Automating Autodesk Construction Cloud Admin: Closing the Gap Between What We Have and What We Need

JAMES MALCOLM: Welcome to Automating Autodesk Construction Cloud Administration Closing the Gap Between what We Have and What We Need. My name is James Malcolm. I'm a senior developer at SSOE Group. I've been doing software development for a little over 15 years now. And throughout today's presentation, I'll be discussing more of the front end user facing elements of the systems that we've designed around ACC.

JONATHAN BOLBACH: Hello, I'm Jonathan Bolbach. I'm also from SSOE. I've been there for about 20 years. I'm working more in the back end of this system. So I'm going to be talking about the data, how we gather that and use that in our automations.

JUSTIN LIPSEY: And I am Justin Lipsey. I'm a technical solutions executive with Autodesk. Prior to joining Autodesk, I spent 15 years or so in the AEC industry. And seven of those years were spent at SSOE, where I had the pleasure of working with both Jonathan and James and even assisted in some of these creative solutions that will be discussed today. But before we start our presentation, we have to begin with a safe harbor statement.

Some of these APIs that are being used and being discussed are still in private beta, not yet released for public use. So just keep that in mind as you listen to this presentation. So chances are you're here today because you can relate to the discussion that we're going to have. You've probably adopted Autodesk Construction Cloud or some product within ACC.

And your company is still using various other applications to manage certain day-to-day work, which is probably leading to outdated information being used or most likely the duplication of work that's costing you time, costing you money. Well, thanks to APIs and integrations, Autodesk Construction Cloud can create an integrated experience across your business that drives productivity by enabling information exchange between your most critical applications.

Now, SSOE is a top user of Autodesk Construction Cloud APIs. And they use them in some really innovative ways to automate repetitive work and other processes so that their teams can focus on higher value items. Today, we're going to discuss how this great place to work expands ACC admin functionality via the data connector and admin APIs. But first, let's learn a bit more about the company. So James, can you tell us some more information about SSOE?

JAMES MALCOLM: Of course. So SSOE is a privately owned AEC firm. We've got a global presence, and we just celebrated our 75th anniversary. Our mission is to deliver unparalleled client value that advances the AEC industry. And you can see over on the right hand side, we've got some rankings for top 10 design firm, and we are very pleased to brag about the amount of savings that we yield for our clients.

So like Justin was talking about, we'll be discussing the administrative functions of ACC and how SSOE build custom tools and integrations using APIs that Autodesk provides to be able to adopt ACC at scale. We'll be primarily focusing on project administration and insights. We'll also cover some other automations that were enabled by the systems that we created and how we've integrated those with other systems across SSOE, as we not just ACC. And we'll also take a quick look at what the roadmap looks like for ACC and how SSOE plans to redesign our systems around these changes that roll out to ACC.

JUSTIN LIPSEY: So for companies that manage multiple projects and users across multiple offices, it's important to have the ability to manage all of those moving parts behind the scenes. And products within Autodesk Construction Cloud share a common administrative experience, which splits into two levels. We're going to discuss these levels, account administration and project administration. And we're going to talk about them while discussing two key aspects of the admin experience within ACC.

And then we'll expound on how SSOE has extended the out-of-the-box capabilities. So first, we're going to talk about projects and how they're created in Autodesk Construction Cloud. So both account and project administrators can create projects. Account administrators also have the ability to toggle on and off the permission for project administrators to be able to create projects. That's exactly what SSOE has done.

So we're going to speak primarily from the account administration perspective regarding project creation. And the process is simple. Within the Account Administration tool, click Create Project, next the project, or the Create Projects dialog pops up where you enter in all of your project details, which includes the project name, the number, the type, the project address, the time zone, which will pre-populate based on your location, your start and end dates, your project value, and even the account that the project should be associated with.

Now, some of these fields are required, but most of them are going to be optional. Still, it's really important to provide as much information as possible to have consistent data that can be used downstream. And something to note is that if you've seen any of the training material on Autodesk Build, you may notice that we suggest when naming a project to include the project number before the project name. Now, this is because the project list populates projects alphanumerically.

And also, this naming convention mimics many organizations' folder structure and naming standards. So we suggest that you include the project number in the project name and also in that data field. Now, I mention that because it's going to come up later. And then finally, you click Create Project in order to create the project. And then you're taken as an account administrator to the specific project that you've created to begin start setting up settings within that project.

Next slide. Now, project templates can also be used to create projects. And templates allow you to specify project settings for the file permissions, folder permissions, issues, forms, RFI submittals the list goes on and on. These templates can then be used to create new projects with those same settings, optimizing your project setup time.

JAMES MALCOLM: So SSOE's adoption of ACC and BIM 360 before it faced a few challenges, first and foremost, our projects don't just exist in ACC. A great deal of manual effort would be required by people in different roles and different organization groups to be able to spin up a new project in all of the different places that we needed to create and store and collaborate on project information. Also because we were planning to go all in on our ACC adaption, we wanted to make sure that we had good data from the outset.

Human error is risk at every step of the creation process that Justin just walked us through. And that was a risk that we didn't want to take. On top of that, our project teams couldn't afford to wait. It could take several days by our estimation to be able to coordinate all the right people get all the ducks in a row, share all the appropriate data, and get those resources spun up. It's days that would be needlessly impactful to our project schedules.

These are just a few examples of some of the challenges that we've identified. And I'm sure some of those resonate with you. There are many more that we've encountered as well. So we needed a way to sand down the rough edges. We focused on optimizing for the user experience and minimizing the amount of data reentry that we had to do to get these projects created. It's worth noting that SSOE uses ACC as a collaboration platform very early on in its process often before a project is won for collaboration on proposals and things like that.

So we needed up our projects to be set up correctly the first time and populated with data from our ERP system. We needed those collaboration spaces to be spun up on demand when the project team needs them, not days later. And also, we anticipated a very high volume based off of our opportunity pipeline of ACC project setups that we'd have to do. So we knew that any automation we built would have to be paired with a monitoring tool or alert software to be able to help us and the other support teams know when something did go sideways.

So we created something that we call Cardinal. Cardinal is the code name that we gave to a system of systems. It's not just one thing. I've listed here just some high level elements of it. It's a website. It's a database. It's an orchestration system of various data integration jobs. It's got a reporting arm, et cetera.

The code name made it easier to communicate with our end users when they ask where is my project data? It's in Cardinal. How do I get to my ACC projects? Use Cardinal. It just simplified everything vastly for us. I'll be sharing some high level diagrams of how Cardinal works on the back end as well as some screenshots of the website's interface.

Justin described how you can set up a project in ACC filling out a form, clicking around a bit, doing some configuration, waiting for the project template to apply, adding the users. At SSOE, we realized that we just couldn't do that at scale. So like I said, we were focusing on optimizing for the user experience and minimizing data reentry. We built a system where a user in our ERP system can simply click a button, and 20 minutes later they've got their ACC projects.

Of course, we've got lots of validation checks along the way. This replaces what would have been a very manual process. The user would typically at SSOE have to ask an admin to create a project. Now, Justin listed out all of the different fields that we'd have to enter, client name, job number, project name, location, et cetera. All of this stuff already exists in our ERP system. So why are we sharing that information in a second way and risking more human error?

Then that admin has to respond to that request and take some time to go and actually configure that project and all the company-based permissions on folders, things like that because it's noteworthy the project templates, at least today, don't copy company-based permissions. Those have to be applied after users have been added to the project. So that's another limitation of project templates that are very frustrating with setup.

In addition to this, we use Microsoft tech for our mailboxes and shared calendars for our projects. So that same user that's requesting access or requesting a collaboration space would need to go in and ask a Microsoft admin to spin up a mailbox, add users to it, give it the correct name, correct number, et cetera. And then over time, as users get added to that ACC project, we would have to make sure that they also get added to that mailbox, which is just another administrative task and IT burden.

So we have an interface in Cardinal that lets our admins monitor the project setup automation. This screenshot shows that queue, and it shows actually the top item there is one that was captured mid setup. We can see that there was an ACC project, and our Microsoft group was created. But we're still waiting for the template to be applied so that we can finish the folder-based permissions. Sometimes, the template application can take a few minutes. And on the ACC side of things, so we just monitor that.

And then once that's done, we go in and automatically configure those permissions. And then finally, once all that stuff's ready, we add the users to the project and then send them a notification letting them know that everything's ready to go. And they are able to start collaborating in ACC. Some other notes about this page and the features that we have, it automatically refreshes so the admins can just keep it up all day.

We have the ability to rename projects across all of our systems. So if they wanted to shorten up a name, maybe a very long client name that had an acronym as an abbreviation, they can have one click to just rename that project across ACC and all of our Microsoft tech as well. If something does go sideways with the project setup, we have the ability to do a retry where the system will display a button, a Retry button for admins.

If the project setup has had some kind of critical error, or if enough time has passed, and these setup tasks have been completed, we give admins the ability to go ahead and hit Retry. And it'll archive the ACC project, delete the other resources, and try everything again starting fresh. We also have the ability to completely halt all of the automations.

In the case where, let's say, Autodesk has a planned outage or maybe an unplanned outage, we can go in here and just hit a single button to disable the automations entirely so that we don't hammer Autodesk's APIs and cause more bandwidth problems for them. And then when everything has all clear, we're able to click a button and turn everything back on. So after projects are set up, managing users, joining and leaving the project becomes the next major task to tackle. Justin, what can you tell us about user management in ACC?

JUSTIN LIPSEY: Yeah, sure. User management is, of course, another key aspect of the admin experience in ACC. And before your project teams can actually access projects in Autodesk Construction Cloud, administrators need to execute a few tasks to allow you to be able to log into a project. The account administrator first and foremost, has to add members to the account, then assign those members different roles and companies.

They also probably need to give other members project admin permissions in order to be able to effect settings in the different projects. So once members are added to an account, they also become available for project administrators to add to projects. So what is that process of adding a member to an account look like? Well, from the Account Administration Tool, once again, select the Members Tool. And this is where all of your account members live.

It's where you can filter and sort and find account members. And then to add members to an account, click the big blue button, Add Members and then the Add Account Members dialog box pops up, where you can enter in one or more email addresses, which is the only required information. And instead of inputting one email at a time, we. Actually recommend copying and pasting a column of emails from an Excel spreadsheet or another database if you have one.

You can also, once again, add the company and role after the fact or skip that completely. And then when they are invited to a project, that company enroll will automatically be set. The only other thing to mention about account level member management is being able to remove members. How do you do that? Well, you click on a member's name, select the More menu, and choose Remove Member. Members that are removed from the account are also removed from all projects in the account.

Now, on the project level, once a project is created, project administrators can then invite team members to the project. The process mirrors exactly what I just outlined on the account level. So I won't go through it again, but I will mention a few things. Any account member can be added to a project. And if members have that company and role assigned to them once again, then those settings are applied.

The team members who are added to the project receive an email invitation and then to access the project, they click on the link in the email invitation, or they can path to the website, acc.autodesk.com to access the project. A couple more things to mention, you do have to choose the product access level for your project members. And this is going to control what products the members can use and how they can use them. Autodesk Docs and Insight are on by default.

And then to remove members, it's the same exact process as on the account level, once again. But there are a few differences. One, if you turn off access to Autodesk Docs, the member then loses access to all products and is removed from the project. Removing project members will not remove them from your account. And then an admin must remove project members. Admin are also given additional capabilities.

Account admin can better manage users by sorting and filtering and searching with functionality in the Account Administration Tool. And project admin can export project members in a list. That's actually an Excel file. And then use that list of project members to make it easier to add the same project members to another project.

JAMES MALCOLM: So project admins have to know who to add to a project, who should be added to a project, who has the right security for a confidential project, or has signed an NDA. There's no way for users to, on their own, leave a project. They have to be removed by an admin. And even admins can't remove themselves from projects. These are, again, just a few examples of some of the challenges that SSOE has encountered with adopting ACC and with doing user management.

So we need to build some custom tools and integrations to be able to help our project admins reduce and eliminate some of that tedious management of the projects within ACC. But also, we needed to alleviate the IT burden for spinning up new accounts, terminating accounts, and adding them to those mailboxes that we use for our project mail. So this high level diagram walks through how our users get access to our ACC projects today.

We built a custom search engine, which also show in just a second where they are able to type in information about their project, find their ACC project, and click a link to request access. That sends a notification to the project admins. Those admins are then notified from using data from our ERP system, whether that project or that client is flagged as confidential or has some kind of non-disclosure agreement that the requester has to sign so they can take that into account before they grant access to the project.

Once they have figured all that out, and they go ahead and hit Approve, the system adds the user to the project. And it also carries over their role and company and things like that. So in ACC, as Justin mentioned, one of the critical things that we found as an issue was that you can only search by project name. And more recently you can search by project number of the projects you have access to.

Now, if you're an account admin, and you're looking at the account admin page, you can search by projects by only by project name. They still haven't added project number there. We needed something a little bit more. So we built a custom search engine that indexes data from ACC harvested from Data Connector, which Jonathan will talk about more later, as well as our ERP system and some of our other custom applications so that you can search by basically any property relevant to your project, including things like client, project manager, or location in addition to project name and job number.

We also include some extra features in our search results. We identify what Revit version is on that ACC project. There's nothing in today that tells you what version of Revit that project is configured for. So if you know you only have 2023 installed, and you see via Cardinal that 2022 is what's active on this project, you know that you have to go and make sure you install Revit 2022 before you can work on this project.

We also display a lock icon on projects that you don't have access to. Those would be the ones where if you click them, it will take you to that project access request flow that I just showed. We also display the list of ACC project members. So you're able to see who, not only their names, but their companies, their contact information, what role they have on the project, and whether or not they're a project admin.

This is a quick, brief diagram of one of our backend systems highly simplified. Essentially, we harvest that data that I talked about that Jonathan will go into more detail about later on a regular basis. And we're able to detect when new users are added to our ACC projects. And we have a backend system that will automatically take that set of new users and add them to the appropriate mailboxes automatically so we don't need to have that step where an IT admin has to test, jump in, and add somebody to a group or something like that.

One other critical feature to fill a gap that we noticed with ACC is that we are able to give our users the ability to leave their projects. This includes project admins. This is in fact, the only way they can remove themselves from projects today. So everybody has access to this. Cardinal's aware of what projects you have access to. So it will surface this little Leave Project button shown in the screenshot there. And you click on it, and you say would like to lead this project. And within a few seconds, you'll be removed.

Now, of course, that's a permanent change. But you are able to then go back in and request access later should you need it. Employees come and go. And our backend systems needed to be able to create and disable ACC accounts for those employees automatically again, to alleviate some of that IT burden.

We also have the ability to automatically assign companies and roles for those new accounts. And with integration from our ERP system and our HR system, we're able to know when somebody gives two weeks notice. And we take that information and query our ACC data to find issues, RFIs submittals, et cetera, things that are open that are assigned to that person who is leaving the company.

And we alert those project admins so that they know, hey, there's some outstanding work items associated with someone who's leaving the company. We need to go and reassign those or at least figure out something to do with those items to make sure that nothing falls through the cracks. The emails that we send out as part of this automation include the due date of the work item that is causing the alert and also a hyperlink directly into ACC. So it takes you straight to that submittal or straight to that RFI so the project admins don't have to spend time navigating a bunch of interfaces to go and find that task and reassign it.

This is some high level statistics. We've been doing this project set up automation since we did our BIM 360 adoption a few years ago. We've since moved to full ACC adoption. We've created over 3,500 projects and growing with this system. And it takes about 18 to 20 minutes, typically often less for those set up automations to complete. And then our custom Cardinal website that we use for people to use that search engine and navigate that admin setup queue gets about 400 average users per week. And now, I'll pass it over to Justin to discuss project insights.

JUSTIN LIPSEY: Without a clear solution on how to leverage project information, a lot of engineering and construction data goes unused. Project level insights and ACC help you to get up to speed with what's going on in your project, assess different trends, identify gaps and problems, and use predictive risk data to improve project efficiency. So let's talk about some of the key tools that contribute to this.

First and foremost, there is Project Home. Every Autodesk build project, for instance opens up to Project Home. And this is where you can get a quick overview of what's happening on your project. There's also the Project Dashboard that gives teams a deeper understanding of their project performance, their daily activities that they should prioritize, and instant visibility into that risk of your project. There are also standard reports that can be generated from every single tool in Autodesk Construction Cloud.

And last but not least, there is the Data Connector. And we'll talk a lot about the Data Connector in the rest of this presentation. But on the project level, it allows for the extraction of data that's specific to that project. And it offers you flexibility to analyze your, data visualize your data in a data visualization tool of your choice. Now, on the account level, project and portfolio insights are even more important.

So all users have access to a new feature. It's called My Home, which enables users to access the right information at the right time, of course but then also be able to view action items that need attention across all projects. Permissions can also be granted for administrators and executives to be able to view specific dashboards that tailor information that they would care about at a high level and also give you more insight into your project portfolio.

And then users with that executive overview permission can also utilize the Data Connector at an account level to run a data extraction that will include information from every project in your account. And last but not least, Project Insights can't really be discussed without mentioning integrations or artificial intelligence. So ACC directly integrates with over 200 third party solutions and allows you to connect data from partner applications and display that information in dashboards directly in the system.

Now, this means that you don't have to switch between applications to view all of the relevant project information that you're looking for. And artificial intelligence in ACC comes in the form of Construction IQ, which takes project data, applies analytical techniques, a little bit of machine learning, and uses it to transform that data into simple and actionable insights. And lastly, on the Data Connector, it now has a certified connection to Power BI, which streamlines the data extraction process.

And we also provide you with quite a few Power BI templates to get your company up and running. Now, even with all of these ways to access your project data, there may still be company or project needs that the out-of-the-box analytics and dashboards and insights just don't meet. So I'm going to pass it over to Jonathan to speak about how SSOE has taken data utilization and visualization to new heights.

JONATHAN BOLBACH: Thanks, Justin. So one of the biggest aspects, in fact, the heart and soul of Cardinal is the underlying data. What we have to do is harvest data from a lot of different sources across a lot of different systems. And we have to get that into a unified ecosystem. And not only that, we have to do it on a regular and consistent basis.

So I'm going to talk about how we use the Data Connector to harvest, how we use other automated systems at SSOE to harvest data, and how we put it together and how we can manifest that data into things like project health, model health, finding anomalies, and just supplying the company with data. Next slide. So Justin mentioned the Data Connector. What this is a Autodesk provided service. You can find it on your ACC Admin Insights page.

On the bottom, there's a button called Data Connector. And you can say on demand. You can hit Process, and the data connector will then generate a data extraction. This process can take a few minutes, depending on how much data you have. When it's completed, it will send you an email a notification saying, hey, I'm done extracting the data, and here's a link to your file.

Inside of that file, it's zip with many, many CSV files, each one pertaining to a different aspect of ACC data, amongst some of my favorites, the list of all of your projects and their metadata, a list of all of your users, and not only that, but what users are on which project, and what roles they have. Further than that, there's information about RFIs, issues, submittals, and really dozens of other categories. So it's a plethora of data.

Once someone like you extracts this data, it can be fed into other analytical systems. I believe Justin mentioned that they're starting to automate that process to build Data Connector data directly into Power BI. I've provided a link below if you wanted to get started on that. But this process for us is still a little bit too manual. So I'd like to show you what we're doing with this. So like I said, this data is incredibly important to our Cardinal system. So we need to get this on a consistent basis, hands free.

So what we've set up in the cloud is a scheduled automation that on a daily, and in some cases, an hourly basis, goes out and sends a data request through the Autodesk platform services, formerly known as Forge, to request a Data Connector report. Within a few minutes, the Data Connector API replies back to our cloud function and with a notification that it's done and a link to the data file. Our automation automatically extracts that data and then intelligently imports that into our Azure SQL database.

So you could see that there's a one-to-one mapping between the data that we get from Data Extractor to a whole plethora of tables in SQL. From here, we can feed all kinds of different systems, including Power BI, we can feed our automation systems, our reporting and analytics. And then in some cases, we're now seeing citizen report writers. So some of our non-technical people are using this data to create reports in Power BI.

Some of the other things to note, like I said, the most important data that we're pulling out of this is the list of all the projects, all the users, and their associations, that's what's feeding the automation for our user management project creations. James will show how we also surface some of the RFI issues and submittals data to the user. In addition to the notifications that you get when someone leaves the company, there's other ways that we can get at this data.

What I really like about the Data Connector is it gives us access to some data that's incredibly difficult to get a hold of, in some cases impossible. Even with some of our current APIs, we don't actually surface this data. The other thing that the Data Connector did for us is it obsoleted a lot of our custom scanners that we wrote that would make many, many API calls to go and gather all of the projects, all of the users. And now, we can get that in one big chunk.

So I want to make a mention out to if there's any Autodesk product leads out there who need an idea for a new feature, we would love to be able to see this Data Connector accessible through GraphQL. You can call it the admin data model or something. But we think we could leverage that data greatly. As James mentioned, we're notified maybe on an hourly basis of user updates or people that have been added to a project. With GraphQL, maybe we can do that at a much higher frequency.

In addition to the ECC data that we pull, the power of Cardinal is really enhanced by the fact that we pull in data from many other systems. So we have a service at SSOE that monitors our application usage. So every time somebody opens up one of our design softwares and closes it, we record who, what, when, where that happened. In addition to that, we record all kinds of hardware statistics, what CPU, they have GPU, their hard drive space, what operating system they have.

We also monitor every single time somebody hits the Synchronize button in Revit, we log that. We log how long it took. We log how long the file took to open, what machine it was run, what project they were in. In addition to that, we also log a lot of data about the Revit model itself. So we pull the list of work sets and the views, what links they have, any errors, the file size, really just a ton of data. And we pull that into something we call model health.

The other aspects of Cardinal is it's linked to our ERP system. So we have the ability to correlate things like our projects, our employees, office data, or business units. We can gather financial data. James will show that a little bit later For. Each of our projects and dashboard, that all together. We also synchronize data about our clients and our vendors directly from our ERP system into ACC.

So in addition to the Data Connector, we also still use the APS APIs. One of the big ones is I run a scanner that will scan and crawl all of our projects and list all of our files and folders that we have, and there's literally millions. And we keep this database up to date. In addition to that, we monitor project activity using APS webhooks. So whenever a file is written, we monitor that kind of data.

I'm not going to go over the rest of it. We have a lot of other data sources that we collect from. Just give an example of the kinds of things that we get from this, so for instance, when we monitor all of our software statistics and usage, we can start getting insights about maybe the life cycle of our projects or of our programs. So for instance, here, you could see in the long term, our AutoCAD usage is declining, and our Revit usage is increasing.

You can even see the life cycle of maybe something like AutoCAD, where every couple of years, we as a company migrated from product to product. We can tell from this database the number of concurrent users, the number of unique users that can feed data into influencing our license needs in the future. It influences our hardware purchases in the future. We can use this to discover who our power users are.

So when we're ready to pull out a new piece of software, we might grab a handful of people that have used the software a lot and are experts. We can use it to make sure that everyone is on the same version of the software. If there's definitely conflicts or issues with a certain version, we can actually see if people are still using an old version. And we can use it to tattle on some people who perhaps have not rebooted their machine in a few months or have maybe kept Revit open for two weeks straight. So we can definitely inform on some issues there.

Moving on, we can also report on model health. So like I said, we collect data on every single Revit sync. And we harvest data about that Revit model. And what I'm able to do is I can serve this data back up to our support team so when issues arise, for instance, on the right here, you could see an instance where we had an issue with Revit taking a really long time to sync one day. And our support group was able to pinpoint which users, which machines, which project, which files were causing this issue.

And then later on, once they think they resolved the issue, they could see that those usage times went down. Like I said, this data is actually smashed together with our hardware data so we can tell them what machines are having issues. With this, we can also discover some bad modeling practices. So if there's abundantly huge number of links and files or other really large files or just different weird things that can crop up, this data can tell on them and help our support team support them.

I'm looking really forward to the new EEC data model plus GraphQL features. I think that's going to augment our model health tremendously. We'll be able to harvest even more data more rapidly from all of our projects. In addition to model health, we can actually talk about project health. Some of this data actually does get surfaced in Cardinal. But also, it gets just surfaced to our support teams and our administrators.

One of the things I mentioned before is they actually scan for every single file and folder that we have in ACC. So I can tell you about data volumes. For instance, when we need to migrate a project from BIM 360 up to ACC, I can tell the support team, hey, how much data are you going to have? How many files are going to need to be transferred? What kinds of files?

And then I can also give them a report on hey, what custom permissions are applied to all the folders because they'll have to mimic that in the new project. When it comes time to archive, I can look at our project activity, and I can look at our ERP system, and surmise that, hey, maybe some of these projects are ready to be archived. And I can tell you how much data there is to archive. When we have the list of all of our files, we can surface that in a search.

So for instance, if someone wanted to know how many images that we have across all of our projects to feed into an AI, I can tell them that. Our support team, they're constantly asking me for help identifying problems that they've discovered. So for instance, they discovered that someone had accidentally uploaded or incorrectly uploaded some files to ACC, and they were all empty. So they said, hey, can you look across all of our projects and show us all of the files that have the same problem, and I was able to do that.

We can look for things like non-standard characters in file names or really long file paths. We can look for folders with too many files in them that can cause issues in Data Connector, so really just an endless number of questions that I can answer for them automatically. So talking about automations, I don't want to go over all of these. I'm going to go over a couple.

So one of the features on Cardinal, not only can we tell you what version of Revit your project is configured for, we can actually provide you a list of those Revit files and a hyperlink. When you click on that Revit file, it actually opens up Revit, the correct version of Revit, and opens up your file. So it's a really fast way for our users just to go and find and open up a file. There's other things that we've done for people, so auto purging. We can do mass updates, mass fixes to projects.

We do a lot with Plant 3D and a lot of automatic file transfers. So a lot of files that just need to get pushed around between projects and clients, emails here and there, we can do that automatically. Next slide. So one of the automations I want to go over in greater depth is the Revit model setup. So when James was talking about all of the things that have to happen during a project setup, he didn't even mention another dimension, which is our CAD and modeling team also have to go into a project and set it up.

So from the Cardinal interface, our model managers can actually use the ERP data that we collect and the ECC data that we collect to request a whole bundle of Revit models to be created from our templates. So what they'll do is in a very few number of clicks, they'll say, hey, I need two architectural models, a structural model, a mechanical model for this project. And we can pull all kinds of data from the project, like its name, the project number, the administrator, the client name, and use that to populate our models.

So the automation will automatically download the files from our templates, upload them to the correct ACC project, name them properly, fill out attributes into them, set them to collaboration, and then even link them back together. Then when it's all done, it just emails the model managers that their project is done. On average, this whole process takes about five minutes. Whereas a model manager, they say it usually takes up to one to two hours to do this entire process.

And on some of our larger projects, they might be doing dozens of these Revit files. I'm going to now pass the mic on to James, who's going to talk about additional data that we surface into Cardinal.

JAMES MALCOLM: Yeah, so we use data connector in a few other ways. For example, we have this week's summary page that we built into Cardinal. And this is kind of a direct callback to one of the features that Justin mentioned was added to ACC recently, which is that My Home feature that gives you that cross-project look. We've actually had this week's summary page for quite a while because we noticed that we needed that cross-project look at our issues, RFIs and submittals quite a while back.

And all of that data was accessible via Data Connector. So we built this web page where you're able to see what are your open tasks? When are they do this week? Who's assigned to what, et cetera? And each one of these cards links you directly into that item in ACC. So again, it's just about getting our users to be able to quickly get to the information they need and quickly get to the items they need to work on.

One of the other ways that we use the data that we've allocated between all of our ERP systems and custom apps and everything is to be able to show these project at a glance type of views where we're able to include information about schedule information about recent timesheets to be able to track activity on the projects. We're also able to surface things about model management, clash detection, who's on the project team, and more.

Now, in terms of what it took SSOE to achieve this, it was definitely not an overnight activity. We've spent many years in many iterations developing this, very close contact with Autodesk over the years, working with all of the new APIs, sometimes nudging them, asking for new ones. It costs us a few hundred bucks in Azure resources per month for the database and the harvesting. But we really wanted to emphasize that this is an attainable goal.

But it takes a great deal of effort from our product owners team. That would be the people that are very highly engaged with BIM 360 and ACC. They know the product in and out. They know how it can work, and they know where its gaps are. And they were able to communicate that to myself, Jonathan, and others to say, hey, can you work with Autodesk APIs to try to fill some of these gaps? And that's where all of these solutions that we just talked about came from. Justin, would you like to talk about the future of ACC here?