Optimizing Construction Safety: Using Autodesk Build for Effective Safety Workflows

KAYLA WISHART: Welcome, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today as we explore one of the most essential aspects of the construction industry-- safety. Whether you are managing a complex project, working in the field, safety is the heart of what we do. In this session, we're going to dive deep into how Autodesk Build can elevate safety protocols, streamline communication, and ultimately help you deliver successful and safer projects.

Starting off, we'll do a quick introduction. My name's Kayla Wishart. I'm a mid-market technical solutions executive for Autodesk. I started my career in safety actually. So I went to Keene State College, graduated in 2017 with a bachelor's degree in occupational safety and health and a minor in business management.

I started my career at Turner Construction, so up in the Northeast where I reside, as a project safety manager for about five years. During my five years as a project safety manager, I also got the opportunity to play a dual role as a superintendent. So really got to get my hands dirty, understand the industry and the processes a little bit more, and really helped elevate my career in safety.

Before I joined Autodesk, I spent about-- a little less than a year as a lean manager as well. And that's really what pushed me into the technology industry because the construction industry is growing and technology is a big piece of it. So I have been at Autodesk for about two years now. And I will hand it over to Rachel for an introduction of herself.

RACHEL TROCCHI: Awesome. Thanks, Kayla. Great to meet everyone. My name is Rachel Trocchi. I am a construction account executive here at Autodesk. But, similar to Kayla, background coming from the technical world. I formerly was technical solutions executive before stepping into this position. And I also have a background in the industry. I studied civil engineering undergrad, and then I decided I wanted to make the jump into the construction technology world.

I started my career as a sales engineer at Assemble, and then I quickly was acquired into the Autodesk family, which has been extremely exciting and awesome to take on working with this entire portfolio. But I've been at Autodesk about six years and reside in Boston and currently work with our global named accounts as an account executive and really focus on our construction portfolio and driving operational excellence with a lot of our owners across the industry.

KAYLA WISHART: Awesome. So if you have seen an Autodesk webinar or a presentation, you've probably seen this safe harbor statement before. This is really just to communicate that our presentation might contain some forward looking statements regarding the outlook, any future results, products, capabilities. So these statements best reflect our judgment based on currently known factors and they are subject to change.

So starting off, let's take a quick look at the agenda. We're going to talk about the critical importance of construction safety. I think from a high level, everybody that's watching this presentation does understand why safety is so important in our job, but we're going to take a look at some of the lingering and domino effects that job site safety and hazards really could leave our projects with. And then we're going to dive into some of the essential features of Autodesk Build and then how we can leverage those features for effective workflows. From there, we will dive into what we can do with the data that we're inputting into our solution and really how we can leverage that data to make more data-driven decisions.

Safety is everyone's responsibility on a job site. So no single action makes a construction site safer on its own. Of course, that's a lot easier said than done. How can we get everybody on board to ensure a safe job? Like I said, we're going to start by looking at some of the implications that an unsafe job site can have on a project aside from just worker safety.

So, as I mentioned, safety plays a key role in our project success. Ensuring a safe workplace isn't really just a regulatory requirement, but it's also a moral and a practical imperative when it comes to our projects. When we think of safety, we often think of worker safety. And of course, this is our top priority. We want everybody to go home at the end of the day the same way they came to work. But there are other lingering effects when it comes to safety.

Accidents and injuries can lead to significant downtime. So when you have accidents, you're affecting the flow of the job, you're affecting the progress of the job, the project deadlines. And these things can often lead to financial impacts. So we think of things like liquidated damages. There's an incident on a job, the job shuts down. Now you're affecting the project deadline. And for every day late, there's a large amount of money that's being paid out of your pocket because of the inability to finish on time.

You look at things like cost of overtime. When we're down manpower, now we're paying additional money to work 8-plus hour shifts, nights, weekends, which could also lead to double time. And not only is it a lot of money to be dishing out for overtime, but now you're also starting to affect the workers as well. So they might not be in the right mindset. They might be getting burnt out. And those can lead to additional injuries on our job.

And then the obvious ones, like insurance and medical claims as a result of these injuries. I did mention earlier that we have an obligation to maintain a safe working environment. But this isn't just for our employees and our workers. It's also for the public as well. And when we have high-risk activities and things may not be planned accordingly and we're imposing high-risk, projects can get shut down.

Now we're starting to get into hefty fines by OSHA. And ultimately, all of these things do affect your company's reputation, which then could lead to the-- not being able to get projects in the future. 99% percent of the time, you are asked about your safety EMR rates and your safety history when bidding projects. And having a 1.0 EMR rate is the standard. And if we don't have that, then now we're at risk of not getting jobs in the future.

So quick reality check here. Around 1 in 5 workplace fatalities happen in construction. That's about 20%. And when you think of all the other industries, that's a significant amount, right? That's pretty high. And then you look at the rate of injury for construction laborers, which is two times that of all other occupations. And this is a lot, right? So that's why it's really, really important to invest in a safety platform. It's really important to invest in safety as a whole.

There has been multiple studies done when it comes to a return on investment with safety. One done by Liberty Mutual back in the day was for every dollar invested, you're looking at a return on investment around $4 to $6. And that's a lot of money, especially when we look at the next slide, which talks about the cost of safety. So OSHA states that any serious violation can have upwards of $16,000 per violation.

Now, it may not sound like a lot of money when it comes to-- depending on the volume of the job, but where a lot of the money does come into play is when we talk about the cost of medically consulted injuries. Direct costs is around $40,000. And that's just things like compensation. That's things like the medical-- any medical expenses or insurance claims directly impacting that worker.

But where we really, really start to dig into our pockets is in the indirect cost things. So that's lawyer fees, retraining, rehiring, loss of productivity, fines. And those, on a low end are around a 2 to 1 ratio indirect to direct cost, but it can get upwards of 17 to 1 as well. And that's-- if you do the math there, that's pretty hefty. So with barriers that you see here, prioritizing safety can be challenging. You look at things that you can't control, like weather, rain, snow, ice, additional safety requirements.

Everybody has a OSHA regulations that they have to follow, but there's also company regulations and requirements. If you're a subcontractor working for a GC, they have their own set of regulations and requirements that often are more stringent than OSHA's. So having to remember all of those while trying to build a job on schedule, on budget, can put a lot of pressure on the workers.

Projects are more complex nowadays. Timelines are a lot shorter. And then, of course, miscommunication and slower response times aren't playing in our favor. So with frontline workers, a lot of times there can be a conflict between short-term efficiencies and long-term safety goals. And with these intense pressures to complete the job by a certain deadline, sometimes the focus on efficiency can lead to trade off in safety protocols because oftentimes they're an inconvenience or they're time consuming. Because those mindsets aren't really easy to change, we really need to be able to bridge the gap by being proactive in our planning process in order for safety to just come naturally.

So taking a look at where can we do all of this in Autodesk Build? Inside of Autodesk Build, we have the ability to have a central location, a single source of truth for all of our safety documents, all of our safety workflows to be easily managed and viewed when necessary. You have things like checklists and issue management. So that way we're holding people accountable. We're able to identify not just negative safety observations, near misses, but also positive safety observations. And then ultimately taking all the data that we're putting in here and being able to have predictive AI driven real-time visibility into our safety concerns on site identifying trends and understanding exactly what the next steps need to be in order to eliminate these hazards or ensure that they don't happen again.

So we need to seamlessly integrate technology and strategic planning into our operations in order to compensate for the challenges of shifting worker's mindsets towards prioritizing safety. By embedding safety protocols into these workflows through innovative tools and well-thought-out processes, we can create an environment where safety becomes an inherent part of the job rather than solely relying on changing attitudes. And with some of the workflows that you see here, this is the way that that can be done.

Let's dive into some of the key features that Autodesk Build and Autodesk Construction Cloud have to offer when it comes to safety. So Autodesk Docs is really the best place to host your safety files. This will be accessible for not only the office but also the field. So all of the safety files that are inside of here can be configured for very specific permissioning levels.

If I was a GC and I was collecting documents from a subcontractor, I would-- the way I would do this is I would set up folders for each contractor and then a specific folder for every document or every type of document that needs to be submitted. This not only is keeping your documents organized, but it's also giving the subcontractor a really good checklist of what needs to be submitted and reviewed.

So oftentimes, these documents aren't just a one and done document. They're going to be revisited from time to time, and you're going to want to have access in the field, especially things like safety data sheets. So if OSHA comes on site and they're asking what the cleanup protocol is for a hazardous material, if you have to go back to your gang box or your CONEX box or the trailer in order to get those safety data sheets, you're going to get a fine. So being able to host them directly in here, they can just pull them up on their mobile devices, and they have all the data and information that they need to.

Inside of the Autodesk Docs, there is a review workflow as well. This is a great workflow to leverage. We do have something in beta called Auto Trigger, and that's what I'm showing you right now. This is where you can select specific folders to ensure that any document that's uploaded in these folders automatically trigger a review workflow. Those review workflows can be set up and customized to however you want to do that.

I do have a specific safety workflow created already. This workflow is specific to safety documents. It's pulling from a specific folder. So as you can see here, here's the review workflow. We have who the initiator is. Typically, this is going to be anybody that is uploading a document in a folder. And then our reviewers.

Highly recommend utilizing roles as reviewers. So assigning a role-- a person to a safety engineer role or a safety manager role so that way all eyes that need to be on these documents are on them. And then being able to copy over any approved or marked up documents directly back to that folder so that way they can be referenced in the future by the rest of the field team.

You'll see we're going through the safety document review process. We're adding some markups. We're going to ensure that hand protection is included in this job hazard analysis. You have your markup tools on the right-hand side. Make sure to publish these markups. Otherwise, the field team will not be able to see these markups. And the whole point of the review process is to make sure that we're adding or making comments on things that need to be adjusted.

You can then put your approval status. It automatically saves. And notify additional members. So this would be me notifying a superintendent of this document as well. Maybe they didn't have to review it, but maybe it's in the area of their work. You want to make sure they lay eyes on it. So now if they go back to that specific folder, the document is now there with those specific markups and that review status. And that will be what the rest of the field team is able to view.

Moving into Forms. So we're going to get rid of paper as a whole. I think that sustainability is obviously something that a lot of people care about nowadays. So being able to host all of your forms, your checklists inside of a platform itself is pretty valuable. Create all of your safety checklists, incident reports. Assign them to team members, and track the status directly inside of Autodesk Build. You can upload your fillable PDFs.

So a lot of companies have company-specific documents or forms that they cannot deviate from. Having the ability to upload these PDFs gives the project teams access to edit them on their web-- on their computer or on their iPad or their iPhone. And then you can also use our Form Builder where you have the ability to build out a form.

In the Form Builder, a couple things to highlight here. You want to make sure that if you are capturing-- especially for something like a safety checklist, if you are capturing things that may not be conforming or need an action required, make sure you turn conditional logic on. With conditional logic, you can require a photo or require an issue. I would just require an issue. And the reason being is because when you can require an issue, you can add a photo to that issue. But it's making it actionable. And when there are safety observations, you want to make sure that these are being solved and somebody's on it.

The other thing is making sure that questions are checked off as required. This may not be relevant to some of the questions, but if you want to make sure that your teams aren't pencil whipping the forms and they're capturing all the data that they have to, turn on the required question field so that way that these questions are not going to be skipped.

The other thing to point out on Forms is the permission levels. So things like incident reports could have sensitive information in there, and you don't want the rest of the project teams to be able to view that information. With Forms, you can edit who can view the forms and who can actually edit the forms as well. So making sure that incident reports aren't viewable by maybe third parties that are in your platform or the rest of the workers and they're only viewable to people like safety directors and maybe project executives.

And then same thing with editing permissions. You may not want everybody to be able to edit forms. So making sure that you can permission those by user or company is important when it comes to the forms. Quick pro tip here. Save your forms back to Docs. So you can schedule a regular cadence of forms. So if you go to your reports tool, schedule a cadence to run a report weekly or monthly to ensure that any forms are saved back to Docs.

Again, this is important because you can permission those forms, or those folders inside of Docs and that will ensure that if-- rather than searching through Forms to find all of your incident reports and understanding what incidents have we had, when you can have a nice compiled deck or a nice compiled document of all those incidents right in a folder that you can name incident reports. It makes it nice and easy to find in the future.

Moving on to Issues. So Issues allows teams to create, assign, resolve, and track observations as they come up. Collect all the information you need. There's a ton of fields that already exist inside of Issues. The really nice thing about Issues is being able to customize these. So making sure that we're customizing our issues, adding required fields if needed. A couple of things that you see on this slide here is I have actually changed some of the Issue types that are related to safety. Rather than using three letters, which is standard when it comes to Issues, I actually use emojis. And the reason I do this is because when you're pinning issues on a drawing, it can create a lot of-- it can turn out to be very hectic.

The drawings can have-- depending on the project, you might have 100 drawings, or 100 issues on one sheet. And if you're not easily able to identify the safety issues, then obviously it's going to take a little bit more time to close those out. Being able to add emojis to your issue types makes them nice and easy to identify. The other thing that you can do with emojis, which I love emojis, I think they're great, but add them in some of the fields too. So I did create a custom field inside of-- for my safety specific issue types for risk level.

This, I think, is a really good point to highlight. I would definitely create a required field for risk level. And the reason being is because as your team is filling out issues, creating issues, they can quickly identify whether it's a low, medium, or high risk safety hazard and there is a visual piece to it. So you see the orange, green, and red. It makes it nice and easy for, in the future, filtering it down to risk level. If I was a safety engineer on a project or a safety manager on a project, I'm going to want to close out the high-risk issues that have been identified before, the lowest issue, the low risk issues. So you can quickly filter these fields by risk level and now you'll be able to identify which ones you need to prioritize first.

Quick pro tip here. So if you are leveraging Construction IQ, and this is something that we'll talk about a little bit further along in the presentation, make sure when you're adding Issues, you're being as descriptive as possible. Construction IQ really works a lot better when you have a really good description in there, a really good title in there, and you're identifying root causes in order for the information that it's pulling to be more accurate. So really just make sure that whoever is creating these Issues is being as detailed as possible in order for the information to populate correctly.

Quick snapshot here on the mobile device just to show you. If you click one more time, Rachel, you'll be able to see the risk level and how it shows up on the mobile device. Like I said, I think this is a great quick and easy added field that you can include on your Forms or on your Issues to ensure that we're capturing and we're identifying what's low-risk versus high-risk and making sure that we're closing out those high-risk activities as quick as possible.

So schedule and plans-- this is probably one of my favorite tools in the platform. Really able to centralize project schedules in the cloud and provide real-time visibility, enabling collaboration, communication, and access to our project schedule. When I was at Turner, I wasn't able to-- I didn't have P6 license, so I would carry around my six week look ahead and my vest and reference it every once in a while, provided I didn't lose it on the job. So being able to actually access the project schedule and digest it easily really helps for being able to filter to look ahead-- filtering to two week look aheads to identify where our high-risk activities are in the next two weeks or six weeks.

And then the plans piece is a newer tool inside of Autodesk Build where now you can actually build out detailed plans, identify hand-offs, constraints, and really ensure that we're incorporating safety into our plan. So as you can see in this plan here, we've created a plan from one start milestone to an end milestone, but we've actually identified where we need safety documentation to be provided and then also to be reviewed. And now we're able to make sure that everybody on the job, anybody that's included in this plan, knows that these tasks, this safety documentation and the pre-planning process has to be in and has to be approved before starting the work.

A really good workflow to incorporate is leveraging forms and plans together. So a lot of times, we're-- with high-risk activities, we're constantly planning the work. So we have really, really good plans when it comes to creating plans or voice plans or anything that is typically a high risk-activity. But where most of our injuries and incidents actually happen is on the day to day. So it's hanging drywall, it's pouring concrete. Those are the times that we're more likely to get injury-- injured because that's just what you do every day.

So with the ability to actually reference different forms to your plan, project teams can not only ensure that there's a plan in place to complete a task, but they can ensure safety documentation is also incorporated into that plan. In this example you see here, I have added some required questions inside of my daily log. So I have ensured, hey, is there a pre-task plan for this-- for the work that's being done today? Is your pre-task plan and daily log attached to that actual task inside of plans?

So that way when-- if I was a superintendent and I was reviewing the daily log, which I had to do by 9 o'clock every single morning, I can make sure that, first of all, the daily log's filled out-- check. Pre-test plan filled out, check. And then I can go back to make sure that those two things are now tied to the actual tasks that are being done for the day.

This not only ensures that the tasks are planned, but it also ensures down the road we have the historical data for any litigation issues that come down the road. That is the reality of our industry. So now you do have that documentation back up to show that the work was actually planned correctly.

And then we have Meetings. So this one's pretty straightforward. But the Meeting tool really enhances collaboration and drives action by centralizing all of our meeting information being able to keep your safety meetings organized with the ability to quickly sort and filter through these items. So link your critical information back to meeting minutes ensuring safety observations are being communicated to team members. So like you see here, there are some references and there's also some items. We call them items inside of Meetings.

As safety observations come up, you can assign somebody a safety observation or an item. You can put a due date on there. And the really nice thing about Meetings is when you go to create a follow-up meeting-- so if you were having a weekly safety meeting, and you've identified 10 items that need to be followed up on, you've assigned them, you've given them a due date and they're all in the open status, anything that's not completed, will-- will carry over to the next follow-up meeting. So now you're really holding people accountable. And if it were me, I don't want my items to be there on the next meeting.

So the other nice thing is you can access this on the mobile device. And the reason I say this is because don't just use Meetings for your weekly safety meetings. Use them for your toolbox talks or your pre-hoist meetings or your daily huddles and ensure that all the information from all of these different huddles or meetings are being captured in that one place.

And something to point out here is we did just add Meetings to our library inside of our account admin page. So be sure, if you want to increase standardization on your projects and across your company, create meeting templates and add them directly to the account library for other project teams to utilize.

So I shared a bunch of features, shared a bunch of workflows. And thanks to these workflows that we've discussed, we're resolving issues faster, we're planning our tasks more effectively, and we're really maintaining smooth communication between the office and the field. While these are fantastic results, we also need to easily digest the wealth of information that we're constantly collecting. And this is really where predictive risk mitigation comes in. So I'm going to turn it over to Rachel to dive a little bit deeper into what we have to offer when it comes to data.

RACHEL TROCCHI: Awesome. Thank you, Kayla. So data and analytics, predictive risk mitigation, one of my most favorite topics. And honestly, I think, one of the most important topics because as you start to aggregate data, you can't get to predictive risk mitigation without that. Without that data, we can't tap into analytics and predictive insights. And so now that a lot of that data is aggregated together within all these workflows that Kayla just talked through within ACC, what can we actually do with it?

So within ACC, data is accessible, it's connected, and it's also useful. So data being accessible through a permission controlled environment is going to enable centralized data to be accessed through controlled sharing amongst all your different team members, internally, externally. And then connected data is also critical to breaking down those silos and really delivering real-time information in order to improve decision making throughout your projects.

And then lastly, with data being more accessible and connected, it's also ultimately then a lot more useful. Increased transparency and structuring of data really enforces standardization, and this will ultimately help to improve safety as we dive deeper into how we can analyze and understand this data to make sure that we are improving safety down the line.

So as we dive into it, Kayla referenced our insights dashboards and our Construction IQ previously. This is an example of one of our Insights dashboards, and this is all focused, centered around safety, calls out, subcontractor risk on the job site here. It also flags all of these different high-risk issues that have been escalated on a project. It's going to identify positive observations as well as flag different subcontractors and where they stand with their safety infractions on the job site.

You can obviously see red is going to be a little bit more at high-risk here. And then, of course, we can see all these different issues across your company, across your project, maybe just issues that are assigned to you that you need to take care of. And of course, all of these different dashboards and what we refer to as our Insight cards are really configurable. So you can configure these directly in the system. There's plenty of different ways that you can look at this information.

And all of these different views here can be configured on a project member level. So maybe myself as a safety manager or project manager coming in, I want to see a holistic view of the project. But maybe you have an executive team that wants to see an entire region or certain segment of projects. We can also dive into that level of detail at a more higher enterprise level as well within Insights.

So Autodesk also recognizes that not all data may be aggregated within the ACC platform. Of course, there's tons and tons of workflows that Kayla dove through, but it's really critical that we are able to extend and tap into our partner ecosystem to aggregate that data to a single source for understanding. I'm sure a ton of you guys have seen that partner slide that has 200-plus, maybe even 300 at this point, different partner integrations that ACC can connect with. We called out a few safety specific ones in here, but really just want to highlight connected platform is truly critical to streamlining your safety workflows in order to drive that efficiency across the board.

And so, with ACC's open APIs, our customers really tap into our partner network to extend the value that they receive from our platform. But ultimately, it's also important to extend the data from ACC and various partner solutions into single dashboards for holistic project understanding. So Autodesk currently leans into configuring Power BI or potentially Tableau dashboards for further advanced analytics and aggregated analytics with data from all different sources.

So through a series of standard templates that are actually available within Insights, you actually have the ability to start from various different pre-built dashboards, which you can see some different examples right here up on the screen. And then you can have the ability to actually configure these based on your needs. Maybe you have specific configurations or specific metrics that you're looking for as a company. You can make those adjustments in here.

And these dashboards will pull data from all across ACC, for example, from your safety forms. So you can understand safety, performance and trends. And you can see a few different examples here. Like I mentioned, of those safety dashboards, one highlighting injuries per company that ultimately can drive Insights towards OSHA incident rates, et cetera, throughout your projects and across your company as well.

So some of you may have also seen through a lot of the other sessions at AU that we have our Insight builder coming into the platform. And this will actually enable the same level of customized dashboards built directly in the platform without that need for a solution like Power BI or Tableau. This is really exciting. As it moves through beta and becomes commercially available for everyone, it'll allow you to take that next step a little bit further directly into-- directly in the platform itself, be able to create different custom calculations that might inform more of these safety metrics that you'll be diving into.

But let's take a look at how we can really push our dashboards just a little bit further. So leveraging what everyone loves to talk about these days, artificial intelligence, using Copilot, you can actually analyze the data to understand safety recommendations for your company. For example, asking a question like, what is the data telling me from a safety standpoint? So this is taking a second for it to think and analyze all the safety information that's in here. But what you'll see is Copilot outlines OSHA incident rates that ultimately cause a restriction of 39 working days and 45 absent working days due to injury. It also highlights frequency and most common injuries.

But interestingly, it also calls out a spike in injuries starting July 19, with an increase of 300%. I thought that was really granular in being able to understand the data just that much further. So you can also then ask Copilot to make recommendations for you. So asking things like, any safety recommendations you can provide based on the data? This, you'll see, actually develops a full bulleted list of recommendations based on the data that includes enhanced hand protection due to having a high frequency of hand injuries, targeted safety training, ergonomic assessments, enhanced health and wellness programs, et cetera-- tons and tons of information.

And of course, with this analysis and the recommendation, you can pick and choose how you want to use that information. But it's incredible how it can dissect the information in seconds and provide recommended action plans, ultimately saving your team time in analyzing the information at hand. So now I'm going to pass it back over to Kayla to wrap things up.

KAYLA WISHART: All right. Thank you. So as you can see, by leveraging advanced technology and predictive insights, customers are really seeing the value it's bringing to their companies. BAM, Ireland specifically actually saw an increase-- or a 20% gain in quality and safety on high-risk profile projects because of the ability to utilize advanced technology and the predictive insights that we provide.

So based on what you've seen today, we really want to encourage you to think about where you sit with your current safety processes, and try to really dissect where you can push the envelope and utilize new technology and things like predictive insights to be best in class. So we really want to thank you for hanging out with us and listening to our presentation, and we hope you gained some valuable insight in how to leverage Autodesk Build for construction safety.