说明
主要学习内容
- Learn about managing complexity by breaking up models in model coordination for online viewing.
- Learn how to speed up your workflows and eliminate tedious tasks by building simple automation into your project.
- Learn how to visualize and accurately track equipment from OEM vendors directly in the project model.
- Learn how to improve cross-company collaboration with Bridge in Autodesk Construction Cloud.
讲师
- BTBlake TitusBlake has been active in the architecture, engineering, and construction industry for 15 years. The first five years, Blake worked at an architecture firm, implementing Revit and working as a BIM/CAD technician. For the past ten years, Blake has been at Miron Construction as a Virtual Construction Specialist first and now a Senior Virtual Construction Lead for the Industrial Division. He has been the Virtual Design and Construction (VDC) lead on over $2 billion in construction project work and has been an integral part in moving Miron's construction technologies forward, establishing Miron as a VDC leader in the Midwest. Blake is a licensed architect in the state of Wisconsin and has been using Autodesk products since 2005.
BLAKE TITUS: This is Breaking Down Mammoth Coordination Tasks with Miron Construction. I'm Blake Titus, senior virtual construction lead with Miron Construction. So what we're going to cover in this session, a brief intro, overview of me and Miron. And then also we're going to go through two projects that we worked on using a lot of Autodesk tools here, one being the Wood Processing Facility, another one being Milk Processing Facility. And at the end, we're going to leave some time for Q&A.
So, real quick overview of Miron. So Miron is-- it's been around over 100 years now, fourth-generation family-owned company. We're the largest general contractor in Wisconsin, and one of the largest builders in the Midwest-- work in several different markets, over 1,500 employees, and we're committing to-- committed to building excellence.
The red dots are where our offices are. The dark blue colored states are states we've done work in recently. So you can see, even though we're focused in Wisconsin primarily, we've done work all throughout the United States. Here are our mission statement values. So this is what we live by.
A little bit about me. So I lead the virtual construction efforts for the industrial, manufacturing, energy, and food sectors. I have 15 years experience in the IT industry working for a healthcare architect for first five years of my career, and then I've been doing virtual construction with Miron for the last 10, became a registered architect in 2016. And outside of work, like traveling, playing music, cooking.
So, a real brief overview. So we're going to compare the two facilities, like I talked about before, but then we're going to get into the technology that was used, how we set up the models for each project, clash detection for each project, and then what went well, things that we learned. Hopefully we can help you avoid some pitfalls on projects that you're working on.
So the first facility, you can see this here. This is a wood products facility. So you can see here the darker gray sections of roof, that was the existing facility. The lighter gray are new portions of the facility. We also went through and modified a lot of the existing equipment that was inside the facility.
So at the-- at completion of this project, we had 295 models that made up our coordination model set. We broke those up into 13 different plan areas. And then this project, it was a multi-bid package projects. There were 14 bid packages that were released, and that meant, at any point, you could have design, demo, and construction all happening in the same pipe rack at the same time. So that did get a little bit confusing, at times.
And this was a one-year coordination project. Miron was involved on the design portion of the work, really, from schematic design all the way through construction.
So some of the challenges that we ran across with this project. We had teams across the US and Canada, so that was a bit of a challenge. We didn't have most of our team members in the same office, or even in the same area at any one time. The bid packages were released over the course of nine months. So, as you can imagine, having design happening at the same time you're trying to do demo construction, that gave us some-- there were some challenges there.
Some of the design packages did not come out on time. That was a bit of a challenge. So we would have a drawing package come out that was supposed to be complete, but we would have revision clouds around it that said on hold for large sections of the project. So that made-- all these bid packages that were coming out had a lot of addendum items in them, and that was definitely a challenge.
On top of that, we had the substantial completion date. Our owner made it very clear that that date was not going to move. There were no exceptions to that, and this project happened over the course of COVID.
So not only did we have the challenges with COVID, we also had a lot of challenges with procurement of long lead time items. Some of those items that-- our lead times change pretty drastically during the course of the project. So, technology used. We started this project in 2019.
So when I look back on this, it does seem like some of the tools we were using is pretty antiquated at this point. But we used, for this project, BIM 360. ACC was just starting to come out, but we were more familiar with BIM 360, and decided to use that for this project. Because this project was in 2019, we were-- files were being sent via email, Newforma, FTP sites, things like that. Really not the ideal workflow, especially with some of the tools that are available to us now.
We had central work shared files that were created, but we did not-- we weren't using cloud models at the start of this project. So there was a lot of File, Save As, then files being shared through FTP sites, and things like that. We did use Navisworks Manage. That was primarily a file viewer, and we'll get into that in a little bit-- also the Issues plugin. Then we used a product a product called Cintoo which helped us view models overlaid with our laser scans.
So we'll get into how do we set up this model, and then management of the files. So this project, we broke it up into 13 different plan areas. And you can see on the right-hand side in the photo what those plan areas were. On the left-hand side, specifically lap line, size and panel line, vented [? soffit ?] sanding line, there were a lot of complex OEM models over there.
So these were broken up, not just for clarity, but also because we were starting to run into limitations on the online file viewer. Breaking these files up really helped us be able to work in a cloud environment. The way we did that, we created a scope box model. So that was really a container model.
We created the scope boxes where we wanted them to be. We named them all according to how we wanted everybody else's named, and then we would have them copy and paste that scope box-- you could do a-- paste a line into their model, and then that's how we broke up all these files. So everybody's model had a consistent scope box-- kept things nice and clean. We had to work with each of our design partners on publish settings, making sure that their scope boxes and their publish settings all were set up correctly, and that all the views that we needed were coming out as planned.
So here's an example of what one of those plan areas looked like. You can see there's a lot of OEM models here that are quite heavy. So the online viewer doesn't particularly like those, but breaking it up into smaller chunks helped make that work a lot better.
So I mentioned the OEM vendor models. You can see an example of what one of those looked like here. I think this file was something like 13 gigabytes, this Revit model-- very heavy file. These files came to us in primarily step file format. We got some of them in Inventor formats.
But what we would do is we would take this file, because it was very detailed-- it had nuts, and bolts, and holes, and all the fillets, and chamfers that we didn't really need-- and we brought that into Inventor, and then we used Shrinkwrap-- that's a tool in Inventor-- to simplify the file. In 2022, I think that tool was changed from Shrinkwrap to Simplify, but for this project, we were using the Shrinkwrap tool.
So we would open Inventor, do Import, and Convert Model, pick that step file that was sent to us, and then we would run the Shrinkwrap command. After the Shrinkwrap command was done, which, by the way, for some of these files took eight-- could be eight hours, and we had to do them in small sections-- we would run that Shrinkwrap command, and then convert the file to Revit. And that was just through the Environment tab, and then click on BIM Content, and that would create a Revit file.
Even though we did get this into Revit, and it was simplified, they were still very large models, very cumbersome to work with. But it did get us into a format that we could put into Model Coordination and run clash detection on, which was really our goal. So once we got this into Model Coordination, you can see here this is an example of the overall facility model with all the equipment in it.
This is about 2/3 of the facility. It's quite a large facility. We started using-- we created all of our clashes on-- in Model Coordination on BIM 360. There was a manual clash issue creation option. We didn't really use that at the time. We opted more for kind of going around and creating the issues manually.
The clash reporting tool that's out there-- the clash matrix, really-- we utilized that quite a bit. And at the time, there were no clash templates that were available to us, so we did not use that. We had to really just use our own standards, and make sure that we were consistent all the way through the project.
There was not a no clash function available at that time, and I'll get into that when we talk about the milk facility. But that was one challenge that we had, is as people would upload files, they would need to process. And because this was such a large facility, sometimes that could take several hours. So getting people to not upload files right before meetings was a bit of a challenge. Autodesk does have a solution for that, and I'll get to that when we go through the next project.
So we were using the BIM 360 viewer in Model Coordination to create a lot of our clash issues. So that portion worked great, but when we tried to run our meetings, we were running Teams Meetings with the online viewer. We ran into a lot of issues, things freezing, things like that.
So we tried to take those-- take the files that were created with all the issues in it through the Issue plugin, and open that up in Navisworks Manage. At that time, there was a bit of-- there was a limitation on the number of models that you could open during the project that was resolved. So we got to a point where there was not a limit on models that needed to-- that we could open.
So what we would do is we would create all the issues on Model Coordination, and then we would do the review of issues in Navisworks Manage during our clash detection meetings. We did not find the clashes in Navisworks. We always did that on Model Coordination.
One thing that's a big improvement now that we didn't have at the time was the NWF files were not connected. So anything pulled down through the Issues plug-in was kind of a standalone file. It was not something that was connected across the team. So, at times, that did cause a little bit of issues where somebody else was working on an NWF file that they thought was connected to what we were using. It was not, so not everybody was working off the same sheet of music at times.
All right, so when we get into BIM coordination-- and I should mention that BIM coordination was done during design. So we were working with our design teams, as they were doing the design, to go through the BIM coordination-- pros and cons to that, which I'll get into. So once we started this project, and started getting into BIM coordination, we realized that this project probably needed to be converted to cloud work shared models for the Revit team.
It was a pretty easy sell to our teams. The one challenge was how we were going to pay for BIM Collaborate Pro licenses. Some team members just understood that this was going to save time, and had no problem putting down a few hundred dollars for the duration of the project to do this, but other teams did, and we had to convince them that was going to be a value add.
One thing that we've done going forward now is we actually-- we put together a BIM specification at Miron that gets included in the front ends of the start of projects, and we actually have a requirement for licensing for BIM Collaborate Pro on all projects going forward. So when you're going through BIM coordination, obviously, every now and then we need to get record models out to the team.
We started using the Batch.nwd Export. So we were able to automate the exporting of NWDs, and I'll get into that in just a little bit. Also, we used Cintoo to check the design model against existing conditions.
So Navisworks Batch Utility, we were able to take the NWF files that were on the Issues plugin. We saved those to a local location on your computer, and then specified where those files get exported to. Once you have this all set up, all you do is hit the Run command, and it will open up a session of Navisworks, and it'll publish in NWDs. Really powerful tool.
This can also be scheduled to run using the Task Scheduler. We opted not to schedule this, and we like to specify when files are going to be updated, really, because if something gets updated or changed, I'd rather make sure that our models are in good shape before we push out a record model, and have it happen automatically, and maybe have something get updated that-- weren't ready for. So, all right.
So I mentioned Cintoo. This was a way that we would be able to view laser scans overlaid onto our Navisworks files. So this allowed us to do all this in the cloud, along with 360-degree photos. So you can see each of those white circles, that was a 360-degree photo. And we could view-- in those 360-degree photos, view the model laid over the top of that as well.
This tool also allowed us to create mesh files of any of the existing laser scan. That was really powerful. And we could overlay the model on either a 3D view or the 360-degree panoramic. So here's an example of looking at the model overlaid on the laser scan.
There is a little bit of decimation that happens in the point cloud-- still very powerful. And then here is the-- what it looks like if you're looking at it in the 360-degree photo mode. A little bit more clear, but you are limited to staying put on those scan locations.
So, what went well on this project? There were definitely some construction and schedule delays, but some of the BIM coordination things that we did allowed us to work ahead in other areas. So some of those areas were getting hangers up well in advance of when we would have been able to do that otherwise.
There are a few areas where we had some finished ceiling details that interacted with the hangers for some of the mechanical systems. Being able to plan that well in advance saved us a ton of time. There's very little rework on this. | the equipment that had to interact with the platforms, that was all coordinated really well, and we had very little surprises there.
And also, there's a ton of maintenance zones that needed to be planned for on here. Being able to work on that work on the computer, rather than in the field, also saved us a lot of time. It was very little very little cutting and grinding of platforms, or anything like that after the fact.
So, what didn't go well? This is, in my mind, some of the best parts of these presentations. So, training. I think training is always a challenge, no matter who you're working with or for.
Our teams, when we started this project, were not familiar with cloud models, and there was a learning curve to that-- specifically the publishing of cloud models, and then also how your publish settings interact with that. So that was a little bit of a learning curve, but we worked through it.
And then also how the model works on BIM 360 or in Navisworks. There was a little bit of a learning curve there. Another thing that was really a challenge was distinguishing which work was in which bid package. There were several times where we would look at-- we'd look to coordinate some items that were on a pipe rack.
We would find out that one of the pipes that was shown on there was actually demoed, one of them is being designed right now, and one of them is on hold. So there was always-- there's a lot of going back and forth with the drawings to figure out what was in which bid package. If there was a way we could distinguish that, that would have been really helpful. And you'll see in the next project, or the next-- when we review the next project, we've come up with a way to do that.
We should have used cloud work shared models right from the start. We switched that mid-project. I would not recommend doing that. Just do it right, use cloud work shared models right away at the beginning.
We created issues for each clash on this project. I think, in the end, we ended up with maybe 3,000 clashes-- issues that were created for clashes. That was really not the most efficient way to do this. It allowed for great reporting, but it was very labor intensive. It's probably not the best way to approach it. And then also, all those clashes that got created, we didn't have a great way of prioritizing the clashes. We used the high, medium, low for priority, but could have used a little bit more granularity there.
OK. So, the next project. This is a $300 million Greenfield project. This is a facility that makes butter, and also dried milk products. This project is going on right now. It will be an 18-month coordination project, roughly. Right now, there's about 300 models in it, and that list is growing.
Again, we broke this up into several different plan areas. And this one is going to be challenging because we could have as many as five different trade partners for each trade. So, for instance, electrical, you might have five electrical subcontractors, and and then also five different BIM coordination members just for electrical. So this could get-- could be a very large coordination project.
So, challenges. Again, we have a lot of team members that are in various different areas. We have some that are in Northwest portion of the country, some in Colorado, some that are even not in this country. So that's going to be a challenge. All these meetings are going to have to be done via Teams.
Job site. So this job site is in Washington State, and Miron's corporate headquarters is in Wisconsin. So getting out to the job site, it is possible, but it's not going to happen as often as if the job site were, say, 100 miles away.
We're getting a lot of OEM models. This picture that you're looking at on the right-hand side, almost everything you're seeing in there is coming from an OEM vendor, and there's going to be a lot of updates to that. The file does not come to us in Revit format, so there's some conversions, and things that we have to do for that. And like I mentioned, several contractors per trade.
So what do we use for this project-- to get through it? So we're using Bridge to move files from our design team's site onto ours. That helps cut down on a lot of the back and forth and downloading of files. We're using Revit 2023.1 and newer, and what that allows us to do is interact with those files that are cloud work shared models that are bridged. And that just really cuts down on a lot of the back and forth there as well.
Navisworks 2024 . So this allows us for collaborative NWFs, which I'll get into in a little bit, but that's been really powerful. And then Autodesk Construction Cloud, that's Miron's standard going forward. All projects are on ACC.
All right, so for this project, model setup and management. How do we handle this one? So, Bridge. All of these files are-- they originate on our design team's ACC site, and they get bridged over, which is just automatic-- automatically, as files get published on our partner site, they get copied over to Miron's ACC site.
Getting our design teams to agree to do that, at the beginning, was a little bit of a challenge. But after-- just after talking through the process with them, showing them how it works, I think those conversations actually helped develop an environment of trust with our design teams. Once they got this set up, and we started using it, I think they really liked the process. And I appreciate that that really-- it allows us to focus on more important things, rather than moving files around.
So, like I mentioned before, cloud models. Definitely, we wanted to make sure that we were using cloud models right off the bat for this project. So everybody that's working in Revit, they're using cloud work shared files. Those are all published directly to the cloud. As a result, everybody needs a BIM Collaborate Pro license.
Like I mentioned, we make sure that our teams are using BIM Collaborate Pro, and they have that accounted for right off the bat. And that's spelled out in the BIM execution plan, and also the BIM specifications. Anybody that is-- like, any of our subcontractors, they'll host their models on our ACC site, the cloud work shared models.
And then so everybody is able to see those files as they're saving, or as they publish, we'll see their changes coming through in real time. Definitely, some efficiencies in communicating issues. Seeing files change in real time, it's great, and being able to see that in real time is really essential for BIM coordination.
So for this project, we had to break up the models, just kind of like any other project that we work on that's a large facility. So, again, we, use that scope box model that I described from the last project. This worked really well, so we didn't make any major changes, other than breaking up by area, and also by level in some areas.
So this project had a little bit more of various levels that were important to be able to view, so we broke things up there as well-- made for a lot more views, but it's a little bit easier coming through, when you're working through coordination. One thing we did do for this project was we created an Excel spreadsheet-- that you're seeing here-- that kind of spelled out all of the views, and what associated models are in those views.
We wanted to make sure that our naming convention was very consistent across the project. Once you start getting-- right now we're around 300 models, but we expect to be potentially in the 500-to-600 model range by the time we're done-- get all our subcontractors on board. Having those files named consistently is critical. So we had that Excel document put together to help keep track of that, and check off any files that are new.
We also have, in this project, something that we call a gap model. So this picks up any information that might not be in our-- either our design team's models, or in our subcontractors' models. In this case, fireproofing on steel, or supplemental steel. So supplemental steel sometimes is contracted out sometimes, for, like, the case of ceiling-hung toilet partitions. Sometimes those things are not included, but we likE to have that for our design-- or for our BIM coordination.
Other things that we put in here is king studs for doors, if we have metal studs. We also have 3D room tags, which you can see here, and I'll get to that in a second. And then any important site utilities that aren't included in a model, we'll take that site utility plan, and put those sorts of things in, if they're critical.
So, again, for this project, the OEM models. We had a lot of those files, you can see. This is all of our OEM models. Those files were provided to us in NWD format. Most of these files were created in either like a plant 3D-type DWG format, or SolidWorks, or Inventor.
These projects these files were provided by three separate vendors, and they're extremely high detail. One of the issues we had with this is, because the files are provided to us in NWD format. That's not compatible with Model Coordination. So we had to come up with a way to convert these files from the NWD format into a format that was used or usable by Model Coordination.
As we worked through that, we realized that some of these files were authored in the United States, some were created outside of the United States, and some of these files were-- it was a container model that had hosted several different files from both inside the United States, and outside of the United States. So that caused a lot of issues with units in our conversion process.
We did figure out how to deal with that, but it was a challenge. And then that conversion from NWD, I'll get into that in a second, but that was a major step in our workflow. We automated as much of that as we could using a Navisworks plugin called iConstruct. So here is just a screenshot of some of those vendor models, very highly detailed, and really critical to our BIM coordination that we were working on.
So some of the things in Navisworks that we're using for this project that's been really powerful for us is the Clash Off and Clash On Workspace. So, essentially what we're doing is we're creating two different model coordination spaces that are identical. One has all the views in it that we use for clash detection. That has the clash detection turned on, obviously. And then we have a Clash Off Workspace, which is completely identical, all the same views, but that one does not run clash detection.
What that allows us to do is be able to-- as soon as somebody uploads a file, we can go to the Clash Off Workspace. As soon as that file is processed in Docs or in Build, we're able to view that in our online viewer. We also use that view to pull things into Navisworks Manage using the Issues plugin.
We also have a Viewing Workspace, which is what we reach into to export our NWDs out, and I'll get into that a little bit. We use a construct for that as well, publishing all of our NWDs. There is batch issue creation, which we've used a little bit just for kind of initial clash detection to identify where issues are-- kind of a heat map sort of situation.
And then the, I think, biggest improvement from the last project to this one is using Navisworks 2024. We have the collaborative NWF, which allows us to save viewpoints in our NWF, and push that out to the rest of our team. So our V2C coordinators really have control over all the files that our coordination teams are using, which is great.
I mentioned that Clash On, Clash Off View. So I have an example of that in the image on the right. So these are identical clash workspaces, like I had mentioned. Also, the clash processing time. So any project that was created after January 24, 2023, clash detection processing time should be improved. So it runs clash on just the changes that are uploaded in the models, and not the entire model. So that's been another improvement.
This project, when we went to get started on it, we had a few-- we had actually a few months between receiving files and actually having to start clash detection-- generally doesn't work out that way, but for this project, it did. So we did-- because there was a lot of different processes that had to happen here for the OEM models, things like that, we started to map out our process a little bit.
We called this kind of our hit by a bus theory. So if our BIM coordinator were to get hit by a bus, would we be able to not miss a beat for this project? When we started mapping this out, our answer to that was no, but putting together these workflows really helped. And I think if, god forbid, somebody were to get hit by a bus, we would be able to keep the project going.
Another thing we did was write-ups on all of our workflows. So really, this is kind of a Miron standard. Anytime we create a new process, or something that could be complicated, we've required all of our V2C team to document this as we're working through the process. I don't know how many times we've done this, where you figure something out, you work your way through it. You think you understand exactly how you did it, but then you don't have to do it again for a month or two.
And then when you come back to do it again, you don't really remember exactly how you did it, and you have to relearn-- reteach yourself. So we try to document these things as we're figuring it out, and then put it all in a reference material folder organized by which program is used.
So, BIM coordination. One of the things we try to do for this project is to help organize our clashes a little bit more, and add some kind of a bit more structure to how we're resolving clashes. So in this case, we used what we called BIM pyramid. So we created this with input from our trade partners. They actually helped us set up each of the levels on here and then we develop our models and resolve clashes in the order from top to bottom.
So each of those levels is kind of a check in point on our BIM coordination schedule, and we work from top to bottom as we go through the process. As you can see here, this is our BIM coordination schedule. Each of those levels on the BIM coordination pyramid are on the schedule.
So rather than having a two-month or three-month BIM coordination time that doesn't have any check-in points, we have each one of our BIM coordination levels on there. And that just allows us to make sure that we're still on track, and everything's going the way we need it to.
Here, we're just zoomed in a little bit more, showing you what-- that overall coordination schedule, July to the beginning of November. We have all those check-ins on there.
So, clash resolution. How are we handling that for this project? So these-- everything starts in Model Coordination. All the files are compiled in Model Coordination. We're using the issues-- using Issues on this to assign those to our team members. But rather than going through, and having our V2C coordinator create issues for everything that is found, we're empowering our subcontractors to do that. So we're training them on how to identify the issues.
We have issue templates set up for each of our subcontractors, and we kind of have a write-up that describes when things need to get an issue, and when things just aren't going to get fixed-- identifying fixed by our design-- our trade partners. We have our gap model that we're adding new information to, and then all the clashes are identified and resolved in Navisworks.
So the files are compiled in Model Coordination, or we're using Navisworks Manage to identify and resolve them. We'll say that clash reporting, we're still using the clash matrix for that, but we've kind of taken it a step further. So the clash matrix is great because it shows current state of where models are, but what we like to have is also some historical data. So we want to see trends.
So we want to see where clashes were when we started. We're setting up a goal of how many clashes need to be resolved per week to get us to our goal, and then we're actually graphing that, and making sure that we're hitting our goals. So you can see here what that looks like.
And then clashes needed to-- the amount of clashes we need to resolve. You can see the percent decreases of total clashes. It's all things that we check and report on every week. You can see here that graphs as well.
Appearance profilers. So we use simple appearance profilers on these projects to identify-- quickly identify what it is we're looking at. So anybody that's very new to these files, they can pretty quickly look at it, and understand what it is they're looking at. And then we have some other complicated appearance profilers that we've used, but we found that, really, simple is better in this case.
These appearance profilers, along with the search sets that are required to make them work, we save that out on ACC and make that available to anybody on the project. So teams can access this, and color their models up the same way.
There are a lot of things that we tried to automate on this project as much as possible. One of those was pushing out NWC files. So, if at all possible, we tried to use exporting of-- or we tried to pull our files out of the Revit models. In some cases, we weren't able to do that.
So we've used Dynamo to automatically export NWC files using a string variable. In some cases, we had to export out maybe 50 to 100 NWC files. This allows us to automate that, rather than having to push out each one one-by-one.
We've also used Dynamo to create the 3D room tags you're looking at here. We put those in our gap model. So what that does is it looks at the architectural file, and then it creates 3D room text that's associated with that, and places it in the model. It's been really powerful, as you're working through BIM coordination, to be able to see what room you're looking in right in the [INAUDIBLE] Model Coordination or ACC.
So, iConstruct. We did a lot of automations, like I mentioned, for this project. One of the things we used iConstruct for was really a new and improved way of publishing NWD files. So this will reach into each of our-- we create NWF files that are saved locally, and it'll go in, and it'll append search sets. It'll append all the viewpoints that were loaded. It'll hide things that are-- based on our appearance profiler, and applies the appearance profiler.
For each of our NWF files-- so in this case, 14 of them-- it'll open each one, apply all those steps, and then push out an NWD to ACC automatically. This probably saves us four hours per week, if we're updating once a week. And pushing those NWDs out to ACC allows our field teams to sync models right to their device. I also mentioned, with all the OEM models that we received in NWD format, we needed a way to get those into DWG or NWC.
We also created an automation using iConstruct to take that NWD, break it up into smaller sections, and publish out DWGs, which are ultimately turned into NWCs for use in Model Coordination. That is quite an intensive process. It takes roughly 36 hours to run, but automating that in iConstruct allowed our team members to really hit go, and let the computer do the work rather than having to babysit it, which was a huge improvement.
All right, so what went well on this project? Process mapping has been really important. It's not fun to do, but putting that all together really has helped us have other team members step in and help when needed. And if anybody were to get hit by a bus, we kind of know what the process is.
The No Clash Workspace has been really, really helpful, just being able to view models as soon as they're uploaded to Docs, and powerful-- and automations. I'm by no means a computer programmer, but being able to implement some simple automations has been a really big time saver for us, and it's allowed some of our team members to be able to relax and unplug a little bit on the weekends, rather than babysitting, updating files.
Some lessons learned on this project. So the project is in progress. You can see in the back, we have some of the [? dryer ?] tower going up. We have a lot of equipment out on site. Training, that we mentioned that was kind of an issue on the last project.
For this project, we use Navisworks to help resolve the clashes. So far, that's working out really well. Most of our team members are very familiar with Navisworks Manage, so we're kind of leaning on that as our tool to resolve clashes.
The model units on the OEM models. Model units can be an issue, but when you have files that are a mix of several units, it becomes a little bit more of an issue. So just working through that process, and then, again, documenting that as we identified issues and resolution to it has been really powerful.
Also being able to get NWDs into Model Coordination. I think eventually the day will come where we can use NWDs in Model Coordination. Right now, we can't. So being able to take that NWD, and convert it, even though it is a pretty time-consuming process. It's been really powerful, and we'll get those files into Model Coordination.
So just want to put out a special Thank you to the Miron VC team. This is the team out there. And in particular, in the bottom right-hand corner, Sam [? Tehan. ?] He's doing the BIM coordination on this project. Him and I have a lot of hours spent together-- putting all this together. So, I really want to thank him. And that is the end of my project, or my presentation.