years for that final cost to come in and wonder if we've met or even beat the original estimate.

And as I said, the other clearer benefits to industrialized construction just simply aren't a priority for some individuals in some of these markets. They face needing to have a higher investment up front, higher financing costs associated with prefabrication. Frankly prefab isn't proven in most geographic markets. It tends to be limited to very specific markets.

And there's a lot of inexperienced players and stakeholders in AEC who just haven't had enough reps with industrialized construction. So there's a big risk for developers to embrace it. And frankly, they're not alone. There's risks associated with industrialized construction for architects.

Many architects are uncomfortable with these unfamiliar constraints. As good as architects are to design against constraints, these are unfamiliar ones. There's a demand for needing to make design decisions earlier, because things need to be prefabricated. And yet not necessarily having a fabricator on board forces architects to hold back on their willingness to detail in advance of their normal workflows, or their traditional workflows. They have a perception, right or wrong, that they have limited design choices and constraints.

And of course, the inexperience that many have inexperienced coordinating directly with the fabricator as a new project stakeholder in AEC. There's not often traditionally been a direct connection between architects and fabricators. And then finally with most modularized construction, the risks have shifted. Architects have developed mechanisms to deal with risks of where a building might leak at the intersection of trades. Now we're talking about potentially dealing with water leakage, for example, at the intersection of modules and assemblies, not necessarily at the intersection of trade.

So there's a different way of thinking about how risks are dealt with, and how they're mitigated. And this can make architects uncomfortable. Frankly, it can also make builders uncomfortable.

The biggest risk for of industrialized construction for builders is simply described as it's an unfamiliar tool for them. It's an unfamiliar set of processes that they just haven't had enough laps around the track. It can be very difficult to get accurate project estimates up front, and that's definitely a demand of prefabrication is to really know what you're getting into up front. They're dealing with lack of their own experience, or a lack of experienced skilled labor with the processes.

These buildings can take three years to go from start to finish. As builders get into prefabrication or industrialized construction, lessons learned and best practices come very slow at first. If it takes the three years before they can understand what's going on, it could be another three years before they can improve upon it. So they're kind of limited as they kind of ramp up their own processes and resources.

And then finally, for better or for worse, as a builder who may otherwise be doing self-perform work gives away or reduces their scope to give scope to a pre-fabricator, that can mean shifting risk and reduced opportunities for profit. There's less work for them to do. Maybe they've priced their profit based on contingencies, or even change orders, and having less scope and less opportunity to take advantage of that business model can be considered a risk for builders.

And then finally, the fabricators themselves. It's not easy for fabricators to necessarily adjust to a prefabrication mindset, especially if it's a shift to a multi-trade volumetric modular construction approach. There's very uneven market conditions, it becomes feast or famine for these fabricators. And frankly overeating can kill you just as fast as starvation, in this kind of market. There's an unpredictable pipeline, there's unpredictable revenue, there's underproduction and overproduction, starts and stops. And the field is littered with fabricators who could not get a handle on prefabrication because of this kind of uneven unpredictability.

So bottom line is, industrialized construction is risky for those people who are willing to try it perhaps, but not really understand the right approach. So what I'd propose is we take a moment and consider going beyond just stick building, but stick building in a shop instead of on the site. But to go further into it and kind of double down and consider the room as an actual product. This productization of a volume of space, or a room, can open up a few sticking points and can change people's perceptions of how they might produce their work.

It goes beyond the prefabricated assemblies we're used to in construction. Things like elevators or curtain walls that we've started to accept could be prefabricated, goes far beyond that to a productization mentality, where you've got a catalog of discrete SKUs or catalog items that you can pick from to say, this is a room built to-- designed and built to a standard of quality that I can accept in my project, and pull that out of the catalog, and onto the jobsite.

It's typically very limited scope. It has known shape, size, and quality. And in this case, even if it's not lower cost, it comes with cost certainty. And that is key, the cost certainty. And you treat this prefabricated volumetric room more like an appliance than an assembled kit of parts. And the image here on this slide kind of illustrates that.

It would be ludicrous to think that you might connect with an automobile manufacturer, a Ford, a Honda, Toyota, and order a car and have them show up in your driveway with hundreds or even thousands of parts, and start to assemble it on your driveway for you on site. Of course, it may be configured to your specific needs, to your liking, your color, your options, but it's manufactured somewhere else, and is brought to your site, or brought to the dealer site for you to pick up as a fully assembled product. That is the kind of mentality shift that the industry needs to make to get past some of these risks associated with industrialized construction and prefab.

I mentioned how there's this risk of not getting proof of the value until the project is over. I want to address that here for a moment. There are a number of ways to de-risk industrialized construction along the way, besides waiting for project completion. Because often prefab is in an accelerated delivery, it can actually lower costs, because typically at the end of a project, that's where profits for the architect and the contractor start to erode. So if we can accelerate the project, there's a better chance that those key stakeholders remain profitable.

It's also good to know that because of this acceleration, all the stakeholders are going to know whether their quality standards are being met earlier than typical. And of course, you can accelerate permitting with the right kind of relationship with an authority having jurisdiction.

I mentioned the unpredictability and the variability associated with prefab. If you do it right, if you develop, if you kind of lean into this rooms as a product approach, there is an opportunity to gain more predictability and less variability. Not just for the fabricator, but of course centered around them. And that can translate to lower costs and increase in profits. Less variability in production often means fewer layoffs, less overtime, means happier workers, means more predictability, begets more predictability.

And then finally along the way in a rooms as a product approach, there's this increased confidence and understanding. There's an increase in collaboration between the stakeholders, that we're finding that there are fewer write downs, because there's better communication, there's fewer RFIs there's fewer change orders, and those are more leading indicators than trailing indicators. The trailing indicator being, what did the project cost at the end? So there's ways to track your success along the way and monitor your progress while in flight.

So with having introduced this rooms as a product approach, I want to talk briefly about a company Raap. As I mentioned up front, I'm kind of representing them today. I want to talk about RaaP, which stands for Rooms as a Product, which is a context startup working to develop technology to make prefabrication viable. To allow developers to build a lower cost, and open sooner.

They lean-- RaaP leans into the multifamily and hospitality markets specifically, and is developing tools in estimating value engineering and DFMA to support and allow teams to understand the strategic use and the right use of prefab options. Now RaaP has a number of tools in development over a number of phases. You can see them here in the budgeting phase. There's a prototyping phase, the design phase, and a fabrication phase.

I'll just show you a few quick screenshots of some of the tools in development and going to market. First of all, there's some very nice estimating tools that are put both in uniformat and masterformat, to allow developers to understand what they're getting when they're prefabricating versus stick built. And in short of showing the interface in real time, here's a few screenshots.

You can see here's an opportunity for a developer very early while they're doing their pro-forma work to select the type of building they want, the quality, in this case, it's a hotel, maybe they've picked an extended stay, they can enter a zip code and the number of rooms, and get very quickly a summary, an intelligent summary based on actual data of what it would cost in terms of dollars and time to build that facility stick built, with full volumetric modular rooms, or maybe go partially into prefab with pods and panels.

You get an executive summary, you can see then there's a breakdown system by system in uniformat and masterformat formatting. Thanks to the magic of 4D, you can understand the timeline, and here you can see in these quick screenshots the full volumetric option allows the project to break ground, while the other options are still in permitting and financing. Fast forward to the end of the timeline where you can see time to revenue, time to opening, where the hotel developers actually can have a predictable revenue stream and some options, while still under construction and traditional delivery.

So really making the point that this can be a cheaper and faster option. And it's all based on local construction intelligence, local construction data, based on the initial inputs that the developer would enter in.

Then a little bit further on past that initial scoping phase we've got some prototyping tools that allow-- pull from known design templates, known design standards and allow for some cost refinement and some faster production ultimately in design. Here you see a snapshot where the user is able to choose between grades of finishes, and of course that's attached to the supply chain, and known suppliers and partners who can provide the right fixtures at the right quality level.

Also can get into, again, using those design templates can get into a known set of connection points between the prefabricated volumetric modular module, and connecting them with each, or other stick built components on site. So it allows very quickly people, the project stakeholders, to get a real good understanding of what it's going to cost, how fast it's going to go together, and what designing to a known level of quality and what those connections are going to look like.

And then and then finally another tool in development is actually creating the sense of a marketplace of partners. RaaP has their own set of partners. You can see a few listed here, like HED is a key partner in design. Obviously we've got a whole ecosystem of partners, including, as you can see here, Modulus Consulting, Hilton, DPR, the list goes on of people being pulled into and self-identifying as prefabrication and modular subject matter experts in this network.

And the idea here is that as this grows over time, we'll be able to offer actionable intelligence, some AI informed decisions that sort through the project requirements, the supplier capabilities, the location, the relative level of busyness or not busyness of some of these partners and fabricators to take on work, to try and smooth out that pipeline, if you will, across the marketplace. Now this approach has a number of benefits, and I'll just run through these real quick here.

First of all, the benefits to the owners and developers. Again, it's about cost certainty. Even if it's cost competitive, or in some cases more expensive than stick built construction, it's the cost certainty that we're finding is really what's driving the developers top priority to lower costs. They really just want to know what they're getting into.

And this is, again, because of a very specific narrow scope. We're not prefabricating the entire building, we're focused on repeatability and predictability. Other benefits are, of course, reliably quantifiable materials. Those estimates around those rooms, those hotel rooms and those residences, are driven by knowing exactly what goes into them. So we get really tight estimates, bills of materials that align exactly with the expertise of who can count them, and who can deliver on them.

And then finally, it's lower cost because of predictable labor costs. Fabricating in a shop means weather is not a factor, which can affect quality and schedule, as any builder can tell you. So there's some really clear benefits to this rooms as a product approach to the owners and developers. And just as other key stakeholders found risks in industrialized construction, there's benefits to them as well.

For architects the primary benefit of this rooms is a product approach is allows them to stay on target. There are already known standards that need to be met, let's say a hotel has a specific standard. If we already have that standard baked into the templates, there's no design question associated with that. That's already a known quantity. It allows architects to design from the inside out, knowing that those rooms are a known factor.

Architects can rely on DFMA best practices by the subject matter experts in the network. They can proceed to design in detail with those pre-qualified fabrication partners who are already on board, and already know what they're doing, because they've had several laps around the track. And frankly, architects can then focus on their design energy on the unique conditions where their skills are most needed, whether it's the site or the lobby, or the facade, or perhaps other design gymnastics that might be associated with a unique facility. Let the hotel rooms and the residences be just rooms, and let the rest of the building be where architects can put their attention.

And frankly there's an opportunity for them to stay more profitable during construction administration because of the faster schedule and fewer RFIs. And some of those benefits translate directly to builders, as well, with the rooms as a product approach. Frankly they can accelerate the delivery of a project, again, because those known standards have already been met. It's not an issue for them to worry about. And they can focus their energy where their skills are most needed, often unique site conditions, unique logistics, and trade coordination. Because again, they're working with trustworthy experienced stakeholders in this network, in this marketplace.

And frankly because of the accelerated delivery, there's fewer general conditions at stake, fewer weather delays, fewer RFIs, contractors can get in, make their money, and go home. And then finally complete the tour around the stakeholders, there's benefits to the fabricators from this rooms as a product approach. And it really is centered around predictability. It allows them to see the future, and trust it.

They have known standards to meet as well. Their design and fabrication details have already been resolved, and are repeatable, and they can focus on a predictable pipeline of work. They can employ their skilled labor in a factory setting, which is easier to manage, and they can frankly just concentrate on producing. And they're not distracted by the coordination issues of a fabricator trying to get into prefabrication, who would otherwise be working with designers and builders, who may have less experience in prefab.

So there's a lot of benefits to this rooms as a product approach. Whether RaaP specifically as a company is the right answer, whether there's others in the marketplace doing the same thing, I just want to double down on saying it's not just enough to say we're going to go industrialized construction. It's not just enough to say you're going to prefabricate it. You have to be really thoughtful, and I would say double down on this productization approach to rooms as volumetric modular processes.

So with that, I want to hand off to my co-presenter Andy Akenson to talk a little bit about what Autodesk is doing in this space, because it's quite complementary. The tools are developing and workflows are proposing are quite complementary to this rooms as a product approach.

ANDY AKENSON: Yeah, and I think when we look at manufacturing informed design and the efforts we're putting in here at Autodesk around industrialized construction, our main theme here is to really help design with certainty to, like Dace mentioned, reduce risk and really increase the amount of benefit for industrialized construction in the end to end workflow.

And so if we look at some of the major industry challenges that we see here at Autodesk. We see this unmet global demand for buildings. Really as Dace mentioned, this poor sustainability practice, construction really is leading to high amount of waste. And we think there's huge amount of opportunity to address some of these challenges.

And then it's as Dace mentioned as well, workforce challenges. So really providing a way to attract and retain talent, and also open it up to people who may not have traditionally been fitting those roles. So if we look at the future, we really see manufacturing buildings not just offsite, but like Dace mentioned, really changing the way we approach how you build buildings.

Productizing components and systems. Really what we want to present here today is how do you create products, how do you use them in your design, and then how do you get that connected all the way through the workflow. And then designing with products. So moving the idea of industrialized construction into the design process. As Dace mentioned, we want to really enable this for the customers at design time.

Right, so if we look at some of the main challenges, we really want to help architects know that their design choices are manufacturable as early as possible. The current solutions we see as a huge gap, we want to provide a way to narrow that gap and provide timely feedback, so that the architect knows at design time their decisions are known manufacturable. So if we look at how we can help bridge that design and manufacturing chasm today, we see the use of construction product templates so that you can design and customize with known construction products, that can lead to automating downstream all the manufacturing documentation and processes, and really bringing these two things together with the product in the middle.

We want to provide a way to connect these workflows, so that that construction product template can then drive outputs for the right level of detail at the right time. The full bill of materials while you're working with a simplified representation in your design, and then being able to connect directly whether it's to the shop floor for drives or whether it's for rendering for upstream and sales. We want to really link that all together through a single definition of a product.

So if we look at our vision here for manufacturing form design, we really want to design buildings with certainty to deliver faster, higher quality, and reducing waste. And so how we do that is by bringing together, I think this is not that dissimilar to the car on the driveway, right? We don't want to necessarily deliver all the parts and pieces. We want to deliver a cohesive system.

So if you go next. Our vision here is to really unlock industrialized construction by providing this real time validation, and delivering accurate manufacturing information at the right time. So really during that design time to have it be informed at the right time for the designer.

All right, so if we look at how we do that today, right here at Autodesk we have tools that are really good in the manufacturing space for defining manufacturing process, the right level of detail, all the nuts and bolts and washers, and how you're going to fabricate. We also have tools like Revit which let you do design intent for large systems of components in buildings. We really want to bring those two things together.

So we see three different personas here. Really what we're doing in manufacturing form design is allowing a product engineer in a manufacturing tool like Inventor to author and publish their product. The architect in Revit to be able to customize, to find the product, customize it, and place it in their design. And then the production engineer, able to pick up all those products in their project, and generate at scale all of the downstream consumables.

So if we focus in on the author and publisher in Inventor, we're going to walk through what that looks like here in Inventor. So here in Inventor I have a volumetric apartment module. It's a fully fabrication level of detail, it's fully parametric. We have parameters that can drive it. So here we have a form that lets you configure the volume, lets you configure the rooms, there are rules behind this that make it highly engineered and flexible, but still within limits of what can be both fabricated and transported.

So here in Inventor we have logic that defines that. And then we have a way to define a product definition. So this is a way to create that definition that can be used in design. We'll set up the context, we'll set up the parameters that we want to expose to the designer. Here I'll select a number of parameters that I want to expose, here's the parameters I've adopted.

And those parameters then have rules. So we have things like minimum and maximum to keep you within limits. Maybe you have increments. And often you want to wait to define that in a way that's approachable to the manufacturer. So here we have a low code way to define that, to set up the form, but you can also do more complex things like setting up rules for, if you don't have enough room in your apartment for something like a bathroom pod, you can have a rule set up here to determine whether or not you have room for that, so that it can inform the architect to know, oh, this is a certain amount of-- within these certain constraints, certain options get turned on or off.

And then I'll specify what Revit family I want to have created. So we want to generate content that's usable in Revit. Here I'll specify a family name, and I'll specify a level of detail for the product, as well, as well as other outputs. So here I'll publish this. So here I will give it a release name so the architect can find it, and I'll give it a location in Construction Cloud. We use an account, a project, and a folder for organization of the products and who has access to it.

So I can either publish this to somebody else's, or share it to a project level library of products. So I'll publish that. OK, and then if we go to the next persona, so once I publish this as a product engineer, then the next persona is the architect. So the architect doesn't need to know or care that it was created in inventory. They just want to find and consume these products in context of their design, but stay within the guardrails of what can be manufactured.

So if we look at it in Revit, I have a site here with apartments and wall panels, some stairs. A bunch of prefabricated components. We have an add in here in Revit that allows me to find the product. So here I'll specify my account, my project, and my folder. And here I'll find the apartment unit that was published, and I can customize it directly here in Revit, but within the constraints of the manufacturer.

So here you'll see a thumbnail preview. You'll see the minimum and maximum. It enforces the rules right away. It's too small, so I can't have a bathroom pod. It enforces the minimum values. So let's make it a value that works, and we'll configure it for our site, and then insert that directly here in Revit.

And here we'll create a Revit family and insert that directly in context of the Revit design. So here you have a product that is known manufacturable, but still usable in your design process. So we're trying to inform that as early as possible. And then here within Revit as well, I'm able to select and edit. So if I want to make some changes in my design I can update the product directly here in context of the design.

Right, so now if we shift over to the third persona, so now that I have my site with all of my products, for the production engineer I want to create all of my downstream assets for that. So we've created a web application here. All you have to do is, once your Revit project is in Construction Cloud, we're able to interrogate that project for all of the products inside. So here you can see all the various products that are in that site, you can see the values that were used for that product. And then I can generate outputs for that product.

So because we know what values were used, and because we have the full manufacturing level of detail behind it, we're able to generate full bills of material. So it could be working with a very low level of detail in Revit, but get a hold of the high level of detail for the full bill of materials downstream. Right? So that's really what we're trying to do here with manufacturing form design, is tie together that manufacturing model, get the guardrail set up for the designer, and then be able to generate full documentation downstream, as well as provide some insights back on things like productization for your project.

So that's a preview of what we're working on here at Autodesk for manufacturing informed design. And now hand that back to you, Dace.

DACE CAMPBELL: And thank you, everybody, for your time and attention as we presented these topics. Would absolutely encourage you to reach out to us either directly, or in the comments on the Autodesk University site, with your thoughts, questions, comments, concerns. I'd love to engage you in continue to improve these proposed processes and tools. So again, thank you for your time and enjoy the rest of Autodesk University.