Connect and Construct - Case study: Streamlining handover and jump starting maintenance for the facilities team

MARK MERGENSCHROER: So we have the app for download. It may be a little slow, with all of us trying to download it at once. So have the Android capabilities as well, by going to the website. There has been some minor issues we've had with some, but a lot of us are on it. We'll be asking some questions. This is what your screen should come to look like once you're inside the app. Questions? Thoughts? Need more coffee? Anybody already tired and ready to go home?

I think we're ready to go.

MARK MERGENSCHROER: We're ready to go? All right, you want to introduce me? OK, I'll go. This is [INAUDIBLE] with Autodesk.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MARK MERGENSCHROER: We're going to look at a case study of Arkansas Children's Hospital, and how we've streamlined the handover, kind of jump started facilities maintenance. The key point to this is this hospital opens January 9th. I want you to remember that. This hospital opens January 9th. So a little bit about me. I'm a principal. I'm the BIM application specialist at Bernhard TME. We're an engineering firm, commissioning firm out of Little Rock, Arkansas. Specializing in health care. I have not always been in the engineering side. I was on the fire sprinkler contractor background. I was a nice certified fire sprinkler designer for 10 years. A few years ago, Ed Deal and Jason Steel nicknamed me the BIM Yoda. I think it was because of my size, rather than my knowledge.

So here we are. AU 2017. Hopefully, this will work. I did something live last year and it was a total disaster. So I've come back for more. Arkansas Children's Hospital, just to let you know, this is a 30,000 foot presentation. Tomorrow at 3:30, I'll be giving the good, the bad, and the really ugly of this project. Telling you where we went wrong, where we went right, and what we would do different. So, 3:30 tomorrow. Arkansas Children's Hospital it's a 225, it's actually 235,000 square foot hospital now. Beautiful facility. It's actually five facilities in one It is a satellite campus to the main campus.

Anybody ever heard of Walmart? This is in Walmart's backyard. You can almost see Walmart from the views. This picture right here was taken Friday, when I was on site. We've got our central plant, we got our pumps. And the top right picture is the view from the patient rooms. The view from these kids' rooms. How would you like to be in a healing environment for that? That's what this is all about.

This hospital is about kids, and about taking care of children, and making children feel needed. It has technology all through the building. It has technology through the design. It has technology through the construction. And now, we have technology through the operations. We have 1964 assets already in. BIM 360 ops. We've had over 1800 in since September. Like I said, we don't open till January 9th. We used the BIM 360 line for everything. For training, design, construction, all that.

So this is Chet. This is the director of facilities for Arkansas Children's Hospitals. He's also a friend of mine. And this hospital is kind of-- Arkansas Children's is very special to me. It's where my son receives his services. You all that know me know that I have an autistic son, who's been through quite a bit through his life. So [? Chett ?] actually lets him play in his office. So I have a very unique relationship with Arkansas Children's. And [? Chett-- ?] three years ago, we had lunch in downtown Little Rock-- and he said, Mark, I want something simple for this hospital. I want something that my technicians can use. I want something that my staff understands. He goes, I already have a CMS. It works lovely, but I want to use the BIM process. I want to use the models. I do not want to throw away this model. What is one of the things in our industry that is the toughest part of BIM? Or anything?

AUDIENCE: Communication.

MARK MERGENSCHROER: Communication. Communication failed on this job. I'll tell you how tomorrow. It's a little teaser. So what we come up with, is we wanted to find a way to bring the Revit model, the BIM, the submittals, design documents, field verification, all into a central repository. And then take it to a CMMS. And so two years ago this week, Chuck [INAUDIBLE], with Autodesk, grabbed my arm and said, hey Mark, come here. I want you to see something. And at that time he took me to the very first-- what was then, Building Ops-- now BIM 360 ops class. And so that started my process. And so, we come up with this. So how are we going to do that?

I engaged our team-- and now, we're going to show you the team here-- the building was designed in C4R. So all total, it's around 2 and 1/2 gig worth of models on C4R. We did it in BIM team 360, was our collaboration site. We used BIM Glue for coordination of models and data coordination between the engineered model, the architecture's model, and the construction model to create, what do you think? What's the proverbial term that everybody talks about, but we don't hear that much? A facilities model. We also worked with the commissioning team. How many in here work with commissioning agents? Exactly. You can't say a word.

So commissioning people can be difficult to deal with. I know because I have 20 at our firm that we deal with on a daily basis. But this commissioning team on this job really did an outstanding job. They did not use BIM 360 Field to its fullest potential, but we built it so they could use it in its simplest way for them. We built a spreadsheet to integrate with that. We tried to keep things very simple because we wanted them on board, because we wanted the data. In the deliverable on this, as for Arkansas Children's, was a as-constructed data model. Not construction model. Everything didn't have to be in its perfect place. But we wanted design data and we wanted commissioning data back into the Revit model, as a digital document.

So our goal. Complete and verify data before the first day of operation. Have I met that goal yet? No, I have not. I'm going to have probably around 2400 assets, all said and told. We will have PM's running on all those. We actually have it down to the automatic door openers. Our approach was Joint Commission. Anybody heard of the Joint Commission? So Joint Commission is a governing body for health care facilities that can come in and actually shut you down if you don't have maintenance records.

Or say, if you have a patient get sick, and they transfer that disease back to a filter that wasn't changed, they can pull your accreditation for that. Now granted, that's a-- it's not that extreme, but that is a possibility. So we worked with a Joint Commission agent to gather the assets that they needed for Joint Commission review. That turned into 92 different asset codes, and we have all 92 asset codes in the system right now. We just don't have every piece of equipment in there.

So we're close, we haven't made the goal yet. So this was our team. And I can't tell you-- so if you're thinking of BIM 360 ops, BIM 360 ops team is really top notch. They've been able to work with me. They've helped me, Charles Coppage, with the Field, has helped me. We've had an outstanding team working on this project, I just want to acknowledge them. So here we go. This is a sample of some of the equipment that we went after. That's most of the commissioned assets.

We also have non-commissioned assets as well, like a jet fuel tank for our heliport. Our diesel tanks, our O2 system farm, we went after all that stuff. We have pictures, we have data. What we did was we went and worked with Arkansas Children's Facilities staff. Pulled their unique codes that they're using, come up with 92 different asset type codes. We didn't use CoBIE, we didn't use LOD. We didn't use OmniClass.

We used their coding system. They wanted to keep it simple, remember? We kept it as simple as possible. We tried to make a very easy approach to this. Granted, it had its hiccups, had its growing pains, but we survived. You'll notice here, we've got some assignments. What is one-- like we talked about, is communication. The initial spec was only 36 pages long. After we got it-- so we worked with the facility's team to get that spec.

After we started working with the contractors and the commissioning agent, that spec grew to 78 pages at the request of the contractor. Because what we did was we went and notated who was responsible for what piece of data for every piece of equipment type. So if it didn't have a name there, the contractor was to gather that piece of equipment. If it had [? CXA, ?] that was the commissioning agent. So we spelled it all out very clearly on who was to gather what data. There's some more right here, where we actually have the contractor pulling this data for us. All very simple, everybody agreed to this. It's worked well.

So we had a design team model. We actually used the live C4R model to start everything with. Now granted, we did not have the design team changing the models. We did not have the architectural team changing any of the models. We used the live design. We compared it to what the general contractor coordinated. I, or my team, made some modifications to that with the approval of the engineer, and with the approval of the architect, to try to get some closer to as-constructed status. Makes sense? OK. Be thinking of questions.

So what we did is we took the same model-- we started a color coding system. We worked with the Arkansas Children's Facilities team to work on all these color codes. These are not the design team color schemes. These are the facilities schemes. And as you can see here, we started creating views inside of Revit. And you can tell this goes back a little ways, because it says Building Ops. It's 360 ops. The actual facilities team calls this Building Ops, at Arkansas Children's right now.

And then what we did is we renamed our rabbit families. And we found that to be very important when we moved to Glue in the field. And that there's a reason we did that. This was the most elaborative-- this was the most complicated thing of all, because not everybody uses the same family naming nomenclature, and it was as you can see, I didn't touch it up. I just put a code in front of it. I didn't clean it up, but we knew what that code meant. So as we moved the equipment sets in Glue, we created views for each floor. Mechanical room, and the plant. And so therefore, we did that six times.

We exported this six times, and you can see how we use the equipment code sets and the numbering system to build the sets in Glue. Is everybody familiar with that? Little bit more elaborate process. So in Glue, you can actually go in and touch the equipment. Right click, go down and create sets, and then that will populate to Field. And that's how we did this. So basically, we went from C4R, collaboration for Revit, to Glue, to Field. We coordinated the commissioning data with Field, pushed it to Ops, and then also pushed it back to Revit. That was our process. That's the whole-- that's the big picture. And we did all that with these codes.

So as far as getting all the data-- you can see all the different-- this is the mechanical side, the HVAC side. And then this is for air-handling unit. We had different categories that each different asset required. I think the air-handling unit they wanted to pull 26 different categories from the commissioning agent. We set up field with the types and schedules. Standard properties, custom properties, all this was custom work. And that made the whole process streamlined for us.

Granted, I pulled out a few hairs on this. It took a couple of rounds to make it work like we wanted to. But once we streamlined it and figured it out, it worked really well. So here's the views that we used inside of Field. The one thing that we wanted to do is we wanted to give the facilities team a model that they could see and use. See inside of ops, we wanted them to be able to really see news and not get complicated with the whole building. We didn't want them putting up all 235,000 square feet of this facility at once inside Ops. That's why we chose to break it down by floor.

Here is where we've pulled our equipment Field. The way we started is the facility's teams actually started with this app, with the BIM 360 app, or Ops app in May, is when I gave that to them. The facilities manager for Children's started in March. So you can see, this was rather quick. Once we started this. What I used is I used BIM 360 Glue, BIM 360 Field, BIM 360 Ops, to train these new technicians on their facility. They actually started gathering data for me. They actually started going and snapping pictures. They started putting asset tags on equipment.

They even started notating what size ladders they would need to get to dampers, to get to V-boxes, to get to exhaust terminals. This was all done over the summer, while nobody was in the facility except for the construction team. Oh, another thing, I'm pretty proud of. So a facilities technician team of 12-- how many computers you think they've got? Anybody want to take a guess? One? Two. Everything is running off iPhones and iPads, currently. I say that, currently. We may-- there's some things that we're looking at. But we've given them access to a lot of different things, a lot of different tools to try to make their lives a little bit easier.

So I mentioned the commissioning agent. This is Excel. Nasty, ugly. We use it in our everyday life, correct, in some shape, form, or fashion? So we set up completed. We used OneDrive, we use the Excel Online, so that multiple people could be in Excel at once putting data in. Which worked really well. Actually got the subcontractors to buy into this. The ones that felt savvy on the iPad out using Field, would enter their information into Field, the ones that didn't put it in the spreadsheet. Then we synced up the spreadsheets, using the import-export format inside of Field.

And then, we have target dates right here. I think there is a November-- we're coming up really close on that day right there. So we're making progress. But we're very far ahead of the ballgame, for what a normal [? C-mass ?] population is. Is there any owners in the room? Building owners? When do you usually get your data? Your handover data? How long?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] I just started.

MARK MERGENSCHROER: You just started?

AUDIENCE: Our university. We don't get anything.

MARK MERGENSCHROER: You don't get anything? Wow. This group right here is about ready to change your world. Because this is a nice tool. This is a very nice tool to deliver some quality information to an owner, like we've never done it before. Asset tags. So how do we transition all this data to the field? This is how we did it. The QR code and the bar code run off that same number. So you think those are random numbers? Anybody want to take a stab at what those are?

So 001, is the plant. 002, is dedicated as the hospital. 01, is our floor level. 00 through is for our hospital, as well. 104, is the air-handling unit code, and then the next four digits is our running number system. We use Bartender to create this, and we've got probably 1600 of these slapped on assets inside the hospital, currently. Everything, every asset that is above a ceiling in the plenum that is supposed to have a tag on it, has a tag on it currently. And we got the contractors, subcontractors, and the facilities team to do these tagging for us.

One of the things it does with BIM 360 Ops. It does work. And we'll show you tomorrow. We're off-- yes?

AUDIENCE: I have a question. [INAUDIBLE]

MARK MERGENSCHROER: What the facility requested.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MARK MERGENSCHROER: Everything that you see has been sitting down, and working with these facility teams. They're trying to think future, current, what they have in hand, what the other hospital is using. And so we've tried to combine the best of both worlds and look at what's going on in the future and now. So it's what we've come up with. Also, every room-- there's 1300 rooms in this facility-- every room also has a QR code, and is synced to 360 Ops. And each room has a QR code in Field. So this way, we can pull up and see what assets are tagged in that room.

Well, this kind of gives it away. But this is inside of 360 Ops. So this is the web version. You can tell it's colored just like these other models. We can do some different things with this, but what-- I forgot I had that in there. So really, it's like a clean slate. What I've told people, when I did this, is before this facility's teams really had to learn their building. And it was like a clean slate. And sometimes the facilities guys didn't have a clue what's above the ceiling. And so, what we wanted to do is give them this 3D model, this 3D technology. Hey, we've got it. It's designed. Let's use it. Instead of having this blank slate, let's give them the 3D models. They don't have to be perfect. They don't have to have all this gigantic intelligence in it. Let's make it so our facilities team can use these, and not have to worry about learning some complicated process.

This is actually live screen captures. This is our ticketing system, our CMMS. This is the home page here for ACH Northwest. This is the asset screen inside of Ops. This is the plan's screen inside of Ops. So have any engineers? Or it's all contractors, pretty much right? Any engineers? So tell me something. How does the facility's guy know where his VV-boxes are? How do they know where the dampers are? Really and truly, with our deliverables?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MARK MERGENSCHROER: Sheet of PDS. And where are those?

AUDIENCE: Sitting on your desk, behind your chair.

MARK MERGENSCHROER: Exactly. So what we have done, is we've actually put those inside of Ops. We actually created sheet-- mechanical sheets, with just designations. We turned off all popping, all duct work. And all it has on that sheet is mechanical designations that shows where every damper is, every VV-box every exhaust terminal. And with the label that is on the asset tag. That has been a tremendous asset for helping them learn this facility. We did it by accident. The reason we created it was so they would know where to place the tags, to help them place the tags. And this has turned into one of the most incredible assets that we're going to deliver, but totally by accident. I'm not smart enough to come up with that. It just happened.

So here, you'll notice the blue numbers. He actually put a ladder height, so that he would know what size ladder he needed to crawl on top of that air conditioner. Because that air conditioner is actually in the basement of the building. So they put the ladder height in there, the facilities team did this. We've tried to come up with some different naming nomenclature for the descriptions. This is an old version. Now we actually have the room number that it is in, so that you can actually physically see that in the description. Actually, it's right there. You can see the new naming nomenclature. We've got the manufacturer model and room number in the description of the asset, so that you can read it as you scroll on the iPhone. That is the air handling unit 8, right there inside the plant, where it's grayed out. This is one of your views to help you locate it inside of Ops. And this is some of the commissioning data that we've pulled.

If you see three dashes, my team knows that that is still data that we need to be collected. As you can see, we're waiting on the outside air to be officially measured through the tab results. And then once the tab results are in there, then we will put that information in. So this exhaust terminal right here, I zoomed out. It highlights in blue, depending upon how you have your viewer set. It can also go to transparent or translucent. They have recently moved to the Forge viewer, which has seen a tremendous response in response time. But you can see down here, you've got your 3D view and then your data is just right behind it. So it just pops up on your screen. You can find it, locate it, and then you also have all your data right there.

One of the things that our deliverable was is to get the commissioning data back into the Revit model. We used the equipment sets inside of Field, in Glue, to be able to push back and to push the data all the way back to Revit. Now one things that I did check, is I've heard that this bloats the model. I pushed the commissioning data, a big chunk of commissioning data. It increased my file size about 30 MG. On two gig model, 30 MG isn't that much. Yes?

AUDIENCE: Why push it back on Revit?

MARK MERGENSCHROER: That's what the client requested. That's why he'd been sold, is he wants a Revit model of his design data and his commissioning data married in one place. And he wanted to be able to use this model in the future for that. He wanted digital deliverable. So that's what we're giving him. Yes?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MARK MERGENSCHROER: So we compared-- in Glue-- we compared the design versus the construction. We moved what we needed to. We didn't worry if it was three or four inches, six inches, some things even a foot. We actually deleted all the fire sprinkler pipe out, because he only wanted sprinkler mains. So we truly looked at it as a facility's model. And what they wanted, for this facility, they didn't care if the duct-work was 100% accurate. They wanted their data to be accurate. And the locations of their equipment to be-- like if that VV-box was in room NH 2108, they wanted that VV-box in 2108. Now granted, they didn't want it three foot off, but in that area. So we compared the models.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MARK MERGENSCHROER: On this one, it was the facility management coordinator. We actually had a facility management coordinator, which was me on that. That went to my responsibility. And yes, it's difficult to know what to do. But then also had a facilities team that was really, really willing to work with me. They didn't want to use a heavy weight model. They didn't want everything down to the nuts and bolts. They wanted the nuts and bolts in the data, not in the 3D. The 3D is just used as a visual help to understand where that piece of equipment should be. Or that duct should be. It's not 100% accurate. It's a true facilities model. Yes?

AUDIENCE: [iNAUDIBLE]

MARK MERGENSCHROER: We can go ahead and start questions through. We're basically done, yes?

AUDIENCE: What kind of data did you push to Revit? Because Field only allows you a few data information.

MARK MERGENSCHROER: So what we did is, all of this right here? We went and created custom properties. There's over 1000 custom properties that we created, which allowed us to push it. Because then what we did was when you go to filter the equipment-- let's say you filter by the chilled water pumps, and you only have the chilled water pumps-- it creates all those custom properties across the line. And then you're allowed to push all that, back and forth.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MARK MERGENSCHROER: Yes. Yes. Now one of the things we can also do, is if we have all of the O & Ms and everything, there's a process inside of Field where we can actually drop that folder in Field. And that all that data will push to Ops as well. Slowly working on building that. Have an O & M team building all that. We are actually starting next week. We have a film crew that's going to be filming all the maintence testing. They're going to be filming all the pre-functional testing on the equipment, and all the training. One of the other things we did, is we used BIM 360 Team to help them get acclimated. So before they had Ops, they had BIM 360 Team. They had the Revit models and the construction models to be able to look at it and go through.

One of the things you'll notice right here-- we've actually set the ceilings to 50% transparency. So they can actually see what's on the floor, you can see the scanner there. One of the things that helps with is when you're looking at security cameras, or you're looking at card readers. You're looking at automatic door openers, or you're looking at anything life safety that's below the ceiling, that helps them locate that below the ceiling. There's just some views. Our mechanical specialist on the facilities team wanted to see all the supply duct work by itself, all the return duct work by itself, all the exhaust duct work by itself. So we actually created different 3D views for them to see all that, so they could learn about their duct work system.

We were able to create some other systems like that as well. Here's some more information that we've done. And then we'll open this up to more questions. So the gentleman on the right there, is our lead for our facilities team for Arkansas Children's. That is his mentor. 29 and 71. 71-year-olds got an iPad in his hand, and he is actually my best resource on the whole project. Because this gentleman is taking and learning and asking questions, and wanting to do something different for his facility. Yes?

AUDIENCE: So two-part question. One, are they using Ops as their CMMS? Or did they have a separate CMMS system that they are trying to pass data back and forth between? And then with the non-use of OmniClass, CoBIE, and the like, you probably weren't able to run a lot of the automated model checkers. So how did you go about validating the data?

MARK MERGENSCHROER: I used [INAUDIBLE] to validate the data. We wrote rules inside of [INAUDIBLE] for that. And the other part of your question was?

AUDIENCE: You answered it there. Using Ops for their CMMS, there's not a separate system that they're using. So they put everything, all their work order tickets into that. And that's logged. It's pushing back into the Revit model.

MARK MERGENSCHROER: The tickets are not pushing back into the Revit model. The tickets are all solely in Ops. We're not doing any of the-- the only data that went back to the Revit model is from the commissioning agent. And that data went back. We are using Ops as our CMMS. We actually had the initial kick off for the entire hospital on Friday, and it went live this morning, with me here. It was quite interesting. So, second point to that. Is this facility-- the main facility, the 1.2 million square foot facility-- does have Four Rivers as their CMMS system for health care. And we also knew that if for some reason we couldn't make this happen, we could transfer the data back to Four Rivers. So we did have a backup plan. But right now, the plan is to go full in with 360 ops.

AUDIENCE: In terms of your workflow, it seems like you have a lot of custom codes and properties. In terms of your next project, do you have to recreate the wheel in your next job? Or can you use some of this data in Ops and Field to your advantage on the next go around?

MARK MERGENSCHROER: We're definitely going to be using that for our next. We've already started the implementation of that as well. It's not perfect. What we try to do is-- in our line of business, anyway-- is we try to work with the facilities team. And this is just what the facilities team had implemented on their current facility, and how they had their assets categorized. And so we just tried to match what they were already using. That's why it was a little-- it did have some unique codes.

And one of the things-- I am going to put up a very generic spec on the site, so you will have access to what we did. For my AU class, it will be up on my AU class. Just look for Mark Mergenschroer, and should be there. So let's check here. Switch portfolios. So you've got some questions here. Is lunch ready, all right. So this is the ticketing system. We've got some tickets.

MARK MERGENSCHROER: Maybe do a graph view?

MARK MERGENSCHROER: A graph view, yes.

MARK MERGENSCHROER: We can do it by ticket type. These are just all-- I didn't program any of that. I didn't get that elaborate. But what I did do is I went over here and did set some pre-filters. So does anybody want any coffee? We've got one person that's ready for coffee. So anybody too hot, besides me? We've got one person that's hot. Let's see if we got questions. One question there. Describe the turnover of all this data. The FM team hard easy, were they bought in already? The Facilities person for this is a former Joint Commission surveyor. He wanted as much data as he could get, but he wanted the correct data. He did not want a bunch of fluff. So that's why we specifically targeted certain asset types. That's why. They were bought in, yes. The 12 facilities staff, they were asked before they were hired if they would be willing to use iPads for facilities maintenance. So they were definitely bought in. Yes?

AUDIENCE: Yeah, I have a question. At one point the owner might change, or the facility data might change over time. Let's see, a couple of years from now. How would the first technicians and the manager maintain the data? New data has to be entered. So how does it do? Do I have to go back?

MARK MERGENSCHROER: So in Ops, they will maintain it. We've already had a pump fail, and they've had to change out the pump. So we've already had to decommission a pump and put in a new pump. What we're doing for Revit is we have trained the administrative assistant on Revit. Very rudimentary training. She doesn't have to know how to design in it, but she knows how to drop a family in it. She knows how to place a family in it. She loves it. Because it gives her some interaction with her team, and it's giving her a way to help her facilities team out in the field.

Misty has been amazing. Misty is the administrator of Ops force, and she's also opening Revit. She's opening Fields, she's opening Glue. And she worked for a trucking firm up until February of this year. So she's really enjoying it. Yes? They did not use the equipment aspect of Field at all. When we brought that to the table, they agreed to use it in a form and fashion where it didn't complicate their workflow. We had some success. We did some commissioning pre-functional testing in it. They did their bar coding of the rooms off of our bar codes, or our QR codes for the rooms. So there was some give and take, in play. But we used their Glue site, and we used their Field site.

Now they did set me up a Glue site outside of their regular Glue site, so we could look and compare and do some different things. We also set up a test ground, a test bed. And I broke it. I broke it a couple of times. I think Katie was ready to come kill me one day. But all that data could be wiped away, and we could start over. And we did that, we found a sweet spot. And we found-- you go for six items. You go for asset name, asset nomenclature, asset number. You go for location. And if you've got manufacturer, you go for that. That's where you start. And you pump all that data into Ops. You gather that data, it makes it simple. The rest comes as you gather the data, as you commission the asset. That was the simplicity of it. We only went after seven items for each asset to start the ball rolling.

AUDIENCE: Can you tell something about the driver for chains, at the customer's side? Was he willing to solve the problem with it, or was it a financial decision or something? [INAUDIBLE] a business case.

MARK MERGENSCHROER: The business case is, he wanted to do something different. Are you familiar with ASHE, which is the American Society of Health Care engineers, here in the states. And Chad is high up in ASHE, and he was wanting to show off.

AUDIENCE: So he want to impress others with his case. He wanted to create a wow effect.

MARK MERGENSCHROER: That's right. And that's what this hospital is doing. So a 235,000 square foot hospital only has 24 patient beds in it. So they're doing things differently. And so this was just part of the things that he wanted to do different. He is definitely not an inside the box person. That's why he said, let's give it a shot. If it fails, we've got something to fall back on. And the team that we got assembled has made it work. The facilities staff up there is-- so right now, I can show you tomorrow if you come.

We already have O & M manuals in there, we have warranty manuals. We have pictures of the equipment. We actually have some video of the equipment. We've really got a lot of things in there that don't usually get handed to the facilities team until six months to a year afterwards. Or they have all the data. Now, I want to make this plug while we're waiting on it. As a general contractor, use Ops to hand your data-- you can use Ops, pay for it for a couple of years for that owner-- and if you're using 3D models, and you're looking at data, and you're looking for a very nice way to hand data over to that owner in a very wow fashion?

It's relatively simple. It doesn't take that much more work. And you've got owners a digital deliverable in their hands, and they don't have to go fishing for it. And you can have them working on their assets before you ever get out of the building.

AUDIENCE: Just one simple question. What if the input model doesn't come from Revit, but from InfraWorks, for instance.

MARK MERGENSCHROER: So, you don't have to have a 3D object tied to that. I guess you could import like a IFC, and get a IFC in there. And some of the Autodesk people in here, you ask a question I don't for sure know the answer for, would the IFC data from Revit go to Ops? I will find out, if you'll get with me. We can find out.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MARK MERGENSCHROER: That's right, that's right. Then also, if you can get it into Navisworks, to get it into Field, then you can get the 3D model into Ops. So you can get that to Navis, then push the Navis-- which is similar to Glue-- into Field. Than that model is in Field, and all you've got to do is push it to Ops.

AUDIENCE: And so pushing back the information back to the model, would come through Navisworks again?

MARK MERGENSCHROER: It would have to be in Glue. And I'm not exactly sure how InfraWorks does all that. But the way you have to do that is Glue-- well, you couldn't push it, because that's pushing data back to Revit. That's the app, that's the add on. The Glue add on allows you to push the data back to Revit, so that probably would not work.

PRESENTER: But I point out for people who are owners in the room who don't have BIM. The merit of Ops stands on its own without a geographical model, and it works perfectly fine as a non BIM-centric CMMS. And I think that's also part of the picture. So when you think about a campus, like a university, you may have a new project coming on like a hospital or a dormitory. But you might have 200 other buildings that are without a BIM. And so it works perfectly fine, and that's an area as well for the owner perspective.

MARK MERGENSCHROER: So in my portfolio here, this project right here, this SJRMC-- it does not have a 3D model tied to it. It's only date commissioning data that we uploaded to Ops.

PRESENTER: Right. So a bunch more questions. Start with yours?

AUDIENCE: On that last one, you can use an FBX file export as well as IFC. But my question is, in all of this, obviously this is a hospital environment. And being a GC, where does your single source of truth live? Are you building a server, and hosting that? Is it on the client side? How's that working?

MARK MERGENSCHROER: OK. A single source of truth. So Ops is in the cloud. It's on the Autodesk Amazon Web Services. The single source of truth for us was Field. All the Field data, the commission data, became the single source of truth for us. That was what we-- we knew we had the Revit data, but we were specifically looking at that commissioned data to make sure that it is operationally correct, and to get the correct data into Ops. Is what you're looking for? How are we doing on time?

PRESENTER: We got about seven minutes.

MARK MERGENSCHROER: OK.

AUDIENCE: What's your workflow from C4R to Glue and back to Ops? How did you handle items that maybe weren't captured in the initial Revit files? Like owner furnished equipment, you've mentioned automatic door operators. How did you manage that push back when it wasn't an initial Revit files?

MARK MERGENSCHROER: Kitchen equipment was not originally part of this. What we did was, we pulled the kitchen equipment straight from the kitchen equipment model. We did have a 3D model on the kitchen equipment. Granted, it was graphics. It wasn't detailed out, wasn't highly detailed. But then we assigned codes to that, and then we pushed it. We're pushing it, we have not pushed it yet. We're pushing it to Ops. And then the facilities team is going to do all that data collection and gathering for themselves.

We kind of made some deals along. As far as door openers, card readers, we did have a low voltage design on this job. So those were in there. Now the challenge is, these card readers and things on the exterior of the building-- how many of you are familiar with the room [? point count ?] method in Revit? Let's pretend that's a VV-box up there, even pretend there's a card reader right here. In the Revit family, you can check the room count point, and then it will actually pull the room data for you. Which is significant when you're trying to locate all these assets in a building, and it will tie all that together for you.

So we were able to use those room [? count point ?] methods to locate all this. On the exterior of the facility you don't have a space, or you don't have a room. And so we had to create some unique intricacies with the room [? coint point ?] method, pulling it back into the corridor that's just outside that wall for different things. Heliport lights were unique. So we actually created a space, or a room name for the Heliport. So that we got all those inside the Heliport. It took some creativity. It took some common sense. But it wasn't anything elaborate, we just tried to hit what the owner wanted.

AUDIENCE: Just real quickly, from an owner standpoint. Did you line item the additional service fees from this? From a BIM BDCO perspective? What was your basic services that you provided from a BIM perspective? And then what was your additional, and do you have a percentage of what that data additional cost was?

MARK MERGENSCHROER: It was a very low percent. See me afterwards. OK, so this is a very special client. So we did it bare bones for this, just because of who the client was. My company has been in business for 22 years. They've been a client of ours for 21. It was a, let's help each other type of a fee. It was less than six figures, I'll tell you that.

AUDIENCE: So, she was kind of digging to about where I'm going to get. Obviously, all this technology works extremely well. Revit, Glue, Ops. It's awesome. This was owned by the contractor. You've mentioned already that you think the contractor should pay for it for a couple of years. You also mentioned that Field is a single source of truth. So my opinion, my question is, have you started to have conversations-- as this continues to grow, this facility changes, different contractors, different designers. Who's going to own all this software in the future?

MARK MERGENSCHROER: So this building has not even opened yet, and we're about to do another 235,000 square foot expansion of this facility that's not even open yet. The owner, Arkansas Children's, is going to own C4R. They're going to own Glue. They're going to own Field. They're not going to run it. They're going to own it, and assign people to manage that. Which would be the contractor, the architect, and yes, I'm an engineer. Work for an engineering company. The architect would run the BIM team 360 C4R. Same workflow. It's just the architecture on it.

And as far as what I'm saying about-- that's just a recommendation. To pay for it for three years. I didn't mean for that to come across like that, if that's how it came across. It's just a solution to hand the owner some data.

AUDIENCE: Yeah, I think that's what people are seeing. They're seeing a contractor that's willing to do that. So I think a lot of conversations are being had with the owners [INAUDIBLE] If they are utilizing for 20 years, that's a different story.

MARK MERGENSCHROER: Right. So if you come tomorrow, you will hear that exact story in detail of what happened.

PRESENTER: And there are different ways with Ops, it's a free product in fact, so the digital turnover could be a free service that you offer them. Just as a sort of bonus, if you will. And also you can transition the ownership from the contractor to the owner, as the portfolio owner, so that can happen as well.

MARK MERGENSCHROER: Yes. So my company actually paid for the subscription for Ops. And then we will transition that. Actually we're getting a services agreement to continue to help administer Ops throughout the next-- almost said lifecycle, and I try not to say lifecycle. But through the next couple of years of operations.

AUDIENCE: Thank you. Are you going to add the subcontractors and contractors, along with the technicians, so that they're supported during the warranty period?

MARK MERGENSCHROER: Yes. So as part of the spec, they have to supply us vendor names for anybody that installed a piece of equipment, and then they will go into the system as a vendor.

AUDIENCE: As far as I know, in term of ownership of the files and hosting all the project as either general contractor or the owner, in the case of the owner in the future, if he wants to own the process 10 years from now-- as of now, there's no transition from Autodesk being able to transfer all the information from the GC as an account to the owner. So I'm not sure if there's some improvement there. But if there is a way-- maybe it's to let the owner be the owner first, at the beginning of the project. Making sure that we go that direction, at the end is going to own the files for future reference.