BIM Collaborate: Bringing the Distributed Team Together

MATTHEW ANDERLE: Welcome, everyone to our class, BIM Collaborate, Bring the Distributed Team Together. Our speakers for today are myself, Matthew Anderle. And I am the Director of Digital Practice and Technology for the buildings and places business line at AECOM. Part of my role here is to introduce new technology to the company, like our BIM Collaborative Platform and to make sure that we have global workflows that allow our teams to work as a distributed entity as one group together.

KATHERINE CROWLEY: Hello, I am Catherine Crowley a project coordinator at AECOM, focusing on our federal and health care markets. I have served as the document controller for a variety of project sizes. At AECOM, we were early adopters of what has now BIM 360 Collaborate, which has proven to be instrumental in managing project documentation throughout the project lifecycle. Of particular note is the role that BIM 360 Collaborate played in our move to remote working in response to the pandemic.

Because we had already been working through this platform, our transition to working from home was practically seamless, allowing us to continue working at a consistent pace in a safe environment.

MATTHEW ANDERLE: Let's talk about our session today. And what we want to bring to you is experience that AECOM has in the BIM 360 platform. We have over 3,200 projects actively running in the cloud with 35,000 team members who are participating around the world. We find that we have a lot of experience in the learning curves of trying to get our teams into the cloud, what kind of set up a management that entails, and also, how we've improved our workflows to approach the cloud platform with the added features it has, and to augment what we do as deliverables because we have this opportunity to work so closely.

And in our session today, we're hoping that you could take away from this a few different learning objectives. One of which is just understanding what BIM Collaborate is and the differences made between BIM Collaborative and Collaborate Pro. Because there are a couple of different variations there. We want to be able to also ensure that the cloud has securities that are built in. And we're going to talk about how you can manage securities for your team.

We're also going to talk about the collaboration workflow changes that you might experience from your team moving into a cloud based platform, and then, the opportunities that the cloud provides for us to have a singular truth of source for design information to do reviews, to do comparisons, and to make sure that we have designed consistency throughout the process. And to get us started, we're going to have the conversation about Collaboration.

I'm going to hand it to, Katie. She's going to introduce these topics for us.

KATHERINE CROWLEY: The topics we will be covering will include an introduction to our sample project, getting started with BIM 360 Collaborate. We will cover managing PDFs, sets, markups, and issues. We will talk a little bit about leveraging metadata and discuss some additional features offered by BIM 360 Collaborate. The project that we modeled this presentation on is a new hospital campus that consists of an approximately one million square foot medical facility, including a 200,000 square foot ambulatory care center, as well as, a 19,000 square foot regional laundry, a 45,000 square foot central utility plant, and new structured parking for roughly 2,600 cars.

Our team was made up of 17 different firms anchored by a joint venture between two A/E firms with 15 subcontractors. We created 122 models. The campus contains 12 buildings. And four hosting methods were employed as the project evolved, which Matt will discuss a little bit further. The project team is made up of managers, subject matter experts, and designers, each with different levels of experience in various arenas.

BIM 360 collaborate offers intuitive and user friendly tools that allow everyone on the team to have a full understanding of the project at every stage. The 122 models are organized by campus, building, discipline, sub-discipline, and finally as aggregate models. The new hospital campus is home to a large hospital building divided into two wings and separated by a central concourse.

The hospital is flanked by North and South parking garages, a combined central utility plant and laundry facility, a maintenance building, a main guard station, a water tower, and several outbuildings.

MATTHEW ANDERLE: Katie mentioned we had four different hosting methods. When we started this project 12 years ago, BIM 360 didn't exist. And it was important for us to try to leverage the new opportunities for us to collaborate because of our large team and our very distributed team around the country. It evolved from everything beginning with a script with an FTP site through teams BIM 360 Docs, and finally, using the latest of the BIM 360 platform to be able to ensure that we made our-- made progress on the project and had deliverables and met the expectations of the client.

So a little bit about the BIM 360 collaborative platform, we talk about there's two different versions, Collaborate Pro and Collaborate. And the major difference between those two is that Collaborate Pro allows you to invoke worksharing between your design models. And that includes both the Revit and our Civil 3D files, and again, our Plant files that we have just recently introduced here into the Collaborate platform.

There are a lot of similarities between what we used to use at BIM 360 Docs or BIM 360 Design and the new BIM 360 Collaborate. You'll see that there are similarities in the way that we manage our files, the way that we design and collaborate with that design, model, do model coordination through clash detection and other issues, tracking, and then, also the management of these two platforms.

We're also going to highlight some of the differences. So we'll see some new aspects of BIM 360 Collaborate that you might not know about. And introduce us to your team.

KATHERINE CROWLEY: BIM 360 collaborate offers a number of functions. The most important being that it serves as a common data environment for your distributed teams. The pandemic helped to reveal the value of being able to exchange, store, and work on multiple file types all from one platform and without needing to work locally or offline. All activities are trackable. And the permissions feature allows project administrators to control who has access to a file and at what level.

Not only that, but if a document needs to be rolled back to a previous version, BIM 360 Collaborate provides that capability, as well.

MATTHEW ANDERLE: Let's talk about how to get started. BIM 360 service is a cloud based platform that Autodesk provides. It is a fee based on several different models that you might introduce into your company. But it also has within it several different modules that are part of the platform. Each module brings different functionality to your project and has different purposes throughout the design process.

What we're going to focus on today are primarily the docs section, design collaboration, model coordination, and talk a little bit about build and the administration site. Each of these are different modules that we found are very helpful in the process of cloud collaboration and have different scenarios that we would use those for with different sub functions within each.

KATHERINE CROWLEY: So we will first discuss member management. To add members to a project, they will each need to have an Autodesk ID. Autodesk IDs are free through a registration process and allow non Autodesk subscribers to access your BIM 360 Collaborate site. Members are added through the project admin module using their email addresses. From there, a company and roles are assigned. The company and role assignments are typically used to establish folder permissions.

Once a folder is created, permissions need to be applied. Permissions are cascaded through the directory tree and cannot be reduced in subfolders. A team member will always receive the highest level of permission granted, either by company, roll, or user specific. Permission levels of BIM 360 Collaborate have evolved from those used in BIM 360 Design. This slide illustrates the new level hierarchy.

You may notice that there are added permission tiers for publishing markups and uploading content. As project teams continue to pursue additional cloud collaboration opportunities, remember to keep document security at the forefront of your project management strategy.

MATTHEW ANDERLE: So to get started, obviously, we need to get our design files into the cloud. And we're going to talk about Revit and some early Civil 3D and Plant work, in ways where we need to take our design files that we offer locally and publish those out to the cloud. In Revit, it's important to note that you should instruct your team that all of these different functions to publish and initiate models should happen through the Revit platform.

And likewise, other design platforms, we want to use the authoring platform to do this function. In Revit, you're seeing the Collaborate tab. There's a Collaborate button. And underneath that button, it's going to give you the opportunity to collaborate a few different ways. One of which will be in BIM 360. As we move through, involve into these cloud platforms, those will show up in this collaborate function. And choose the one that your team is using to collaborate and work share your models.

It's also important to note that, when you publish your models, there are settings that we typically want to apply to ensure that the information that we're going to present on the web is consistent with what your expectations are to use as a web based platform or out in the field. And under the Publish Settings, you have that opportunity to select different views, sheets, and 3D organize or 3D formatted content that you want to share out on the website.

Choose these settings before going ahead and publishing or creating new publishers of your models so that your teams have that expectation when they receive that information through the web. There are two ways that we can publish models. And one is through the Manage Cloud Models tool, which is also on the Collaborative Tab in Revit. Selecting the manage called Model Tool to allow you to pick which project you're publishing from, and then, again, selecting which models you want to publish at this time.

The other way is through the Revit recent screen or the Home screen that gives you the option to select the BIM 360 project that you're working in the bottom left hand corner, and then, selecting the models that you want to publish. So as you'll see on the screen, there are a list of all the files that are in your project. You have a published status. So it'll tell you which models have been published, are coordinated or synchronized with what is available on the website.

And you have the option to select all your models and publish, or choose one of the models with the menu system on the far right to publish models individually. So once you publish models, that's what brings into the model for team collaboration. Publishing provides us the option to milestone these models as they appear on the web for us. And team collaboration is where we find those milestones on a timeline based review process.

So as you can see, we have different teams divided by the different disciplines. Those team members are formatted or created in our administration panel and identified which folders, essentially, are containing the models from those teams. And when we publish, we see these milestones that show up on this timeline that allow us then to review what has been published. It gives us information about the models, the sheets.

And otherwise, if we package things that go along with that publication, and then, as we share, we have the option to share as a package, which gives us a timestamp of this information, which allows us to link to those different packages. Or as we publish, we can link to the information live as it comes in from our teams that are publishing content. So we get into some design review.

And in the previous BIM 360 platform, we typically uploaded these types of sheets into the plan section. In the new BIM 360 Callaborate platform, under the build section, we have a section that is dedicated towards sheets. And similarly, we're going to upload our PDF set either from your computer or we're going to load it from a file that we stored on the docs section of BIM 360 Collaborate.

And once we've uploaded that, we're going to move on to do some automatic attribute capturing from those sheets. So built into the BIM 360 platform now, it will first ask you to define the set and the publication of the set that is critical for us to capture and compartmentalize where these sheets belong. In addition to that, it's automatically going to detect to see if you have sheet numbers and try to determine where on your sheet or where in the title block your sheet numbers exist.

In this case, the system automatically identified where our sheet number attribute was, and then, pulled that information from that area of our title blog. And then, once we've confirmed and validated the sheet numbers are coming in correctly, the next step is then to identify where the sheet title is. In the platform, we're going to select the button to define the sheet title area. It's going to give us an option to draw a box around the field in our title block that contains the sheet title.

And as we move through the acceptance buttons within this process, you're going to see that information then come into our published status under the sheet title heading. Once we select to publish the sheets, then those sheets now become available to our teams as a record of that sheet in a version or in the history of time as part of a set and shows up under the sheets section in the build module.

You can see that we've captured several different attributes as part of this process. One is the sheet number, sheet title. Also we can see the version that's available to us, who uploaded the sheets, on what date. And automatically, the system has attributed that sheet to a certain discipline. And the disciplines are something that are set up in the administration panel to identify a sheet prefix being part of a certain discipline or define a certain discipline.

It's important to capture that information correctly because it gives us a couple of opportunities. One is to identify a sheet series that is part of our disciplines, but also, gives us an opportunity to filter that sheet lists down to a certain discipline if you're trying to review several sheets or several different discipline sheets altogether. We're going to talk about some other opportunities we have to filter sheets and add additional metadata to our publishing process.

So the Version and Compare tool is a feature that we use quite often. It's a really powerful tool that was started in the original BIM 360 platform. And it's continued into BIM 360 Collaborate. And what it allows you to do is to review a document in its current state and any historical state. And by doing so, it then does a visual review of that document with an overlay that could be reviewed in a couple of different ways.

One is to simply do an overlay with color coding to show you the previous and the current document and where they differ. The other option is to do a side by side view, which is unique. And showing you on one side of the screen, one version of the document, on the other side, the current version of that document. And either sliding the sheet underneath the center divide or sliding the center divide itself will swipe over that page and reveal the changes to you.

It gives you a cleaner look, in my opinion. It also gives you the opportunity to swipe back and forth in a consistent manner to see what changes were made and review all the changes in detail. We're talking a little bit about markups and issues. And in the markups panel, which is available on the side when you're reviewing sheets in the web based BIM 360 platform, at any time you can select to markup a document.

And it applies to a variety of different documents, so not just PDFs. We can mark model views. We can mark images. We can mark PDFs and many more. What this provides for us is the standard tools that we would use to identify any design anomalies or attention to a design situation that we need to highlight or change within the team.

And using the standard tools to circle things, bubble things, or cloud things, even create callouts or dimension strings on the drawings, we can convey that information, again, in a central repository for the team to review and immediately have access to the notations that we're making anywhere around the world. There's two opportunities to create markups or two settings that we typically follow for markups.

One is if you create a markup and you're still editing that document, you can save it as a private markup and not publish that. Once you're done making your markups and this information is ready to share with your team, we'd certainly want to publish that markup, which makes it visible to the rest of the team. And records that within the document as the individual who created that markup, the time of date, and what version of that document that markup was created on.

Let me get to issues, and issues like markups as universal across the BIM 360 platform. And issues are something that we typically create so that we can track a change that we want to make within the design. And by doing so, we create a record that is listed within the issues management system that is identified to the drawing or the object in clash detection and assigned to individuals for follow through.

And that individual then has the opportunity to add additional information to create comments and to review the issue in full, to format their official response. And then, of course, we have that opportunity to review the response, mark that issue as closed, and resolve the issue that was created. So the entire tracking mechanism is something that's invaluable to us, both on just the design document side, but also, in the Model Coordination side.

That brings us to model coordination. And historically, we've done clash detection in several different platforms. One of which, Navisworks is probably the most prominent for us. We've moved into BIM 360 Glue and have used that extensively over the last couple of years. But model coordination takes this information and captures it from the BIM 360 site automatically and brings it into its platform autonomously without us having to move things around or submit to different platforms.

And one of the best features that we've found in the model coordination system is that it has a clash matrix that automatically detect clashes between the models that are on the left against every other model that's in your project. And it reveals it to us in this heat map of where we have intensities of clashes. So the darker the color, the more clashes that are prevalent in those two models together then in the rest of the site.

And we have a few ways to review this. One is we can select a model from the list on the left. And it's going to open up that model plus all the models that it has clashed against or is determined to clash against. Or we can select on one of the boxes themselves. And it's going to bring up the models that intersect that grid and show us just those two models together.

Once we're reviewing models, we can then see what the clashes are, what the intensity of those clashes are, and maybe what the consistency or the repetition of that clash is from one object to maybe multiple objects. And there are ways to sort that. We can create a hierarchy of which models are more important to track, which ones are less important to track. And from that, we can then create issues, like we were doing on the sheets or in views.

And the issue from the clash detection or from the model coordination platform is going to provide us a lot of details in the issue once we generate it. It's going to bring in some information about the objects that are clashing. It'll bring in information about the model that we're reviewing, where that information coming from and provided some other details about those objects in the issue when we're trying to track and resolve.

So we also have an opportunity to do visual reviews. And one of the favorite features I have is to go into the Model Coordination system, select several different models to federate together, and open those in the web browser. It gives us a very focused look at certain models as they are coordinated in a federated space all through the website. And one of the nicest features that we've invoked is the first person view, as you walk through a model and you walk through the geometry to see the design as the design is coordinated with other components of your design.

And one of the easiest parts of this is that you don't have to have Revit. You don't have to have any special software on your machines to execute this kind of review process. And simply having a web browser or a device that's connected to the web provides you this kind of opportunity to walk through your models, do visual reviews in a focused setting, without having to install any substantial types of software or have extensive training in certain softwares to do the clashes.

So this review has been invaluable to us.

KATHERINE CROWLEY: So now we'll talk a little bit about leveraging that metadata. When you publish PDFs, BIM 360 Collaborate automatically identifies callouts with sheet numbers that match other sheets that have been updated-- uploaded with a set and creates hyperlinks for them. This feature allows you to navigate through the set using your callouts, assisting and design reviews and page turns. These hyperlinks can also be included in PDF set exports.

MATTHEW ANDERLE: So now we're going to talk a little bit about assigning the metadata. As I mentioned before, we have the opportunity to invoke tags on our PDFs and our documents that we've uploaded. Sometimes we have these determined as custom attributes in the doc side, in the build side. Under sheets, it's considered be tags. And that provides us an opportunity to tag a sheet or tag a set of sheets with information that we might want to use to filter or compartmentalize these sheets in a certain way as we move forward with our review.

So tags, in general, work in a way that we add metadata or keywords to those objects, in this case, these PDFs, and allow us to be able to filter or sort or search by those different tags that we add. And tags are added by typing in information and entering that into the tag field for those selected sheets. Can be one or could be the entire set. And we also had the option to then manipulate metadata.

And one of the neat new features of BIM 360 Collaborate is to add a rule based metadata review. And so, as we're going through, you can see that we're pulling in information from the sheet titles. We've added a rule to find sheet titles that match a certain scenario, a search string. And we've converted that into a new search or a new string that we were going to populate the sheets with once they enter into the BIM 360 platform.

This is a unique tool that allows us to normalize information. So if we have abbreviations that are getting changed in a way if we're getting information that was even misspelled, we can use this to find things like that and convert them into what they should be. So another neat feature of the BIM 360 Collaborate is the edit sheet titles with rules and ability to find things and convert the metadata once it gets saved.

So we also have an opportunity to look at metadata in the models themselves. And familiar with our Revit users and anybody who's working in asset management or working with the parameter based models, we're finding that this information is critical, not only for the design aspect, but is becoming very much so part of our deliverables. And so, making sure that we have the right information in the model is imperative.

In Revit, we have that opportunity, obviously, using the Properties Panel and the Type Properties panel to review that information. But once we move that to the cloud, we have that same opportunity. And using the BIM 360 Model Viewer provides us an opportunity to select objects and open up the Details panel-- Katie, next slide, please-- to be able to select the objects and opened up the Details panel and look at that same metadata that we're seeing in the Revit Design authoring files as we are in the web viewer.

So again, we don't need specialized software. We don't need Revit or Revit Expertise to go through and view this information. It presents itself on the cloud for us.

KATHERINE CROWLEY: There are a few nice additional features that BIM 360 Collaborate offers. Within the past few years, Autodesk integrated Office 365 software into BIM 360 Collaborate. That means if you are managing data through an Excel document or have multiple authors writing a narrative, they can edit that data within the BIM 360 Collaborate environment. Editors are saved while working in the document.

And a new version is created each time an editing session is closed, which makes it easier to track who has made a change and when the changes were implemented. Multiple users can edit a document at the same time. And versions can be rolled back if necessary. To use the feature, select a Microsoft file and click on that Edit and Browser button. A new window will open and edits can be made.

Changes are automatically saved, which is indicated at the top center of the screen. Click the return link at the top left of the screen. And you will return to the documents preview page. If you click the BIM 360 link at the top left of the page, you will return to the file list instead of the documents preview page.

MATTHEW ANDERLE: One of my favorite features is the placement tool. And that's something that we use when we're reviewing Revit models, both in the plan view or a sheet view and the 3D view. And what that allows you to do is to take a little placement icon and put it onto a plan somewhere. And it's automatically going to navigate you through the building to match where your view is placed and where you want to focus on.

And that's something that is instrumental in navigating a large project because you can simply find the sheet that you want to review that has the space or has the department that you want to walk through, and place yourself into that space, which will then focus your 3D view within that same area that you're trying to focus on. So in closing, we want to thank you for attending our class.

We hope that we've revealed some of the key features of the BIM 360 Collaborate platform, brought to you some experiences that AECOM has had over the years in just features that have helped us in our process and brought forward some of the information that is critical about getting started and managing your team with some securities, and also, introducing maybe some design workflow changes for you that has been invaluable for us, of course, throughout our design workflows, but also, our construction workflows.

And we're honored to have this opportunity to talk to you about AECOM's advancements in our collaboration strategies. And we want to thank Autodesk for having us and being able to share our experiences. And we want to thank you for attending. With that, we do please ask that you complete the surveys that are part of our class that helps us to be better presenters in the future and will help us improve our presentation for, hopefully, the next AU.