Let the APIs Work for You: How PARIC Uses Autodesk Construction Cloud Connect for Automations

TRAVIS BYERLEY: Thank you for joining us today to learn how PARIC utilizes Autodesk's platform services and ACC Connect.

SOPHAT SAM: Great. And before we get started, please take a moment to read our Safe Harbor statement. In general, this is a publicly traded company. So anything that we say, advertise, et cetera, should not influence your purchases of other stocks or anything like that. So with that out of the way, we can move on to the next slide.

TRAVIS BYERLEY: Hello, I'm Travis Byerley. I am an applications control manager for PARIC corporation. I have a 17-year background in architectural, engineering, and the construction industry. My experience has ranged from architectural design, CAD and BIM management, model coordination, mechanical and plumbing design to my current role is managing data standards, technology processes, procedures, and software implementation.

SOPHAT SAM: Thanks, Travis. And my name is Sophat Sam. I manage our team of integration solutions engineers within the Autodesk construction solutions business unit. My team and I typically work with our customers, helping them develop and fine tune integrations between the Autodesk Construction Cloud products and usually third party products.

I joined Autodesk in 2019, when we were acquired as part-- or when I joined as part of the PlanGrid acquisition. Prior to that, I worked primarily with other customers in the New York area in terms of helping them deploy enterprise content management solutions. Academically, I come from an architectural background. So I have worked primarily with designers and architects in the AEC industry.

All right, so let's talk a little bit about the agenda for today. So first, we'll give you a quick background in terms of what and who PARIC is. Beyond that, we're going to go through and walk you through the business process that we are trying to solve. We'll go into a little bit of what ACC Connect is, which is the tool we'll be using to help us automate a lot of these processes.

We'll then show you how we've used that to automate the manual process from before. And then we'll take a quick look at other future automations that we're working on with PARIC. And then end with lessons learned based off of the two or so years that we've worked with PARIC on this initiative.

TRAVIS BYERLEY: So a little bit about PARIC Corporation. PARIC was founded in 1979 on the idea of developing innovative solutions and streamlining construction processes. We quickly grew from a small construction company to an industry leader. Over the past 40 years, PARIC has become a nationally recognized construction firm that currently ranks 151 on ENR's top 400 national contractors list.

As a premier general contractor, construction manager, and design builder, we've leveraged decades of experience to provide our customers with innovative solutions. PARIC has expertise in historic renovation, development, and adaptive reuse projects. This includes a diverse range of multifamily experience through both design build and construction management deliveries. We have managed projects ranging from small renovation jobs to full scale, high-rise, mixed use buildings.

So back in 2019, we set a goal here at PARIC to automate some of our time-consuming business processes to help us become more efficient and free up some time for other daily tasks. One example of a task we felt we needed to automate was setting up a project across all of our daily systems that we use.

This diagram illustrates how many of the repetitive steps that we had to take to set up a progress-- or set up a project across all of our platforms. Starting with the first box at the top is our CRM tool. Our administrative staff had to collect data from-- project data from across many different individuals in the company and then manually input those into that platform.

They would get this information by word of mouth, emails, an Excel document that floated around the building via email, et cetera. Then the second box there in the middle of the screen, the same administrators would go into our ERP tool and input that same information again and then have to verify that the information did not change, it wasn't-- it was still correct, and matched the CRM tool.

Once that data was populated and verified, the VDC team would receive an email from the administrative staff letting us know it was OK to set this project up in our Autodesk platforms. From there, the VDC team logged in and entered primarily those same project data into BIM 360 and then went through the entire-- went through that setup process.

Then we had to add a roughly around 50 standard users from here at PARIC. This process roughly took around 40 to 60 minutes. But the real turnaround time with back and forth communication would realistically-- could stretch across a day to two days. So we understood that other companies have similar workflows to the project setup in other systems. That is why we have identified that need to bring you this presentation today.

So after going through all these manual steps, setting up roughly 10 to 15 projects a week, I thought there has to be a better way. I contacted our customer service manager at Autodesk and started discussing my pain points with her about the manual project setup process. From there, we were connected with Sophat.

We had many discussions around what we wanted to accomplish. I walked him through our workflows. And we diagrammed those workflows into flowcharts. So that we could capture each data entry point and the data that needed to be entered. From there, we contacted our CRM and ERP software providers to help us identify what APIs they had available that would help support our workflow.

Surprise, surprise, they didn't have all of the APIs we needed. So we had to add additional steps into the workflow to accommodate the APIs that were missing. So next, Sophat jumped in. And he started working on building and testing the APIs that would align to our workflows.

From there, we learned that it was important to set up regular meetings between PARIC and Autodesk to provide ongoing feedback to the Autodesk product team and to discuss any necessarily-- any necessary enhancements. Many of these conversations involved the product team, Sophat, and we were all really discussing how we can make APIs available and maybe even put in some future enhancements into the software.

SOPHAT SAM: Yeah, so as our conversation with Travis and the team progressed, obviously, we kind understood what the pain point was in terms of what they were trying to solve. From there, we basically diagrammed out how to best automate most of these processes. Before we could do that, though, there was a checklist of things that we needed to verify going forward to help with the automation.

So for example, we needed to make sure that it was-- that there was a single admin account that we could use to help automate the creation of those projects. We needed to make sure that files and folders were accessible to that user. As Travis mentioned, we also needed to work with third party tools, like their CRM tool, to make sure that the data that we needed was also available.

With that, we also identified that ACC Connect would be the tool that we would be using to help with this automation process. Once we identified that, as Travis pointed out, we also needed to make sure that the APIs that we would need to do this automation was available. So this became an iterative process between ourselves-- that is myself and the Autodesk product team-- as well as with PARIC, just to make sure that what we wanted to automate was either on the roadmap or available in some way for us to utilize.

The key point here is really all of the APIs that's available. And as the title of this session mentions, let the APIs work for you. We're really trying to make the most out of the APIs and using it to automate a lot of these otherwise manual processes.

So before we get into the meat of this session, what I want to do is just quickly go over the tool that we selected, which was ACC Connect, to help us with this automation. So just for a little bit of background, within BIM 360 and ACC, there are typically two types of integrations. First are the partner cards, where you can embed other applications into your dashboards.

That was not the option here. What we wanted to do was directly take data from other systems, and utilize that for our automation. So that's where we ended up with API integrations. This allows us to exchange data directly between our software and third party software. So we'll be focusing on for this session.

So what is an API? So without getting too technical, and obviously, we do want to focus more on making sure the APIs work for our customers and less on the technical know-hows of what an API is, but basically, within all of our products, we have proprietary code behind the scenes that's making sure the products are working as they should.

So that's the code that we write. That's the databases that we set up. And a lot of that is proprietary technology that we can't just give to our users or to our customers. What we do provide to our customers when they do want to integrate is the Autodesk Platform Services. This is a set of available APIs that then allows our customers to build integrations between our products, like Autobuild, [INAUDIBLE], et cetera, and third party products.

But as you can imagine, utilizing APIs is very technical. So if you want to make it work for you, you sometimes have to be a developer to use the APIs directly. So this is why we opted for ACC Connect for this use case. It allows our customers to basically build integrations and manage those integrations in a user friendly interface as opposed to writing custom code. So now you can go on to the next slide.

Great, thank you. So as a quick debrief on what ACC Connect is, as you can see on the left-hand side here, ACC Connect allows our customers to build these integrations visually. So on the left-hand side of the screen, we have what are called triggers and actions that the customers can pick and choose how they want to integrate their workflows.

The beauty of this platform is that it's not a one solution fits all kind of deal. This allows us to build solutions that are very custom-tailored to the customer's requirements. So even though we have pre-built integrations, what makes this really unique is that customers can customize exactly how the data flow will move from one system to the next.

And as we go through the rest of these slides, where we'll show you how the integration works, this is important to keep in mind this allows our customers and for us to customize the integration specifically to the customer's needs.

TRAVIS BYERLEY: So today, we're going to-- also we're going to review some of those automated processes that Sophat and I worked together on to develop. Our first automated process was started back in late 2019 or early 2020. And we developed the BIM 360 project workflow setup.

We developed this soon after the pandemic started. PARIC was setting up 10 to 20 projects a week at this point. That manual 40 to 60-minute project setup process that I described earlier proved to be more difficult while working from home. Us parents in the room, dealing with our children, trying to teach them and doing our daily job tasks.

So it wasn't as easy just to walk up to somebody at their desk, give them project information, and go be on our way. The BIM 360 automation took our manual process down to roughly 20 to 25 minutes, with a mixture of an automated process and manual workflows. Some of the APIs were not available in BIM 360 and still are not to make this workflow 100% automated.

So we started with our CRM tool. That was our trigger. ACC Connect would check the CRM software to look for a project number being entered. When that project number was entered, that would initiate the project set up in BIM 360. From there, BIM 360 would send an email saying that the account was set up. We click the link. And then went in, selected the Docs template for the project, for that project template.

At this point, the automation could not select the template for us. It would go through, enter all that required project information to set up the project. Another email was received into a VDC service account email that we used, saying that the project was set up. ACC Connect monitored that email account, looked for that email, and then would add those 50 plus users that PARIC adds to every project, would add those automatically.

From there, we received another email that welcomed us to the project. Then we set up a Power Automate workflow. As Sophat was explaining, ACC Connect is really great at working with inside Autodesk. But when it comes to the Microsoft platform, Power Automate works really well inside of the Microsoft platform.

So from there, we had Power Automate look at that same email address to push a OneNote workbook project into each project. And we'll review a little bit of that later. And then from there, the last step that ACC Connect cannot do because of the API wasn't available, by default, all members were added as a project admin.

The VDC team here at PARIC had to go in and turn off admin access for all 50 of those users every time we set up a project. So fast forward to the year 2022, we're now looking at setting up Build projects, ACC Build projects.

So with this collaboration that Sophat and I have developed over the past-- over the years, we were able to identify some APIs that needed-- that were needed to allow for a complete ACC Build project setup automation. So Sophat and I are going to introduce you here to our new workflow.

The ACC Build project setup workflow is completely automated. There isn't any need for the VDC team to go in here and remove admin access. The Build workflow here took the BIM 360 workflow from 20 to 25 minutes down to no more than three to five minutes. So we still start with the project administrators going into the CRM tool and entering that required information.

From there, ACC, that required information here on the screen, job name, the phase, the business unit. Here, we have a trigger. When the ACC project is selected, that's how the automation knows to set up a BIM project or an ACC project. And then down at the bottom, the job number. Once that job number is entered, then it kicks off the next step.

SOPHAT SAM: Yeah, so the next step of this workflow is where ACC Connect comes in. One thing to note is that we leverage a lot of what we build from the BIM 360 workflow but now adjusted it to create ACC projects based off of that selection that you saw a moment ago.

So just as an example, this is what an ACC Connect recipe can look like. So starting on the top left, we have something that's going to check to make sure that an ACC project doesn't exist already. This will also work for BIM 360. So for example, once a project has been closed on the CRM, we go through, check and verify that it hasn't already been created by someone by mistake in BIM 360 or ACC.

Once we do that check in step 12, we can now go in, and at the bottom of the screen, step 18 there, we can then create that project in ACC. When we create that project, what we're doing is we're pulling data from the CRM. So the project name, the project type, the job number, those are typically the required fields that we have in ACC.

Beyond that, there are other information that we're pulling in as well, such as the start date, the end date. But again, this is a way for us to easily come in, build these workflows, but also adjust them quite easily going forward.

TRAVIS BYERLEY: So the third step here is once all of this project information is entered into the BIM-- sorry, the build project-- we receive another email into that service account that the project settings have been set up. The project's ready to go. From there, ACC connects admins to those users.

SOPHAT SAM: Yeah, so as Travis mentioned, what we're using here is really an email. Once we receive that email in that Outlook inbox, that tells us that the project has been created successfully. Once it's been created successfully and all of the information has been pulled over from the template, we can now go in and start adding users to that project.

What you see on the left-hand-- or sorry-- on the right-hand side, are all of the project users within the PARIC organization that should go into the project based off of their business unit. So within the CRM, the business unit is defined for that project. Based off of that business unit, we can then cross reference it in this Excel spreadsheet. If it's a special project and the user belongs to that business unit, they will then get added to that project.

Additionally, on the far left-hand or right-hand side-- my left and rights are confused-- on column D there, we can also identify who should be a project admin. So as Travis mentioned previously, in BIM 360, the APIs did not support this. And all users were added as admins. Now, we can go in and specify exactly who should be a project admin for that project. So we're using the spreadsheet to then pull all of the appropriate users and then add them to the project.

So as you can see on the left-hand side, a lot of steps here. But we're basically taking that file, parsing the file. And then depending on their business units, we're going through and adding them to the projects based off of their email, their roles. That's at the account level, but also which products that they should have access to based off of those roles.

TRAVIS BYERLEY: After the members are added, we have a little bit of an if statement built in. So if that special projects business unit is selected, our special project team utilizes around 10 to 15 standard documents on every project. So we built in a recipe that will add those documents in.

SOPHAT SAM: Yes, so again, we are using a spreadsheet that identifies which documents should go into projects based off of the business unit. So for a little bit of background, when we create a project in ACC based off of a template, the folder structure can be copied. But the files do not come over.

So this is to get around that where specific project types needed specific files to be included in those projects. So the spreadsheet, as you can see on the right-hand side, if a project is under the special projects business unit, we're going to copy these documents in the spreadsheet into the newly created project.

What we also copy over for all projects are line items 8 and 9 here, the OneNote workbook, as well as the ACC member lists, which we'll get to in a second. But this now allows PARIC to specify which files should go into which projects depending on the business unit. From a recipe perspective, it's very similar to what we did before, where we read the spreadsheet. And depending on the business unit of that project, we go through, download that document, and then upload it into the newly created project.

TRAVIS BYERLEY: So from there, if we back up and follow step 4, we introduced another trigger. Here, the VDC integrations service account receives the ACC welcome email. Here's an example of the email that is-- that we receive. From there, this is where we jump into Power Automate.

Power Automate is monitoring that email account. Once that email is received, then Power Automate will launch and set up a copy of a template that we have built for our OneNote workbook. Our OneNote workbook has any-- we house all of our company meeting minutes in there. We put individual notes in there from every person that's working on the project. They're able to use this.

So we're keeping all of our project notes in one spot. And then somebody goes on vacation or goes on leave, we can reference what they've put in the workbook. But the flow is pretty simple. It monitors that email address. Once the email is received, it copies from OneDrive into another OneDrive folder. And then it uploads-- ACC Connect will upload that OneNote workbook link. And then that document has a link to the OneNote workbook folder.

And then as Sophat mentioned earlier, if a project is not in existence yet, this flow checks-- or this ACC checks our CRM tool roughly every five minutes to see if a new entry has been put into the CRM tool. Another automation that we set up, part of creating a project in Build was all of our team members were contacting VDC to add members to a project because you have to be a project admin to add a member to a project.

Well, we identified that if we gave a project member admin access and they go in and type in the person's name wrong, type in a company name or fat finger it, that it was causing many duplicated entries into our system. So we created this workflow to look at a member list, pull that information, and to automatically put it into Build.

SOPHAT SAM: Yeah, so similar to what we did with the list of project users that were added initially, what we're doing here, as Travis mentioned, are external users. So here, the file that you're seeing on the right-hand side does live within that specific ACC project. Whenever that file is either updated, or saved, or anything like that, we can detect that the file has changed. And we can go through and process that file.

A couple of things that Travis also mentioned, before we add these users to the projects, we're going to go through and also check if their company exists within the organization or the com-- the account. So if the company doesn't exist, an email is sent out to notify and verify that they should be in the project.

Once that check is done, we also do a check to make sure that the user is part of the account as well. So if they're not part of the account, they're a new user, that is also notified. An email notification is sent out to verify that as well. If all those conditions are met, then the user is then added to that project based off of the role that they have at the account level.

On the left-hand side, you've probably-- you've seen it already. But basically what we're doing is going through and downloading the Excel file every time it has been updated, or saved, or anything like that. And then we're just processing it line item by line item. So making sure we get all of the details needed and then building in those conditions before we go ahead and add those users to those projects.

TRAVIS BYERLEY: So from there, we also identified that publishing Revit models was another task that people on our-- business partners and our trade partners' companies, it was just one of those things that they always knew they had to do it at the end of every day. So that we could have the updated models in Build. And that would populate and model coordination.

Because if you've lived through that, you know that it takes a couple hours sometimes after you push that Publish button in Revit. So we wanted to help that and streamline that process. So every evening, we would-- or the automation would go in and verify if a project was updated and automatically push that out. And Sophat can explain the recipe a little better.

SOPHAT SAM: So as you can see walking you through on the top left-hand side, previously, we showed you when files were updated. That's when we run the automation. Or when the CRM was updated, it would run the automation. What you can also do on ACC Connect is schedule the automation to run at regular intervals.

So on the top left-hand side, we have this workflow running every day at midnight. In the middle of the screen is where you see the Excel spreadsheet of all the projects that needs those models to be published at midnight of every night. So using the combination of that spreadsheet and our schedule to run every night, we go through and find every possible model in those projects and then set them to publish every night.

So as Travis mentioned, no one really needs to remember to publish at the end of the day. If they don't and they forget, it's just going to automatically publish at midnight. And then in the morning, hopefully, everything should be ready for the team to start collaborating again.

TRAVIS BYERLEY: And don't worry, we do bring all of our trade partners up to speed and let them know that their models will be published every day. So there isn't any information or design-- unfinished designs that are being pushed out without them knowing. All right, so we can only do so much in that short period of time that Sophat and I have been working together.

But a couple future automations that we're going to be working on over the next year will be tying our company directory and our ERP system to the company directory in Build. So that's-- we go through a complete pre-qualification process before we put a person or a company into our ERP system. Once that's done, then we'll set up some-- we'll set up a recipe around that to initiate the transfer into Build.

And then from there, we're going to fully completely automate our project setup, which would include that repetitive step of entering the information into our ERP system. We're going to automate that. We're going to transfer all the information out of the CRM tool into the ERP tool. And then it will trigger to set up the Build project from there. So that red box in the middle of that image on the left, that whole section there still needs to be automated.

So a few lessons that Sophat and I have learned with working with each other, starting off, PARIC had to identify our primary needs. So the need to optimize and streamline the business processes was one. We needed to reduce project setup time across multiple applications.

Once we identified those needs, we started that collaboration phase. We were working with our software vendors, understanding what APIs were available. Sometimes, they were able to make APIs available for us that would help optimize our business processes within the products. And through these enhancement requests that we sent over to Autodesk and had conversations with that product teams with, it really shows how two teams can come together, and collaborate, and do awesome things.

SOPHAT SAM: Yeah, and lastly, it's the optimization. And this is key because optimization is not a one and done kind of deal. It's really an iterative process between, obviously, the different software vendors, but also within our customer's organizations. It's an iterative process in terms of trying to figure out what works, what doesn't work, and what do we need to fix to make that process more streamlined.

So as you can probably see in the presentation, we started with one process, the creation of projects. But we also identified other processes, like adding external users, publishing the models every night, et cetera. That was not things that we had included as part of the needs of the customer. But that became something that was identified as we continued working with each other and really trying to identify, at a larger scale, across the organization, where can we come in and help?

And as Travis mentioned, a lot of this is really collaboration. So making sure that we work with the customer, that we work across the other software vendors, and making sure that we are all playing very nicely and making sure that it is a successful story for our customer.

TRAVIS BYERLEY: And I'm not going to lie, there were a few heated conversations. It gets frustrating when sometimes the whole picture is not very clear. And then you really got to just-- all right, let's take a step back. And let's break this down. Let's talk about it a different way.

SOPHAT SAM: Definitely. That is part of the iterative process But with that, we hope you do enjoy our session. Obviously, feel free to reach out if you do have any questions. And hopefully you find the session helpful for your organization as well.