AU Class
AU Class
class - AU

Design on Location: Exploring the Integration of GIS and BIM

Share this class

Description

Building information modeling (BIM) and geographic information system (GIS) play critical roles in supporting building and infrastructure projects across lifecycle phases. While BIM is a multidisciplinary process for creating and managing project information, GIS instills real-world context into that information flow. Together, BIM and GIS grow collaboration, enhance decision making, and keep project information accessible to stakeholders. In our session, we'll highlight how BIM-GIS integrations benefit many roles across project phases. Gain insights into establishing initiatives at your organization that bring GIS and design teams together for cross-team collaborations. See how designers use Civil 3D software to discover ArcGIS data that contextualizes sites and informs decisions. Learn ways that project managers link documents from Autodesk Construction Cloud to GIS web features and coordinate across teams on resolving site issues. Come away from this session ready to harness BIM-GIS integrations for both your benefit and other teams in your organization.

Key Learnings

  • Establish initiatives so that design and GIS teams join forces to make BIM-GIS integration workflows more efficient.
  • Identify GIS data and maps pertinent to your project site and use them on-demand in Civil 3D to inform design decisions.
  • Coordinate on projects through a web-based experience that links Autodesk Construction Cloud documents to GIS features.

Speakers_few

  • Фотография профиля Michael Davidson
    Michael Davidson
    As a Product Manager at Esri, Michael pushes the boundaries of interoperability across GIS/CAD/BIM and ArcGIS for AutoCAD. Michael possesses 10 years of experience in civil engineering software development, including past focuses on BIM for bridges and geostatistics. He has a PhD in Civil Engineering from the University of Florida and is a licensed PE in Florida.
  • Jeffrey Frye
    Jeff has over 30 years of engineering and design experience. He is an industry expert and leader at HDR.
Video Player is loading.
Current Time 0:00
Duration 0:00
Loaded: 0%
Stream Type LIVE
Remaining Time 0:00
 
1x
  • Chapters
  • descriptions off, selected
  • subtitles off, selected
      Transcript

      MICHAEL DAVIDSON: Welcome, everyone, to this 60-minute technical instruction session-- "Design on Location-- Exploring the Integration of GIS and BIM." I'm Michael Davidson. I'm Esri's product manager for CAD and BIM integrations in ArcGIS Pro, and then a plugin that we developed that sits on top of Autodesk software. It's called ArcGIS for AutoCAD. I'm very happy today to have a colleague joining me. Jeff, you want to say a quick hello?

      JEFF FRYE: Hello. My name is Jeff Frye. I am with HDR in the Everett, Washington office. And I'll give you a little bit more about myself in later slides.

      MICHAEL DAVIDSON: Thanks, Jeff. Now, before we dive in today, please do take note of the safe harbor statement here. If I or Jeff end up making any forward-looking statements regarding potential future features or development efforts-- these are just current plans, current levels of development-- please don't make any business or purchasing decisions based on anything that we present here today.

      To set the stage for today's technical content, this session is all about the benefits of BIM and GIS integrations, and that extends across project phases, industries, roles. And to keep it focused, we do have three supporting objectives.

      First, we want you coming away from today knowing how to motivate and establish organizational initiatives that bring design and GIS teams together on integration workflows. Second, for all of you designers out there, we are going to walk through some picks and clicks for accessing maps and GIS data on demand right from within Civil 3D so that you can make those more informed design decisions. Third, for all of you project managers, we're going to walk through how to set up a cloud environment that lets you coordinate on your projects. And it does it by linking design and construction documents from Autodesk Construction Cloud to the world of GIS. And that's happening all within your web browser.

      So in line with our theme and those objectives, we've divided this presentation into five parts. Now, first, I'm going to provide some high level of why BIM and GIS integrations matter. I'll then turn it over to Jeff, and he'll share his experiences and some successes and insights on establishing organizational initiatives that get those GIS and design teams talking to each other.

      Now, from there, I'm going to focus in on two roles. And we're going to start with designers. And I'll demo some built-in capabilities that let designers discover and work with content right within their Civil 3D application. Well then dive into that project management space and see how to get started, but also highlight a real-world use case for coordinating on projects in a cross-platform environment, again, through that connection of Autodesk and ArcGIS.

      So let me start with some high-level overview of BIM and GIS, contextualize it, talk about why this matters. What I'm showing here is a life cycle for infrastructure projects. I know all of you all know this. And whether you're coming from AEC or transportation or utilities or another industry, your projects are divided into phases.

      And earlier phases like design or later activities like project handover, they're not neat and tidy. They're not completed in isolation. Phases overlap each other. They encompass maybe activities entirely. And this creates a need for many types of project professionals, and that includes designers, project managers, but it's also GIS users. It's field teams, asset managers.

      It creates that need to share, access, and transact on all these different types of project information. That might range from, say, pre-existing imagery that's publicly available or data that's gathered out in the field on regular intervals. It might be LiDAR, it might be-- maybe if you're out in a digital twin application, it might be real-time sensor data.

      Maybe if you're focusing on the modeling and analysis side, maybe you're working with terrain models or doing Voxel modeling to help characterize the subsurface conditions for your site. Maybe you're working on precise, accurate technical CAD drawings to help convey those project deliverables. Maybe you're working on BIM models, 3D and 4D and beyond, for your project's built components.

      And regardless of where you're coming from, I'm sure that you've all lived through, at some extent, how daunting it is to keep track of all of those evolving, disparate pieces of information. And this is where, from Esri's standpoint, we do emphasize that geographic approach, and we think it becomes key.

      So using location, imbuing all that project information with location to help drive the decisions you're making, we see that as one of the few constants that persists during those messy overlaps or transitions between project phases and activities. We see location as connecting and maybe to some extent shepherding project information-- that includes BIM; that includes CAD-- across these lifecycle phases so that all of that information can be integrated as a source of spatial data so that it can rain a little bit more organized, centralized, and ultimately available for use by all these different project stakeholders, all these different organizations that are needed to get that project to completion.

      So collectively, Esri and Autodesk allow a wide range of professionals to maintain that thread of location across these project phases as they unfold. So I've got here, just the starting point of a slide. It's designers authoring CAD data sets to gain that geographic context from things like Esri basemaps right within their Autodesk apps.

      They can discover on their own. They can self-serve access. They can collaboratively edit and create GIS features using their familiar CAD and BIM authoring tools, and they can do it while transacting on project information that stays centralized up on environments like ArcGIS Online and Enterprise.

      Now, for mid-project phases like construction, pre-construction, or maybe even really late phases-- so operations and maintenance, project managers, asset managers-- they can use ArcGIS GeoBIM to link spatially enabled design and construction documents to GIS features on the web, and then coordinate using a easy-to-use interface across teams to resolve issues and keep their projects moving forward.

      Now, underpinning a lot of those activities by the designer, by the project manager, by the asset manager, you have GIS users using tools like ArcGIS Pro to federate all of those different types of project data, analyze it on their end, visualize it on their end, but also make it-- share it out, make it available to all these other project stakeholders. And again, that's going to make possible some of those activities that the project manager, the asset manager, the designer can carry out. So for example, you might have the GIS user authoring feature layers in ArcGIS Pro. And of course, combining them together with the GIS, the CAD and the BIM, packaging them up, making them available for use.

      But that's not to say that we have a perfect tech stack. We're not done. There's still challenges that remain for BIM and GIS integration. And what myself-- what Jeff want to do today in this session is we want to provide insights and let you start addressing collaboration issues, establishing that awareness and shared vocabulary across your teams. We're going to share some ways to consolidate data, for example, without-- say, when you bring GIS into BIM without losing that geographic context and offsetting instances where, say, BIM and GIS can lead to these stale models.

      Second, we're going to highlight some tools that can soften data management challenges. Who takes the lead in originating shared data, performing quality control? Who has editing access? And what and where is the authoritative data that I need for my role?

      Now third, we're going to call out some best practices to make your application workflows less cumbersome. I'm going to highlight some tools that reduce the need for all of your users to have the same exact version of the same software to operate. And then we're also going to talk about some ways to reduce some time-consuming processes for keeping data in sync, and hopefully help to start that journey of addressing these challenges across your organizations. So with that, I'm going to hand it over to Jeff, and he's going to dive into those insights at the organizational level.

      JEFF FRYE: Thank you, Michael. Just a little bit more about myself-- I've been in the industry for about 34 years, started my career as a CAD production person. All the while, I prided myself on bridging the gap, bringing people together, making sure that our designs, our staff members were trained, our designs were collaborative between every platform that we were using, all the while getting projects out the door, making the deadlines and meeting project requirements.

      Currently at HDR, I generally work on mega projects that have a lot of moving pieces, a lot of public involvement, a lot of public exposure, and public input on projects, but most importantly, a lot of project data. My projects use data from all across the engineering spectrum. GIS analysis, AutoCAD Civil 3D designs, Open OpenRoads Designer, even OpenBridge Modeler designs are used as well.

      As I started thinking about integrating more and more GIS data into my daily work, I recognized a gap. But I really wasn't until I was able to get some senior leadership involved that we were able to make a lot of progress on this. Over the next couple of slides, I'll take you on that quick journey of our initiative at HDR, how we formed it, who we brought in as team members, how we communicate with each other, and how our partnership with Autodesk and Esri helped us achieve both of those goals.

      So I want to take a quick second here to think about our problems and our solutions in one box. We had a few issues to work through in the beginning, but our most noticeable was our language barriers. We didn't speak the same lingo between our CAD teams and our GIS teams. We didn't share the same terminology. We didn't fully understand what GIS really had to offer the CAD environment.

      We had our work silos. We had CAD users working very diligently in their environment. We had GIS workers working in their silo. And occasionally, we would enhance the data, but we really didn't understand what we were getting, why we were getting it. Lastly, we didn't know who to ask, what to ask for or how to ask for it.

      In our solution column, we prepared solutions that include a glossary of terms. So we had that common language. We established regular touch point meetings and events. We created and documented workflows, and we embedded team members in each other's projects.

      Starting with language barriers, we still have these common goals and objectives and contractual deliverables to get out the door. Our GIS team was very knowledgeable on the data side, the data analytics, and what it took to produce very vibrant and robust web interfaces and showcase our project data. Our CAD and design teams knew how to draw lines, arcs, circles, and polylines to annotate our designs, create our sheet files, and ultimately create PDFs to give to our client as part of our project deliverables. But collectively, we were not on the same page.

      Although some of the words will appear the same in these bubbles, their meaning is so greatly different that it caused confusion, frustration, and a lack of confidence in each other's abilities to help out. It wasn't until we were able to get senior management involved at a southern California Esri event where two of our senior directors got together and started talking about each other's teams and the need for better coordination. They knew there was a problem. They knew there was a lack of trust between the groups, and they knew that there was a lack of education. At the same time, they had confidence that they could solve the problem with the help of some thought leaders on both sides.

      In the very beginning of this, we formed a very small, informal working group with a few GIS experts and a few CAD experts. We all sat down and drafted this mission statement that you see on the right to determine the problem, possible solution, outcomes, and use cases for sharing data.

      We came up with a group called CAD And GIS Are Friends. Arguably, this working group title at HDR is one of the silliest I can imagine presenting to senior management, let alone at Autodesk University. But it's catchy, and it really indicates the trust, relationship, and compatibility that has come out of this for HDR, Esri, and Autodesk.

      Our thought leaders were asked the questions what, when, who, and how? when this whole thing started. The first thing this working group did after forming was implemented something called office hours. Just like in school, the thought leaders would join a Microsoft Teams meeting, have a loose agenda, maybe show a quick tip or trick, and open the floor to anyone that had questions, issues, problems, or successes to share. Sometimes we even invited Esri or Autodesk to attend these meetings.

      Each of our business groups at HDR had regular webinars. We would attend those webinars as a group. We'd make presentations to those teams. We would showcase our internal use cases or discuss our upcoming technologies. We'd share current project examples. Gain exposure for the thought leaders was probably the most important part of that. Occasionally, this group is even being asked now to make presentations and help out for interview prep.

      On the social side, taking advantage of Microsoft Teams, out working group started this Teams page where we kept it simple. We provided links to internal trainings, link to vendor, offered trainings, and provided a space for users to come together, share their thoughts, and project issues in a safe space. This working group and the collection of power users on both sides of the fence enabled this-- it enabled this working group to leverage that power. We took advantage of this and started adding new roles to projects by embedding GIS users into projects that normally wouldn't have a GIS person on the organizational chart and a CAD person on a project.

      Our working group asked and answered these questions-- what to ask for? So we created a checklist. Those checklists included all the right questions to ask with the appropriate answers selectable. How do you want it? Do you want it weekly, daily? Do you want it at milestone submissions? Who to talk to? We established this open line of communication that allowed those opportunities to collaborate together. And we are currently in the review and tracking stage of with this group.

      When it came to workflows, we started really simple. We started with how to import shape files into our CAD. We evolve these workflows to include direct connections to ArcGIS Online and develop round trip workflows as well. We made the users aware of features, data, usability that they'd been missing out on, like, automatically layering GIS data when it comes into CAD or getting access to that metadata that we historically hadn't been available.

      And lastly, annotating objects. In our workflow documents that we created, we added contact information for our subject matter expert teams. So users had a resource or an email. We were a phone call away if they got stuck or if they wanted to share their success.

      We created repeatable, reliable, and easy-to-use documents for teams to include in their own project documentation. So we created documents that could be included in CAD manuals, BIM implementation plans, or digital delivery plans.

      Lastly, we landed on standards as the single most important part of this workflow. We decided that predictable inputs led to predictable outputs on both sides. It helped us greatly reduce the confusion, the trust issue, and the overall back and forth we had been seeing in these transfers.

      On the CAD side, we adopted a layer-naming convention. On the GIS side, we adopted a folder-naming convention. Back to the CAD side, we adopted a file-naming convention. On the GIS side, we adopted a data mapping standard.

      When all of those standards are aligned, we ended up with that predictable input, resulting in that predictable output. We also established rules for non-standard layers coming from CAD to GIS as unclassified. I'll talk a little bit more about that in just a second.

      This is a screen capture here of an example project where we're using an Esri basemap and our live CAD data that was provided to our GIS partners. It gives us the ability to see the live data on. In this case, it was a weekly cadence that we were sharing our data with our GIS partners.

      On the next slide, this will talk about how we want to show the granularity. This allows any consumer of this data to turn on and off the appropriate layers, be it architectural or civil, or survey. It allows them to show the data with the context in the background that they want to see at that time without any extra information being shown.

      This slide talks about-- the funnest part of this is the unclassified layer. So when a CAD user didn't follow our rules, put things on the wrong layer-- in this case, you can see the layer name doesn't follow our layer naming convention-- it gets classified in GIS as unclassified. This is an unintentional consequence, but it's great for a CAD manager to quickly look at and query the database for unclassified information.

      I can then talk to the model element author for that. You can see here, I have the file name. I can reach out directly to the person that last saved that drawing and find out how and when we can get these things fixed.

      Again, the display granularity given here in our GIS environment allows anyone with access the ability to see the design the way they want to see it, and with the context with which they want to review it. Without opening CAD, you can query the designs, get access to internal Civil 3D and AutoCAD data. You can display the design any way you want to. You can take screen captures of the design as well.

      You can use this for discussion during meetings. And in many cases, these GIS interfaces at HDR have reduced or greatly reduced or replaced roll plots. With that, I will hand it back to Michael to show some more examples and workflows of bringing CAD and BIM and GIS together.

      MICHAEL DAVIDSON: Thanks a lot, Jeff-- really appreciate that. So what we want to do for the remainder of this presentation is focus in on some specific roles now that Jeff's got us covered at the organizational level. And I'm going to start with that design space. So that head space of the designers.

      So this next section is for all of you out there that are in the trenches working with Civil 3D, trying to get your models and your drawings out. Now, the promise here from the GIS, the BIM integration's perspective is that by combining BIM, CAD and GIS data, is that you, as the designer, and you, as your design team, can better understand where and how an asset fits within the built and the natural environments.

      And you can also gather existing conditions for your project, get that context at will. So the idea is that we're making your models more information-rich. We're giving you the means to collaborate across your teams, maybe with other teams, during the design and construction workflows, and allowing for you as the designer to not get roped into rework, say, in later project phases like operations and maintenance. You can do things like publish out the as building to GIS right from Civil 3D, for example.

      So just a few years ago, GIS groups were the only viewers of GIS data. But that's evolved, and it's increasingly evolving. And what we see now more and more is that GIS users are-- maybe GIS managers, for example, they're administering-- they're curating, supporting project data that the designers can bring straight into their tools of choice, whether it's AutoCAD or Civil 3D or InfraWorks. There's that variety there.

      And further, as a designer, you're not waiting on your GIS team for you to reach out to them, for them to identify and package up and email you over or point to a network location where a shape file is stored. Instead, data flows into the design to inform it right while it's being worked on. And the promise here are what we aspire to is that that's going to remove bottlenecks, remove delays.

      And that this data can come from all kinds of places. It can be from within your organization. It could be live data that's being gathered out in the field. Imagine making changes and verifying them with your field workers out on site as you're making design decisions, or as they're doing assessments out on the site. There's also public information from Living Atlas of the World.

      So that's an authoritative, curated content for soil types or environmentally sensitive areas, even vessel traffic, for example. You can also draw up on imagery, whether it's publicly available, again, or specific to your organization or captured through drone scans, things like that. And there's also Esri basemaps.

      And what I want to do for the rest of this section for designers is I want to focus on some built-in capabilities in Civil 3D that can help serve you as they're bringing about those integrations from GIS and BIM. And I'll start with Esri basemaps.

      So with the release of Civil 3D in April of this year, 2024, one of the new built-in capabilities is for designers to select from a variety of Esri basemaps and add them directly into their drawings. So these basemaps can provide a huge measure of prepackaged design context. They're going to help you answer that question of where, but they're going to do it in a way that you don't have to build up the basemap yourself.

      And a little bit separate from this, you can draw from customized basemaps from your organization. Now, either way, the idea is that it can give your teams this nice, warm, and fuzzy feeling that the design geometry, that your models are in the right location and allows you to make that much more confident design decisions.

      So here I'm in Civil 3D 2025, and I'm going to be working on a hypothetical project for this next series of demos, where we're going to be looking at some water lines for several buildings. So I can see as I'm zooming out, there's building footprints. There's some property boundaries. There's water distribution lines, laterals, and meters. And I want to contextualize all of this by loading an Esri basemap.

      But what I need to do first is to assign a coordinate system. And here I've taken the route of just opening the drawing settings. And then from the Tool Space pane, what I'm doing here is just populating some location information. Now, for this illustrative scenario, the project takes place in North Carolina, so I've specified a state plane coordinate system.

      And now that I've assigned that coordinate system, I've navigated to that geolocation contextual ribbon and then just pulled in whatever I selected to be of interest from that variety of Esri basemaps. That's light and dark themes. And what I selected here was imagery.

      Now zooming into those buildings in that southeast portion of the island, I have that ability to visually gain that quick sense of the context, of the existing conditions. What are the parking lots? What are the boundaries of the island?

      So let's now turn to another integration capability that's built right into Civil 3D, and this is known as the Autodesk connector for ArcGIS. Now, this tool set's going to let designers maintain a connection between design content and properties in Civil 3D to attributed geometry up in ArcGIS. So the connectors for ArcGIS, they let you import GIS information into your design environment.

      So the idea is that civil engineers, designers, CAD technicians, whoever, they can see that real-world context of their designs, not just from the Esri basemaps, but also from feature layers, for example. So they can work with up-to-date existing conditions, information. And further, you can pass changes that you've made to the connected layers back to ArcGIS.

      So while there are lots of ways to use the connectors, what I'm going to do today is I'm going to highlight just one key pattern that lets you discover GIS layers pertinent to your design, add and translate the attributed geometry to a variety of supported Civil 3D objects that enrich your drawings and enrich your models, and then save back edits that you make to a connected layer, for example, to keep those design updates centralized and accessible to your other teammates, but to also to other project stakeholders.

      So let's go into a little bit more of the picks and clicks. I've got a series of demos here. They're all about one minute, pretty short. But as we press forward here, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go back again and again to that hypothetical water infrastructure project for those buildings.

      And here I'm going to put on a little bit more specifically, say, the hat of a mid-level engineer. And I'm checking the work of a junior engineer for some laterals, for some meters that they've laid out, and that they've pushed up into that system of record.

      So in a moment, what I'm going to do is I'm going to play a demo that shows how to take that first step-- access the Autodesk connector for ArcGIS and Civil 3D; find some layers that are pertinent to my project site, set a project area, browse through it, and then choose from those layers stored in, say, ArcGIS Online or ArcGIS Enterprise; and then allow me to start taking those next steps that are ultimately going to lead to help me do a better job of QA/QC, checking the work of that junior engineer, and placing those laterals and meters of the water infrastructure components for those several buildings.

      So zooming into the southeast corner of the island, we can see these cyan building footprints. And what we want is supporting information for the associated-- the water service lines, the meters. Now, what I'm going to do is from the Insert ribbon in Civil 3D, in the ArcGIS group, that's where I can access and open up the Autodesk connector for ArcGIS.

      So next, I'm just going to type in the location of my project site, the name of the island here, and that's going to automatically zoom me in. Next, I'm going to set a project area where I just set it to my current view. And now what's happening is that the connector is loading up publicly available layers that are pertinent to my site, but it's also showing me my organization's content that's pertinent to the site that has that same geographic overlap.

      And what I'm seeing there is all kinds of helpful information. I've got some landowners information. I've got the laterals themselves. I've got the main lines for the water distribution, and I've also got the meters. So I'm seeing right there that this tool is helping me discover the what's latest, greatest, what's centralized, but available to me to access and pull down into my tool so that I can do a better job on taking the next step that I need to take for my project.

      So now that we've identified some GIS data that we want to work with, like the waterline laterals and the meters, as well as the content that's going to inform our design checks on that junior engineers work-- so things like the landowners information that's going to supplement it-- let's now see how to add all that information, all that attributed geometry to our drawing. And that's going to include some of the options for bringing the GIS content into Civil 3D and translating it to Civil 3D objects. That's going to make it that much more familiar for you to go on with your workflow.

      So GIS layer's made out of points. They can be translated to COCO points for example. Lines can be translated to alignments, feature lines, even gravity pipes. Polygons can be translated to parcels, for example.

      So let's see this in action for just one of the layers for our water project. So I'm going to walk through importing a GIS layer into this Civil 3D drawing, and I'm going to use those landowners polygons. Now, notice, before importing, I've set the CAD layer to the one that I want the GIS to come in on.

      So what I'm going to do next is go right back to the Autodesk connector, and I'm going to select that landowner's polygons layer. Now notice a pulldown appears with the representations that are available for translating, too, in your Civil 3D environment. And I've selected parcels.

      Now, if what you find is you're bringing in the same layer or layers day after day, there is a templatizing experience to this importing process. You can specify CAD layers to which the content gets routed, object styles. You could save all that to a JSON file.

      But for today, I'm just doing one simple layer and bringing that in. And zooming in to our buildings of interest, what we see now is that we have parcels. We have parcel objects now included in our drawing. And it's not just the geometry. The GIS attributes, they're going to get carried through, as well as example, through the property sets.

      So far, we have done a couple of things here. We've discovered some GIS data relevant to our waterlines project. We've added some layers to our drawing, including GIS content, translated to Civil 3D objects like parcels like I've just shown. And what you could do is you could use that same set of picks and clicks to bring in the laterals and the meters and all the information you need. Like I said earlier, you could also carry out like a templatized experience if you wanted.

      But what I'm getting at is with just a few minutes of effort, I've enriched my drawing with context to inform and the content that I need to carry out those checks on the laterals and the meters that were laid out by the junior engineer. So in my final demo for this section, what I'm going to do is I'll walk us through carrying out those checks. And for any revisions that we make, we're going to save back those edits, and that's going to keep that design data centralized and authoritative for my teammates, for other project stakeholders.

      So zooming in once again to those cyan buildings of interest, what I'm doing now is I'm just visually scanning across these buildings, and I'm checking the service lateral placements. And we can see that we're looking pretty good. We have close proximity to the laterals and the meters to the corners of the buildings.

      This tank farm doesn't need it. But what I see for this final building is, wait a minute, this lateral and this meter, it's actually falling outside of that property boundary. So I'm going to make an edit here, and I'm going to move that endpoint to within the property boundary.

      And now what I'm doing is I'm going back to that same location, that ArcGIS group in the insert ribbon, and I'm going to save back those changes. Now, notice you can select which layers you want to save back if you want to go that route. And now what I'm doing is I'm pushing back that change I made on the laterals and the meters layer back up to the ArcGIS online or Enterprise.

      Now, if another stakeholder, a GIS person, a project manager, if they want to get at that data, they can rest easy that when they pull up, for example, this web map in ArcGIS online, that that latest, greatest information is sure enough intact because I did that saveback effort. So I'm not just benefiting myself. I'm not just benefiting other designers. I'm also benefiting other project stakeholders.

      Now, speaking of those other project stakeholders, let me now shift focus to all of the project managers out there. You have that awesome responsibility of communicating across teams, maybe internal and external, to your organization, identifying and staying on top of issues, getting all the right folks to take action so that your projects can move forward.

      I want to focus on project managers for this next module here. And let me get a little bit more specific about what our perceptions are of your day-to-day. What we see is that you're likely juggling several projects at any given time. That you have to keep up with heaps of evolving information for every single one of those projects. And you've got to keep it organized just enough to keep a beat on.

      Now, second, you have to convey status to lots of different teams, maybe even to executives, maybe even to the public at times. Now, third, for the revolving door of issues and fires that arise, you're going to need to reach out to the right team or teams, get them the right information so that you can get those issues resolved and maintain that forward progress on your project.

      So what I want to do here in the next several slides is I want to explore how BIM and GIS integrations can help you as the project manager, maybe even the asset manager to some extent. And this is where ArcGIS GeoBIM comes in. Its promise is that it's an easy-to-use web interface that facilitates collaboration across GIS and BIM, where you interact with both the ArcGIS world, the Autodesk world, and the project information on both of those platforms in a cloud-to-cloud way.

      Now stated another way, GIS web features are going to give you context, and they're linked to corresponding Autodesk design and construction documents as content. And that situates you between these worlds of BIM and GIS so that you can view all your project data, all your project activity on one map. So again, the promise here is that linked environment is going to make it easier to communicate issues, status to your teams and your stakeholders, keep everyone aligned on project delivery activities.

      So project managers-- Jeff, he gave me a heads up. You don't have the longest attention spans. All I'm asking for is about three minutes. What I've done is I've broken down into bit-sized videos just some of the key steps that you're going to need some help from a GIS person, maybe from your VDC, to get you up and running with an ArcGIS GeoBIM project.

      But if you stick with me, you're going to be equipped with how to get it up and running, but we're also going to show you a real-world example of how far you can take this tool to serve for pre-construction, construction, even out into operations and maintenance.

      So first, you can launch the ArcGIS GeoBIM app from ArcGIS Online or Enterprise, just like any other ArcGIS app, and you can create a project. Now, in addition to standard information like the name and description and thumbnail, what's key here in this first step is setting location and getting that coordinate system set that's going to be used for your ArcGIS GeoBIM project.

      Now, you can select the coordinate system by selecting a basemap. And you can do it from preconfigured or your custom basemaps, for example. Now, the coordinate system is identified for each basemap, and it's going to give that reference, that backdrop to all this project information that we're going to subsequently bring in.

      So we've taken that first step. We've got the coordinate information in place. What we're going to do next is we have this project created on the ArcGIS side of things. As a second step, what we're going to need to do is establish that connection to one or more Autodesk projects.

      So for any project in the Autodesk Construction Cloud, you can supply your Autodesk credentials. You can create that entry in the accounts page for the ArcGIS GeoBIM project we just created. And after that account is configured, the list of projects that you can choose from within ArcGIS GeoBIM, it's going to match the list of projects that you see over in the Autodesk Construction Cloud.

      And in our example here, we see three projects that we want to include for that from our wider portfolio. But notice you can also bring in all of your projects if you really want to. And you can pull all of those from your selected Autodesk hub.

      All right, so we've taken two steps. We've set that coordinate information, and we've made that connection, that initial connection between the worlds of ArcGIS and Autodesk. Now, with those two steps in place, we're going to take this third step now where we need to create the GIS features that correspond to the Autodesk design and construction data.

      So a common workflow here with our current technology is you're going to need that GIS user, and they're probably going to be working in ArcGIS Pro. And they're going to bring together all the different types of project information that includes those CAD and BIM data sets in your Autodesk Construction Cloud.

      And they're going to federate, express, and share out all that information as feature classes. So it's to be packaged up and published out to a web scene, and that's essentially going to provide the left half of your ArcGIS GeoBIM experience where, at will, the right half can be occupied by that Autodesk design and construction environment.

      So once that web scene is made available to you by your GIS person, ArcGIS GeoBIM includes a collection of tools that are going to read those Autodesk projects and geographically locate all the engineering documents, all the issues, even, and create things like document footprints, and issue points.

      Now, you can also do things like can create project boundaries that you display in the web scene. That's going to encompass the footprint of your entire project. For example, the project boundary tool can create just a single polygon per project, for example. That's going to represent the geographic extent of all the projects, all the documents in your project.

      From there, you can start to-- the world's your oyster at that point. You can start to zoom into project sites, start to view issues, facilities, inspect them, interrogate them on demand. You can figure out what type of design and construction documents are available at a given location. You can access it visually. You can look at it in a tabular format like I'm showing here.

      But what I'm getting at is with those three key steps-- getting the location information in place, making that initial connection, and then making sure that you have that correspondence between the Autodesk design construction documents, your GIS features, you're off and running. From there, you can take this really far.

      And just one example-- one more little video here for tips and tricks-- is that you can configure your project-specific functionality by creating ArcGIS GeoBIM apps that live within each ArcGIS GeoBIM project. So ArcGIS GeoBIM, it contains feature sets that ease that configurability. You're not doing any coding.

      And once you've established those key ArcGIS Autodesk project connections, you can configure these apps that suit your project coordination needs. So on the Apps page, like I'm just browsing through here, you can create as many applications within ArcGIS GeoBIM as you want.

      And each application, as I said, can be configured for a specific purpose, or maybe meetings with a specific team, by selecting from the tools, the style, and the data that you want to be associated with that application. Now, you can have up to two maps or scenes added to each application, and they can contain as much or as little content as needed for whatever specific purpose you're wanting to get up to.

      As I said before, the maps and scenes they can come from any source you have access to. For example, what I'm showing here is a portfolio app where I want to do things like have charts and the ability to review issues through editor widgets. I want to be able to add notes. That's going to help me with status. Maybe even you could go towards schedules-- that type of activity-- through these apps that you configure, hopefully, relatively easily.

      So project managers, if you are still with me-- it was just a couple of minutes, maybe a little bit over three, but hopefully, not much more-- let me now show you the promise of this through a real-world example of just how far you can take these type of project coordination tools that integrate BIM and GIS. So what I'm about to show you is an example of digital transformation. It's from Portcoast Consultant Corporation. It's a port and coastal consultancy in Vietnam, and they specialize in designing and surveying maritime projects. Now, Portcoast used advanced survey technology and ArcGIS to create a digital twin of ports along Vietnam's Coast.

      Now, early in the project, they use a lot of reality capture of the site. But then as next steps, they started to build up a lot of context through feature layers and combining those feature layers into web scenes. And this is where ArcGIS GeoBIM came in because it can link all those feature layers to things like BIM models, Civil 3D drawings, contracts that are stored in Autodesk Construction Cloud-- and as the project manager put it-- so that all parties can understand what is where while reducing the need to convert models throughout phases like design and construction. It can reduce risk and time to completion.

      Now, out in the operational phase, ArcGIS GeoBIM was again used to do things visualize issue completion, timelines, asset locations through dashboards that were configured and built up under those ArcGIS GeoBIM maps. And per the asset manager, that resulted in a 40% increase to operational efficiency for these ports.

      So let's summarize what we heard today and just recap all the benefits that can be achieved by integrating BIM and GIS as it pertains to organizations, as well as specific roles. Now, as Jeff shared with us, you can establish an initiative that spread across your organization, allowing designers and GIS teams to do things like begin picking up on each other's language, each other's syntax, maybe even develop some empathy for the day-to-day challenges faced on both sides of those types of roles.

      Now, from those initiatives, the design and the GIS teams, they're going to start figuring out the best ways to tackle efficiently integration workflows. And more broadly, these initiatives, they're going to contribute to making digital project delivery a reality.

      Now, second, turning to designers, there are multiple integration options that enable this on-demand access of things like maps, your organization's content, Living Atlas content that you can use within tools like Civil 3D. So you can self-serve. You have that agency now. You're not waiting on-- you're not as dependent on your GIS team to hunt down and package up a shapefile, for example. You can gain that needed context for your existing conditions at will.

      Now, taking it further for these BIM and GIS integrations, what they do, as the integrations and the adoption matures, is they actually start to evolve design workflows and make them more collaborative, in part, just by virtue of keeping the latest, greatest, the authoritative project data, more centralized, more accessible by other designers, by other GIS users, by other projects, stakeholders.

      Now third, we did some focus on how BIM and GIS integrations benefit project managers. They allow them to coordinate using easy-to-use, configurable web interfaces that, behind the scenes, are maintaining this live link between this GIS and this BIM platform. They enable project managers to see and evaluate issues, design and construction documents in real-world context, and then convey that up-to-date project information across teams.

      So whether you are listening in today, coming from a role that has that leadership, say, or that ability to bring about initiatives at an organizational level, or whether you came to us today as a designer or a project manager, and you were looking just to learn some more of the how and maybe some of those benefits that BIM and GIS integrations can bring, what we hope you came away with was a deeper appreciation and some more details about how those BIM and GIS integrations benefit not just you, but a wide variety of roles in industries like AEC.

      So if you want to learn more, check out this story map. There's the QR code there. It includes links to things like articles and hands-on tutorials. You can get hands-on with it for working with integrating BIM and GIS data sets.

      There's a joint blog article that Esri and Autodesk put together that speaks to the value of GIS integration specific to designers. There's a case study that HDR-- they put out there that's on yet another project that benefited from all of those efforts to integrate BIM and GIS. Get those design teams working together. And if you are willing to do me a favor, there's also an opportunity there for you to tell me to tell our product teams how are you using BIM and CAD and GIS, including what can we do better to overcome those challenges that I introduced way back near the early parts of this presentation.

      Now, regardless of your role or your industry or where you're coming from today, if a lot of what we covered is brand new to you, that's all right. Go check out this resource for getting started on your journey toward digital project delivery through these integrations.

      All right, thanks very much, everyone, for attending today. And I hope you have a wonderful Autodesk University 2024.