AECO: How Owners Can Bridge the Gap Between AEC and Operations

MEG SWANSON: All right, everyone. Are you ready for the afternoon session? The coveted 3:00 time?

FRED KRAUS: [LAUGHS]

MEG SWANSON: Thanks so much for joining us. There's actually a lot of studies in time of day and attention span, and one of the things-- because everyone says after lunch is always the lull time, and it's actually like the 3:00, 4:00 in the afternoon time.

So there are a lot of studies and-- actually, in Australia, where you have people that are going in and they're getting their sentencing-- so they're up for parole and they're figuring out if they're going to get freed or if they're going to go back in for their time. And so they were tracking judges, so how likely are they to free someone or put them back in on parole? And in the morning right after their coffee, everybody's great. People are getting paroled, they're all happy. And then it kind of dips down and everyone has lunch, and then they're like paroled and happy, and then 3:00, it's like the other dip down. So the moral of the story is if you're ever up for parole, make sure you know what time of day your sentencing is.

[LAUGHTER]

MEG SWANSON: So hopefully we're all in a good space here. Although we are in New Orleans, so that's probably--

FRED KRAUS: We don't have a slide on that.

MEG SWANSON: Yeah, potentially in the mix for everyone. And so thrilled to be here today. What we're going to do is talk through operations. So as you heard this morning in the keynotes and a number of the sessions, there's a massive focus with the Autodesk community environment with all of us around AEC and then O for operations. And so that's what we really want to talk through today is, how do you make that connection and that handoff between all the work that goes into designing, building, launching an environment, and then everything that happens afterwards?

So Fred and I are going to talk through a bit of what we see in the industry. So we've got the privilege of being with a company. We've got about 10,000 customers, about 11 million users across work tech software. So they track anything from meeting room bookings-- I need to book a room-- all the way to facility management, like it's too cold in here, the AC is broken. So everything in between on assets.

So we're going to talk through some challenges that we're seeing in the market, especially as we've had, as all of us have seen, such a huge evolution in just speeding up the digitization of environments. And then we're going to walk through some use cases too, of just screenshots of here's what we see, here's what we see in the field, health care case studies to walk through so you can see really how to tie these two together and get full optimization as you're moving from the handover between construction into operations. Sound good?

All right, so a little bit about-- happy to be here. So I run marketing. Some of the things that I'm going to walk through are just based on what we see from a research and what people are searching for.

So that's the beautiful thing about marketing is you all get tracked because we listen to everything you say and search for, which is great for us building products and servicing customers, because we know what they're searching for and we know what they're looking for. So I've been privileged to be in the construction, engineering design space since about 2005, when we were talking about-- guess what-- collaborative environments, and how do you bring people together, and how do we have movable walls and environments. And so it's always interesting to see how some things change, some things don't as we're all continuing to bring people together into great environments. So Fred?

FRED KRAUS: Yeah, hi. Fred Kraus, VP of products. So I run products. There's two main divisions in our company in iOffice SpaceIQ, assets and workplace. Even though there's a lot of mix between them, and I pretty much head up the asset division. So my focus is on Autodesk, and how to get how to get the critical asset information from Autodesk into ongoing facility operations. And I came into the business through Archibus, one of the products in our suite of products in our family is Archibus. Long time product manager at Archibus, and then have broadened out to cover assets as well.

MEG SWANSON: Great. So how many folks here have been involved in a photo that looks like this? Yeah, so we've launched the environment. Had the privilege a couple of years ago, we opened up an office on [INAUDIBLE], just a couple of blocks up the street. And there was this big moment, right? The second we're opening a building, we're letting our tenants in, we're letting employees in, the second we do, what happens?

It's like, almost everything's out of date already because as soon as somebody walks through the door, it's-- everything starts changing because maybe the assets that we put in there aren't right. Maybe the configuration is not right. Maybe they didn't quite hire in the same way for the team members to be in the office that they had planned for. And so you've got that handoff between everything that was built in the design phase and everything that was carried through in the systems, which took a tremendous amount of work, and then we hand it over to operators, whether it's a building operator or it's an independent company.

What we want to talk through today is making sure we have those really smooth transitions because a lot of really leading engineering, construction, architectural firms are having very smooth transitions in this, because we've all walked into a space that we needed to renovate, and you probably didn't have digital floor plans. You probably had no idea when everything was constructed. And so that's the beauty of today. We're able to have these smooth transitions and handovers, which is why we see so much innovation within the Autodesk solutions to be building in these operations, how we pull in BIM modeling, how we pull everything together into the built environment because when you look at the total cost of ownership for a company-- and this is a pop quiz, and we have prizes.

So what is the most expensive thing for a company? What's the most expensive thing on the balance sheet for every company? Labor. The people! The people are the most expensive because we're not cheap. What is the second-most expensive thing, very close behind it?

AUDIENCE: Energy.

MEG SWANSON: It is-- yeah, energy is close. It's all the capital expenditures. So it is all the building operations, and there's just a massive opportunity. So 80%-- we look at projects-- 80% of the total cost of ownership of the project is post construction. So it's all in operations. So it is the-- and then as we look at sustainability and everything that we need to do now to renovate buildings, that's also starting to get a little higher across. So we want to make sure that we've got really strong hand-offs between, and we'll share some technology screenshots and some ways to do that. Fred?

FRED KRAUS: Yeah. So when we talk about what we need to make this smooth transition, and to try to start curbing the costs of operations and making it more efficient, we want kind of the data stream to look like this among the phases of planning and design and construction so that when you get to hand over in commissioning, you have a lot of the data and you kind of like, can go. You can hit the ground running in operations. But that's not really what we get. There's a lot of data loss between what we see when we talk to customers and what we see in the industry. There's a lot of data handoff problems, even within design and construction such that when we get to commissioning we want to be on that blue line, but we're kind of like, down in that black line. There's a lot of-- and there's reasons for this. I mean, there's process issues, there are data interoperability-- interoperability issues and software.

MEG SWANSON: Easy for you to say.

FRED KRAUS: You know-- and there's just-- we see that those kind of problems, collaboration problems-- which I think BIM is really helping to improve upon-- but when you have those kind of problems, you have data loss. And so when you want to get to that blue line, you're really kind of stuck with, as Meg mentioned, incomplete data and bad data when you get to hand over. And these are the kind of things that we're trying to improve.

One of the things that we want-- and as I mentioned, the solution is better data. We want better data at handover so we can use it in operations. The questions that I-- and this is a kind of a busy slide, but the questions that I have asked is why now? Why is now a really good time to start thinking about this and improving it? There are business drivers, technology drivers, and process drivers that are really kind of helping to improve the situation. Now business wise, I think there's more emphasis from owners on wanting to improve the occupier experience.

There's also AEC is getting into the operations, too. There's this vertical integration that we're seeing for-- and we had some people come by the booth that are, we're a design and construction company, but we want to keep-- we know that operations is a big deal, and we want to keep them going, our customers going in operations. So that kind of vertical integration is happening. COVID is really forcing us all to think about the workplace differently. And one of the things that really keeps on coming up is a re-design of the space. And that's another big business driver. That means we need to have good data on our space in order to be able to embark on these re-designs very efficiently.

MEG SWANSON: Yeah, because around work spaces-- so we've got data every single day, right? On the top terms that are searched by everybody on the planet, thanks to Google. So what do you think the number one term that is searched when people are searching for workplace?

FRED KRAUS: [INAUDIBLE]

MEG SWANSON: What's that? Yeah. So what was that, flexibility? Yeah, so flexibility employee experience, number one that we see coming across. Number two right now, it just spiked up, visitor management because guess what? People are back to the office. Guess what? They have people visiting. They have no idea what to do with the people coming in.

So we visited a very large corporate client a couple of weeks ago. We walked into their offices, all right? They are there. Nobody greeted us. Found the coffee area, started making ourselves some coffee. Like, that's not OK. So it was a-- we really-- as we look at offices, it's been such a big shift to bring employees back.

And now on top of it you've got vendors, you've got visitors and visitor management. So third that just spiked up over the past, probably about six weeks, is office renovation. So now that everyone's coming back-- started in Australia first, because we had a lot of return to office in that space.

And now we're seeing I mean, just every single day-- and it's looking like this week it's going to outpace and become the number two search term. But just how do we-- now that we're in the offices, we need to redefine them, we need to create new experiences, and we need to renovate them. So massive-- not just what we hear in the news, but just truly what people are literally searching for every single day, which is a big opportunity for everyone who's in this space.

FRED KRAUS: Yeah. And so further-- in addition to business drivers, there's technology drivers. And what we're seeing also is what we're learning also here in this conference and even last year, when if you attended AU remotely, it's the cloud technologies. It's the cloud technologies that-- I'm going to try the word again-- that are improving the interoperability of data so that it's not just siloed in one process.

And what we want to do is leverage that interoperability-- I'm getting much better at it-- to really to bridge between design, construction, and ongoing operations, so that those cloud processes are really helping. And process drivers are-- I think of the-- there's a comment-- Franklin Covey wrote the, what was it? The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

MEG SWANSON: Yeah.

FRED KRAUS: He says begin with the end in mind. And we another thing that we're trying to influence is with data and with hand over, if design and construction starts with the end in mind, then they have-- they're incented to always continue to have the good asset data, good workplace data through the design and construction process. We don't have that data loss that I showed in the previous slide, so that we have good hand over data. And we're working with Autodesk on that.

The tandem team we've worked with also has the same goals in mind. Begin with the end. To begin with what you want in the end in ongoing, in handover to make sure that you have the right asset data. Again, the right categories, the families, everything that's ready to go throughout the design and construction process.

And it's hard. We know that. I mean, when a building's being built and there's issues in the construction process, the last thing that people want to do is go back to the model and update it. So the better that we have-- that we can collaborate on the tools and make that process easier, the better the outcomes will be, and the better we'll be able to drive cost improvements in ongoing operations.

Some of the data related questions we'll get to also throughout this presentation-- who's going to use the data, what data are you going to collect, and how will it be validated and maintained? Very important questions that are not easy. But those are the things that we are-- we're working with people that are our customers to have that in mind as they go through the pre-handover processes.

MEG SWANSON: And so we look at what's happening today with offices and in the workplace. We just recently ran a survey across US, UK, Australia, so about 10,000 employees in each. And so we asked them-- because there's this debate, right? I think many of us are involved in re-envisioning what offices look like, taking a look at college campuses and universities, house health care. So we look at what's happening within people going back to the office. The green is how many days in a typical week were you in the office pre-2020, and then how many days are in the week now-- are in the office now?

So for the US, there's this whole-- I mean, my goodness. For those of us here in the US, all you hear about is people being forced back to an office, right? The reality is they kind of weren't there to begin with. So what we see with data, we track this across 10,000 customers where there was a lot of flexibility. There was a lot of hybrid working before. And so now we're seeing not too dramatic of a shift on average. We've got team members in across the globe, about two days a week.

So when you look at the UK, here's where we do have a pretty big shift. So five days in the office, pretty standard for those of us working in those environments. And so now, that's really gone down to two. And so this, as we know, it's going to bounce around and evolve over time. And then if you were in Australia in the early start of this year, you walked into any office building, it's like nothing had ever happened. The office buildings were full, the lobbies were full. And so what we see here is that everything pre was still very much very office focused, being the office. And so now we're down to about three days a week.

And obviously, this is flexing and evolving every single day. We were with a company that has a very large headquarters in San Francisco. And so they've got 20 floors, they think they need seven. And so-- but they don't know which seven. They don't know what teams. They don't know what kind of space people need.

And so this is where, as you're asking, what data do you need, what sensors do we put in place, what technology can we put in place? Because as you're designing spaces, just even planning that question of, how are you going to track the usage of this? How are we going to track how teams are working? Because what we're seeing also with clients that have offices globally or manufacturing facilities globally, it's very different.

So same office, same work product, you know, same things team members are doing, you go to the Melbourne office, you go to the San Francisco office, wildly different as far as people coming in, people coming back into the office. So it's really good when you're working with global environments just to keep reminding them, it's not just about the headquarters footprint, that we're going to have different work experiences throughout every country, and this is just going to continue to evolve and change. And so how do you keep the facilities, keep the environments ahead of that where we're getting data, we're getting information, and we're able to plan for the next renovation, the next build-out, the next campus expansion.

FRED KRAUS: So we'll dive into some use cases to kind of try to bring this a little bit more to brass tacks about what we're actually doing about it. The first is, you know, we talk about the life cycle in the AEC and the operations life cycle. They're really interconnected. And this slide kind of-- there's different roles that have different motivations, especially on the operations side. Starting with the building, the building operator, the building manager, what do they care about? They want more efficient operations. They want to lower their costs. They want to make sure-- they want to increase their asset lifecycle.

You know, and then that feeds to the employees, or the managers, the department managers, the division managers. What do they want? Well, they want a good workplace to go and work in. They want their employees to be productive. They want redesigns to work for to their workforce.

And that kind of feeds into or transitions into the employee. What do they want? Well, they, as Meg mentioned, they want good employee experiences. They want to be able to when they go into the office, they want to have productive experiences there. They want to collaborate. They want to have also spaces to be able to do individual work, focused work. So, and all of this is driving that kind of flexibility in the workplace. And they all feed back.

So the employee, what they want or what they get out of the workplace, the data there can feed the division or the department managers to help them plan better and do their jobs better. And then that will also feed back into the building manager and provide better operations for the building. So we think we think of this as like-- again, the thread that binds this together. And going back, I'll go back to what can we help affect before this happens that can make their jobs easier in ongoing operations?

Let me get into what can we do, go back to the data at handover. At the handover when a building is completed, how do we get that rich BIM or CAD data into a facility manager or building manager's hand to be able to operate with it? And you see here, there are solutions. So here, this is Archibus this was in the iOffice and SpaceIQ family. We're working very closely with Autodesk to improve upon these processes.

And from originally, Archibus has had an extension to AutoCAD and an extension to Revit for many years where we actually do get and be able to catalog work the workplaces, the spaces, the space attributes, the assets, the asset families and the asset data into operations. We know it's not complete. We know it needs to be better even at handover, but at least we can get the stuff that we can get the data that we need in order to help our customers with ongoing operations.

And from there, we're building on that to become more cloud enabled. Again, working with Autodesk on cataloging that process of getting the workplace and asset data from the cloud, from Construction Cloud, from BIM 360. So we have those processes that are going to become-- pretty soon, you need a client workstation in order to do that. But being able to do that seamlessly to help start facilitate operations and handover is what we continue to improve upon.

And the richness of it-- I mean, there's-- I'm sure anybody who works with Revit-- I don't work with Revit that much, but I know people who do. And there's a lot of there's a lot of data related to assets that are in there. There's a lot of that can be improved on how that can be standardized, and we'll work with we work with them to be able to get that more standardized and that richer data into operations.

Increasing asset performance. So from there, you know, I talk about the building manager. What tools do they have? And that gets into our bread and butter. Once you have that asset data, what do you do with it? Well, you use it for your maintenance, for your preventive maintenance, on demand maintenance. We provide Archibus and Manager Plus, a lot of our tools in iOffice SpaceIQ family are focused just on this, using the data to help facilitate ongoing building and maintenance operations.

So from labor scheduling, to a one place to go for a supervisor to look at all the work orders that are open, to mobile solutions that help the technicians in the field get the same information-- and all this is coming from BIM and improved upon and in operation solutions.

MEG SWANSON: So when we look at-- and this isn't about the software, it's about having those conversations of how are we going to take all the information that's been built and import it into something that can live on from an operations standpoint. So making sure we're taking all of the floor plans, all the layouts, and sometimes we're going into environments where they weren't designed, and you're having to recreate them on the fly.

And really, this is where I think Autodesk is really powerfully leaning into this space as far as building all these connections, building all these tools so you can extend into as soon as the facility is launched, how do you operate? How do you move from departments? How to do space planning across, and what we're learning as far as the areas.

And so even as you're adding in-- there's a lot of discussion on main stage this morning also about additional technologies that we add into the space. So sensor management. If somebody booked a meeting room, are they using it? Are there people in the office? So how do you not get over complicated with it, but just ask those questions as far as how are we going to track how this is used?

All right, well then how can we make sure this is integrated and seamless? Because one of the challenges right now, even from an employee standpoint, is to get from your home office to work office, it's usually about three to four, maybe six different apps, right? An app to get in the building, an app to book your desk, an app to book your catering. And so you've really got to look at prioritizing what people need and how do we simplify that, so it's just a really seamless experience for people to use the environments.

And then in the next area on the next slide, what we were polling through-- so again, looking at US, UK and Australia, it was also within-- so if we know how many days a week people are coming in and we're tracking utilization, just the way people are using space is very different. So the way people are using space today, it was described to me by a client almost like they said, it's like my car. So I know I need a car. I don't expect to use a car 8 hours a day, right? Unless you're in the trucking industry, which you're going to be driving more than that.

And so an office environment, it's not that you need it eight hours a day for every single employee, but you need those flex points. And so what we're seeing is in the US for individual and collaborative spaces, like, I'm going to come in for half the day and I'm going to leave. And so we need to make sure we're tracking usage and creating those spaces and environments, similarly for the UK team.

So we're going to flex and see a bit of movement where somebody is going to come in, work three, four hours, then pop out, come in, do a meeting for three, four, hours. Pop out. So it's also very different, not only in the days of the week, the space planning but then with the tenure of the meetings are. Except for the Australian teams, they're going to come in and they're going to work by themselves-- thank you very much-- in one space. [LAUGHS] And don't bother them. So we're collaborating out in the pubs, maybe not so much in the offices.

And then back to Fred's point. So how many of you, just a show of hands, ask these questions as you're doing hand offs between data? You get a prize.

[LAUGHTER]

So it's just simple, right? It gets-- you get to get really complex with how do we have real time monitoring? How do we have all the data feeding in? It's just these basic questions. How are we going to use this space? Huh. What data are we going to use? Huh. OK, who is going to use that data?

And it just starts elevating and having the teams think about the space in a different way. So we just encourage you to start popping these questions into those handover meetings, and those discussions, and those strategy sessions because even very complex projects that we'll work on that have a number of integrations and sensors and vendors involved in it, these basic questions haven't been answered. So we launch, the place is wired with all this technology, but we actually have-- there's no way that it can actually be pulled out and used. So just making sure as you're working with the design and handover and we've got those basics answered.

FRED KRAUS: So I'll go back to some of the things that we're working very closely with Autodesk on, especially on the Forge APIs and the BIM side of things. What do we want to enable those of our customers in building operations, in building management and maintenance, asset management, what do we want to enable them to do with this kind of rich data in front of them, with the models and with the assets?

One of the things is that comes up-- and it's quite simple-- is I just want to see where the things are. I just want to see where in the building, my assets are. It's not that much more complicated than that. I also just wanted one place to see them. So how can we enable our customers to do that, to see the-- I keep on saying, like the rich BIM asset data-- how can we enable them to utilize that and just see it in one place, and see where they need to service them to get their technicians to the right places?

And then building on that, seeing the details. So in ongoing building operations, they want to see-- you want to see maintenance history, what assets have gone through in its life, and it helps them better-- it helps technicians and maintenance staff better service them. And again, this is going to be-- these are the things that help drive down costs of operations so that technicians, if they save a half hour a day, it adds up to quite a lot of money in big campuses.

So showing assets and work date details in one place, overlaid that from the model. Using-- hooking up to building management systems, we're working with a company that does fault detection and diagnostics. So they take the BMS or IoT data, they analyze it, and they can start presenting opportunities to save energy, which is another great-- I think someone mentioned energy savings, part of that whole capital expenditure-- saving that in operations.

You have a $50 million operating budget, save 1% of that, that's a lot of money. That's $500,000. So using the tools that we and our partners have to be able to show what diagnostics that can help save money, and then dispatch a technician out to go and take a look. So being more proactive before critical assets break.

Another use case, seeing how the assets relate to each other in a system, and seeing how they relate to the spaces that they serve. If you have to shut down part of their HVAC system because something that you need to fix, what do you need to take offline? And this is where the facilities operations really goes hand in hand with the workplace teams. I need to take down some conference rooms because they need to fix something in the ceiling. So seeing how those interactions take place and being able to facilitate that with our customers is something, just-- it's a use case that we continue to drive.

Access issues, so what can you arm your technician to understand before they go to a site, before they-- so they have the right tools at their disposal? What do they need to worry about? Where's the nearest safety equipment? Those are the kind of questions or use cases that we get into using the-- starting from the model data from Autodesk transition.

So those are some high-level use cases, some of the things that we're helping our customers think through and do with our partnership with Autodesk. One thing to leave you with, is just a case study on the importance of space information for a large health care system. UCHealth, 6.6 million square feet, they have 18,700 space records, to over 2,000 employees in the system. They have a lot of they have a lot of information that they need at their disposal, and they need it to be accurate because they use that to be able to report how they utilize the space for the joint commission and for compliance with fire safety.

So these are really critical needs that they need to have it be accurate, and that's what they are depending on from the model to be accurate so that they can use it and they can report on it with confidence. Not only that, but it helps, again, with utilization of space, marrying the space with occupants, where can they find opportunities to better utilize their space and even save costs down the road on space use?

MEG SWANSON: So just wrapping up, we really see this integration between operations and everything that goes with construction and design in an entire built environment experience. So we're here at the conference. We're happy to talk with anyone about the operations side and just how we start really building out, especially with massive market renovation, massive market as we look at how manufacturing is changing, how they're designing their spaces. We look at retail moving into more dark stores instead of having consumer-based stores. I mean, there are just so many shifts in different industries, and we've got experience in a number of these industries in how we bridge between the design and then what we're seeing in actual operations and usage between those areas. So really important to make sure we're thinking through the entire lifecycle and entire journey. And I think with that,

FRED KRAUS: Yes, thank you.

MEG SWANSON: Yeah, so we've got--

FRED KRAUS: Happy to take questions, and please come and if you have questions later or you just want to find out more, please come and visit our booth. It's in the AE section 500 near where Autodesk is, a little farther down the floor. So I'm happy to take questions. Yeah?

AUDIENCE: Where's the biggest opportunity for like, an architect right? So in some cases, they see this as turnover, more work.

MEG SWANSON: Yep.

AUDIENCE: Adds to the cost of the project and so forth. Where is the opportunity for them to potentially make more money with the order or GC, or whatever the case may be for these projects?

MEG SWANSON: Yeah. I'll take the start of it and then turn it over to Fred, because it's about not ever making it a handoff, right? And just making it a continuous process all the way through. And then also-- so when these points of renovation come up, right? Because we're always looking for new business like everybody. And so when we have existing environments where we're doing those, I mean, I see firms, they have the biggest success is they're not doing handovers. They've got the data going into systems and then they're using that to come back and consult. And so they're saying we design the space this way. We see usage happening here. And that's a really interesting conversation, right?

And so it's almost new business generating in a coaching way because you're sharing with a building. We know we built this gorgeous campus. We see that one of the buildings, half of it's never used. So let's dig into that together, and let's figure out how we re-imagine that space together. So it's-- I think I find the integration of having teams, looking at the data, and getting feedback back from the occupiers is just a way just to keep that continuous business going. And then launching practices, as many firms have done, just around the massive renovation that we have right now in creating collaborative spaces. I mean, this is just a huge spike in the market at the present moment. Fred?

FRED KRAUS: I think that pretty much covered it.

MEG SWANSON: Well, that's a first.

FRED KRAUS: It's going back to--

MEG SWANSON: [LAUGH]

FRED KRAUS: --no, it's going back to that. Oh, Do you think--

AUDIENCE: If I get you question right, you were asking that how the A team can make more money, be more profitable in this space. What can they do? [INAUDIBLE] going to do? One of the things that I believe is-- well, I was just brainstorming [INAUDIBLE]-- we often see that the specifications-- when you need the product specifications, everyone is trying to hand over the responsibility to the next person.

MEG SWANSON: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] I say is I will be more responsible for this much data. Then it is GC's responsible. Then the GC will create the downstream contractor, the subcontractor, said OK, it is your responsibility to give everything. But there is no one central data manager or facilities management fee. And the people who actually are knowledgeable of that data are the facility owners group, who are not even involved in any of the processes. They get it the last place.

MEG SWANSON: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: So often, what I've seen is that big owners where data is so important, they sometimes hire consultants to become the data managers for the data to do that thing. And I guess there is an opportunity that if there is a design firm, they can be that data managers. They can take the responsibility that rather than us giving all the responsibility downstream, we will manage that process. We will be the champion of that thing if you pay us the dollars that we're going to pay the GC. And I guess same way, the GC has an opportunity to include in their scope that OK, we can be the captain and we can do that thing. So I guess everyone in that whole sphere has an opportunity if they can convince the owner that we could be the data managers, [? or ?] the process, whoever is intelligent enough to [INAUDIBLE]

FRED KRAUS: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: --the data flows from.

FRED KRAUS: Yeah. And we mentioned-- and redesign was definitely top of mind. We mentioned also with ongoing, like-- we see that architectural firms are interested in going into and ongoing, having a relationship with the customer after handover for helping consult on that. Because you spurred a lot of good discussion on.

MEG SWANSON: [LAUGH] Yes, question?

AUDIENCE: So I've noticed that a lot of clients that are doing facilities management in the sense, they're using Maximo, and I guess at this point, I'm not familiar with any-- as far as like, data going out of Revit in the Autodesk suite, it seems like we kind of send it off into its Maximo, when who knows what happens with it? I know that frequently after we send it off, and things will happen on a site.

MEG SWANSON: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: And things will change within the Revit model that we've already shifted off into Maximo, and it's like doing its own thing. Do you-- is there a better connection between like Autodesk and Maximo? Have Do you have any case studies of essentially, doing that better?

FRED KRAUS: Yeah Do you want me to--

AUDIENCE: It seems like it's a very common industry, like--

FRED KRAUS: --yeah.

MEG SWANSON: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: --facilities, asset management and [? asset ?] seems pretty common.

FRED KRAUS: Yeah. And Maximo, just like our products that we receive data from the model, you push it and in that case, you're saying it's one way. You kind of your wipe your hands and you're done with it. What we want to see is more of that feedback loop. So if you're using the-- if you're using an operations, it doesn't have to live just there. It also wants to feed the model because the model-- we talk a lot about redesign, right? The model needs to be kept up to date. So-- and there are things we're doing that will help that. So you reposition items on a floor, how does that get back to the model?

Most of the time now, if you're actually doing physical space changes, it still stays in the model but it'll get pushed, so get pushed for redesign back. So there's two things, I guess, I'll mention there. One is that there is some feedback. There is some things that operations can do that will influence the model, so it's not just one way. And the second is that it shouldn't just be once. You do a redesign, you should be able to publish that information back so that it's used in ongoing operations. And the way to do that is to make it easy. You make that--

AUDIENCE: There doesn't seem to be any kind of connection in terms of the software. So it's like, it's all very manual, [INAUDIBLE]

FRED KRAUS: Oh, I see. Oh well, I showed here, like, we do have-- I mean, Archibus has a direct connection that we work with Autodesk to improve. So there are better ways to do that.

AUDIENCE: Is it bi-directional?

FRED KRAUS: It's one direction now, yeah. But it can be repeated, so doesn't take long.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] into Archibus, right? [INAUDIBLE] Archibus factors and updates within those IWMS systems.

FRED KRAUS: Updates-- so the question was about updates in IWMS. What happens with the model? And the way we do-- and this is an area of ongoing discussion-- the way we do it is we think of the models best used to change physical space. So physical space, if you make changes to walls, that should be done in the model. And we want to make it very, very easy to just one click, publish that, and push those changes to your IWMS.

The second thing is with asset information, that's where we're working with the tandem team. I mentioned, we're working actually to make that more bidirectional. That's something that's active in our roadmap.

MEG SWANSON: I think that's the-- bring it back around, it's just really whatever software provider you're working with is-- I mean, you're deep in the Autodesk community and have been asking those questions, right? How closely are the teams working? What's the roadmap? How are the engineering teams working together? Because-- not to make it a product pitch at all, but it's hugely important, right? And we're really proud of work with the Autodesk engineering team so closely, and how fast-- I mean, it [INAUDIBLE] was like, we want it very fast-- how fast are we going to get that to integration so that you've got the data is the same, regardless of which system you're looking in. Great. Any other--

FRED KRAUS: Any more questions?

MEG SWANSON: --yes?

AUDIENCE: You've been showing iOffice SpaceIQ. You have a bunch of different products. Have you been primarily showing the Archibus feed?

FRED KRAUS: I'm sorry? The Archibus?

MEG SWANSON: He said--

AUDIENCE: Are you showing primarily the Archibus feed, or has it been more of the iOffice SpaceIQ products? There's a few.

FRED KRAUS: Yeah.

MEG SWANSON: Right.

FRED KRAUS: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].

FRED KRAUS: That's a good question. So right now, the-- and we've worked with Autodesk on this on our phases, on phases of what we want to enable. Right now, the first phase is mostly centered on Archibus, even though we have other-- iOffice, SpaceIQ have other solutions that do great workplace and asset management. But right now, the focus here is on Archibus. Getting into-- and we can show you in our booth, getting into future, we're actually working on a new platform, forward-looking platform that will take some of the benefits of all of ours and kind of bring them together. So that's a phase two, and we're working on that now. So there's--

AUDIENCE: How long?

FRED KRAUS: What's that?

AUDIENCE: How long? Are you talking about years?

FRED KRAUS: Well, it'll be in-- using-- building a new platform doesn't happen overnight, but it's something that we want to bring out next year and then continue to add to it. So on the roadmap is a healthy amount of integration, that kind of BIM integration that I showed, but on a new, modern platform.

MEG SWANSON: Yeah, because what you'll see in the booth demos is we've got-- we've made a big investment in UI, UX, and getting UI, UX designers on board. Maybe a year ago, that started, just to build the entire system, right? So what is the flow, what is the use cases, how does everything run together? And that just started releasing inside the products a month ago?

FRED KRAUS: Yeah.

MEG SWANSON: I think with the new design system. And so part of it is usability, ease of use redesign, and then also moving on the technology back end to the platform. So we've got some of the work that we're showing in the booth today, which shows the new direction, which to your point, yeah, it's not multiple years, but it is-- there's kind of an evolution as just making sure we've got the design and the systems, and things that get incredibly complex where it can be very intuitive from a user perspective.