A Consultant Guide to Creating Revit MEP Fabrication-Ready Models.

All right, I think let's crack in. It's only one minute-- one minute to eight. First of all, just thank you all so much for being here at 8:00 in the morning. You're all far better people than me that's for sure. If I wasn't speaking, I'd still be in bed. Congratulations for being here. I think you've achieved something today. That's for sure. This is a repeat session, so a bit of a different slide to some of the ones that you'll be seeing today. I was speaking this presentation on Monday at the fabricators forum. But let's crack in. Let's discuss the subject here.

So we're going to be talking today about Burohappold's journey to detail things better in the MEP world. It's also going to have a lot of my own personal opinions. I've only been in the company 10 months, so I'll be saying-- I'll be saying various things that may or may not get me fired. But we're just going to go with it anyway. I've always spoken my opinion. I'm not a sales person. I'm a-- I'm a 3D modeler, so I use the tools every day.

A bit of a key word as well to hit you with, simplicity, because we're not talking about scripts and the API developments, we're just talking about doing things better. And it's not rocket science. It is simple stuff. So an agenda today, we're not going to through many, many, many things. We're just going to have a look at a few couple of things here.

So a bit of introductions. Where I came from previously and why at Burohappold, we're tackling a different approach to change to change what we're doing now to make things better. We'll look at fabrication and how we're tackling that, because fabrication exists in Revit now. Obviously, that's our platform of choice. So we have to look at that. We can't ignore it. Modular framing, which is a bit of a passionate subject of mine control, which I was quite heavily involved with previously and what we're doing in that space. And then of course just a bit of collaborative Cloud based sharing.

We're going to look-- we'll use many solutions at Burohappold. We're going to look at kinship just very briefly, quite simply because they're here today. You can go check them out in the whole. You get-- if you say you saw this presentation, you get a free beer. Last night between six and 9 o'clock there's many free bears just because people said they saw my presentation on Monday.

So who am I? Name is Ben West. I didn't want to put an awful mug shot up there of my face. So I came up 15 years in the industry. I'm a sheet metal worker by trade. I'm 30 years old this year, so you don't have to do the math. It's not-- it's not too complicated. I started when I was 15 years old, so I don't have any fancy degrees. I've just spent my time in the industry basically. And, yeah, selected [INAUDIBLE] in Scotland. I picked Scotland, because I like a balanced lifestyle. We all work so many hours in the construction industry. It's a stressful place, so I love to get out on the weekend, climb a mountain, and have that balanced lifestyle where I can get down to the bottom and have a beautiful bottle of Scottish whiskey. So it's all about balance and lifestyle.

I came from Adelaide, South Australia. I thought I'd put a little map here just to begin with. You grow up in your home cities and you think that everybody knows where you are, where that is, and certainly, that's what I thought. I moved over, and everyone said, Adelaide, where is that? Is it next to Sydney? Well, no, there's Adelaide for you. But it's no surprise. Adelaide's quite a small place. Sort of, only 1.3 million people sitting in the city compared to-- look at London creeping into that 8.8 million zone now. So it's a small city. And if you're looking for a holiday destination, we are doing pretty good. So if you got some annual leave, check it out. Not that I'm here to plant the seed.

But Adelaide's a small place. I grew up thinking anything over five, 10 stories were skyscrapers. As a drafter, I mean, if we got a project and it was anything like these buildings here, my heart was pumping with excitement. I'm just thinking I'm doing the best big building going around. Obviously, not the case. I only started to travel a bit later on in my life, and I, sort of, realized that, oh, OK, buildings do get a big bigger than five, 10 stories, but yeh. So but don't be fooled. You don't need to do massive mega skyscrapers to do quality buildings. Quality still exists in any size building now.

So my previous company, AG O'Connors, we're a local company based in Adelaide, that 1.3 million, and we were doing good stuff with them. We invested heavily in Revit, and then using it to it's full benefits. So we're doing thermal plant rooms, fully coordinated, all the spring hangers, modular framing, using assemblies in Revit to break it up and spool everything. Prefabricate plot rooms, once again all done in Revit. Everything down to the nuts and bolts to fully quantify it and spool it all out, break it up, manufacture it.

2017 came out, and we jumped on board with fabrication and were testing it out. It didn't work quite well. But 2017.1, .2 came out, and before we knew it we were doing fabrication models straight to our supply chains. And of course, also modular rise of constructions, the one on the-- one on the end there, even the building changed shape, change size, integrated roof structures on the top, we could still do that. And like I said, so you don't need to come from megacities, mega-sized companies to do quality work.

But Burohappold where I work right now, if you're not familiar with Burohappold, I can't give you the best sales pitch about the company, because I haven't been there that long. But it's an interesting company, and I was drawn into it because it's-- we do interesting projects. Unique projects that perhaps other people get scared and run away from, we tackle them.

And so you can see some interesting projects here. We've got Museum of the Future that's been quite heavily talked about at the AU this year. You can see some stuff in the hall about that. We just won some awards yesterday as well, so some great projects. But like I said, that's what drew me into the company. That's what draws other people into the company.

And we're scattered around the globe. Nothing back home in Australia, but we've got plenty of Aussies representing. But the cool thing about Burohappold is we're starting to really share the work now. Based in Scotland, I can tell you that a good 80% of my work is spread around Middle East, Hong Kong helping our London office and our head office in Bathe. We're all sharing the work, and that's the way that we're starting to work. And it's great, because the tools that have progressed and allowed us to do, things like Revit servers. We can just share models quite collaboratively now.

And we're pushing BIM, because there's simply no alternative really. Our clients are expecting more of us. Just like contractors, we're on a-- we're on a budget. We're on a program. We have to do it, and, of course, at Burohappold, these unique buildings that we're doing, we have to innovate. We have to write our own codes and scripts and then push a more detailed approach, because we can't deliver these otherwise anymore.

When we talk about BIM, a lot of us would appreciate, sort of, back in 2008 if you've been modeling for quite a while in the BIM space, you'd understand that was the point where we all researched BIM. And we hadn't bought the software yet. We were just hearing a lot of sales pitches and people going around, and yeah, we though we were going to solve world peace with digital engineering.

And then we bought the software and we went, right, we can't do that, but we can do some-- we can do some drawings. And that's where-- and that's where we ended up. So we, sort of, had all these expectations crashed, and now we're, sort of, realizing the expectations. And we will get up to that top level again, but it's going to take a while to solve world peace with digital engineering.

So Burohappold, we always like to rethink, innovate, and to give you a bit of Perspective. I'm here today to talk about a more detailed approach about how we're doing modeling and actually doing it properly, coordinating it, looking at fabrication conversions. It's not rocket science, but it is innovative because it's going to push the industry into a better place in the long term.

And if you've seen a Burohappold presentation, you might have come across this slide before. Basically, it's business as usual. We don't like to use the word BIM, because we've got our own internal mandates. It doesn't matter what part of-- what part of the globe we're working in. We're going to do BIM regardless. If a project hits over 40,000 pounds, which is hardly anything considering, we have to do it.

So it's business as usual. That's the mentality. Whether we have to build our own models up from scratch, we'll do it because that's the direction from the top of the company. And that's the bit about Burohappold. We're not the biggest company in the world, but we do think about things differently. We have invested in BIM, and we always like to take on those unique projects that push us. But the subject at hand, we're here today to talk about what we're doing and why we're going down a more detailed path.

So once again, this is going to be a lot of my own personal opinions mixed with the company direction in there. So I came to the UK, like I said, 10 months ago. We've got BIM level 2 mandates that we have to do it, basically. We have to model. We have to be collaborative. And there's no joke. We're doing a sloppy job. We're achieving it sure. Everyone's achieving it. But everyone's doing a sloppy job. And if you hear another presentation that says that people are doing it all perfectly, they're absolutely lying. Everybody's struggling for various reasons.

But basically we're going to be hit with BIM level three in the UK in supposedly seven years time, and we don't know what that's going to be. But we can understand that it's going to be more detailed than what we're doing now. And so let's look at it, because we've got-- it's taken us seven years to get where we are now, and we're not doing a great job. We know that BIM level three's going to come. So let's prepare now for that next seven years instead of getting there and struggling again. It's no different to when we all started. If you got on board with Revit late, you go, oh, I wish I started early. We now can see that we can start a bit earlier.

And the software's progressing. It's allowing us to actually take these steps more than anything. So, sort of, back in that 2010 when a lot of us began that journey, it was a very-- very much an engineering tool more than anything. You could do shop drawings in it. I was using Revit for shop drawings back in 2009, but it was a far greater struggle than what we have now.

Over the years, we've seen a lot of construction style elements being brought into Revit, and, of course, now we're hit with the fabrication wave. And that's why we're looking at it now, because it's that first wave. It's not perfect. And we don't want that circle to go around and get to fabrication again and go, damn, I wish I started earlier. We know it's here. We know it's not perfect. It's the perfect time for a consultant to start looking at workflows in that space.

But a bit about our journey with Burohappold and what we're actually doing in this space and getting there. So three months in we've started all these focus groups in the company. We've got several focus groups going around. One of them's designed for prefabrication, modular construction where we're looking at fabrication conversions and we're looking at modular style construction and workflows. And three months in, it's purely basically just grabbing people, putting out the word. This isn't an overnight job. You can't do this overnight. We've got a three journey, which I'm going to show you in a minute.

So, sort of, moving on a little bit further after three months, we've now-- we're now doing site visits, because we're not going to tackle this journey alone. I saw a couple of our guys in our London office. They went out and they visited a number of our partners prefabrication facilities, and they understood. And it's important to realize that people are proud of what they do.

They will take you and show you what they are doing. They're not going to give you all of their content and all of their databases. We don't care about that, but we want to see what's actually happening with modern construction because it's evolving. It's changing rapidly. And everyone's doing a slightly different approach, but people are proud to show you what they're doing.

And that's really six months in we're just getting a better feel for things. We're testing out a few workflows. And nine months in, now we've got a great collection of examples. We've been around and visited many places. We've done a few pilot testings. We've got content. We realize that we need to create some documents going on, but like I said, to put this into perspective, this is nine months in and we haven't really done a lot of modeling, because there's no point jumping into this overnight.

A lot of us sort of went, oh, Revit, yes, we're going to pick this up, and we're going to be-- we're going to be the bees knees overnight and it never happened. We're taking this approach properly to thoroughly implement it across the globe. So next, says are you serious.

So this is a project here that we're working on right now. It's a small project in that we're trying out these workflows. So we're using a modular style construction where we're designing catwalk systems. And everything's laid out nice and clean. It's basically a well laid out building. And it didn't take us any extra time. I'm going to show you a bit later some of the modular style templates that we're using. If anything, it was quicker to do.

And what happened is we sent that to our client and they turned around and said, we're not interested in modular construction. The market isn't there for us. There's no worries. We just turned it off in our model, and what we're left with is a well laid out building. And that's what it's all about, the workflow to get a better laid out building more than anything.

It's not a new journey for us either. We're reengaging and re-initiating a lot of things right now. But back in 2009 there was a project that we had in Manchester that we partnered with the contractor and we use CAD-Duct as a designer. And we designed with their database, we got their standards, we toured their factories, and we didn't have to throw anything away. We didn't have to redo any models. We designed it, as per their specifications, to our company standards with Burohappold. And the contractor took that model. They didn't have to swap anything over. They just started to segment everything in the model.

So it's not a new journey for us. We're just looking at better ways now to move on into the next era. Of course a lot of MEP it's always been an argument who's winning, who's not winning. Structures have been leading the game for a while-- that's my opinion. In our company we do a lot of projects where we'll model in Telka. We'll grab the contractors Revit database because, ultimately, it's just as quick for us to still model. But the benefit is, later on, the contractor can actually use that information. And that's what we always do now. We engage early on as best we can to make sure that our models are going to be used, not thrown in the bin.

Next is about training, education, teaching people. We've got hundreds of Revit modellers in the company. Once again, this isn't an overnight job. This first year is really just about educating, trying out things, getting the workflows, getting the standards in place. And next year is all about teaching that. Once again, I've got hundreds of people scattered around the globe. So that's going to take a whole year to do. And that's something that we've accepted in the company. So this is that three year plan.

And of course we have frustrations. Everything has got issues. Software sucks, the hardware is not working. That's all common knowledge but really, it's that realistic roll out. If you are going to begin that journey, don't try to tackle it with a six month goal. Tackle it with a realistic goal. It's that revisiting the beginnings. Like I said, we do BIM level 2 in the UK. So we've got Cobie data that we've got to do, which is basically a lot of information that we've got to extract from the model and put onto a spreadsheet, and that wasn't around when we built our content.

So now, instead of just keep slapping on a slide and bolting this on here and there, we're actually going back and overhauling it from scratch because we've made that investment already. So now it's time to make the new investment.

And if you're not familiar with the UK and BIM level 2, it's basically collaborative modeling. We have to have a common data exchange. But really all of this is just a lot of acronyms. We abbreviate everything. Hundreds and hundreds of things and nobody knows what anything means basically anymore, but we're all working collaboratively in a model environment.

But where are we going with all this? So really, the workflows that we're looking at, the conversions that we want to do, we want to help the next phase in the process. Contractors are looking a lot more at FM now than ever before. And so it's no different to consultancies. We need to start looking at, what's our next phase? And it's quite easy for us because it's-- you know, the contract is always a ways down the line. So we want to help the tender process.

When I was contracting, buildings would come across 10, 20, 30 stories high. And you'd be asked to price that in two days time and it's next to impossible. You're just throwing random figures at it. But with where the tools are progressing, if we could give you an MAJ conversion from our model, well then you can plug that into your fabrication database and start to get prices very quick and very reliable. And that's where we want to go in the next phase. So let's have a look at fabrication.

I'm going to begin the journey here with Rivet because we're not going to model in fabrication. When I was contracting I always sort of said that consultants have to get up to speed and start using fabrication. Of course, I went to the other side and went, that's impossible. Half of our modellers suck. And then I've got to out-skill them with new tools? Not on the cards. But why bother? The conversion process is getting so much better now. We've got things like Dynamo coming in and the API developments going on. In the next couple of years we're going to see very clean conversions happening.

And so to get that you need one to one matching content. So it's about Burohappold, where we're going and revising our content, and building and matching database on the side, so that we get that one to one conversion happening on later on. And of course when you tackle this stuff-- I thought this was a great slide. I didn't do this. I just found this on our company's little social media page and I just went with that. That will work quite well. Don't fly out of control.

When you look at fabrication, there's software that's been around for so many years. You know, Autodesk bought it from Map Software back in the day. So it's heavily progressed. And as a designer, we don't need half of that information. We want to help the tender phase, so we're not going to fabricate. We just want to make a clean conversion that you can take and progress more than anything. And so it's all about sitting down and looking at your goals before you actually jump into the software.

Back in Australia I was involved in the BIM-MEP AUS initiative, which is basically a collaborative initiative where competitive companies got together and we started to actually share our secrets and work together. Because we realized, at the end of day, you're going to get everything one way or another. But this is just an example of naming conventions that we started to come up with. And the BIM-MEP AUS initiative-- this here took a year to develop because it had so many competitors coming together in their own time. If you're just working at a company yourself, this should take a week tops.

But it's so important to have that information there and get your naming conventions in place. Because I am sure most of you guys have heard the same presentations. I've heard presentations from many big contractors that have half a million items in their database. And then they go whoops, the naming convention's wrong. And it's absolute chaos. You'll never fix it. You can pretend like you're going to fix it, but you're not. And so it's really important to sit down and understand your goals before you go into the software.

And where do you start? You've got all these options now. Once again, the software's been around for so long, that you're going to go out of the box. You're going to look to initiatives. You can go online. People like [INAUDIBLE] have free downloads. So where are you going to start? We started with the BIM-MEP AUS initiative because it's a cleaned up database. It's a foundation that you can grow on. And so you go in there-- and then we did go online and grab a few other pieces that we found here and there. But going back to that other slide, the key thing is we've gone in there and instantly we've changed the naming conventions before we start anything.

Because it's no different to Revit. If you get my model and you see content from here, there, and everywhere, you're going to lose faith in the model and you're going to frighten the BIM. Even if it's spot on the first thought is, that's a crap model, because you just see all this corrupt information. Well if I give you an MAJ file and I've got content from here, there, and everywhere, you're just going to look at that and go, no, I'm losing faith in it. It's too hard to make the conversions because I got to swap this and that and I don't know what that is. And all of a sudden you've lost faith. It's all about that consistency and the naming conventions more than anything.

So where do we start as a designer? Like I said, we don't need half of that information. We're going to use our Revit model and we're going to make a conversion. We're not going to add additional data. We look at what Revit does. Supply air, return air, exhaust air. Those sort of things is the foundation. The next thing that we look at in Burohappold is we modeled and we specify the material. We've been doing that in pipe work for quite a while, where we'll nominate if it's PVC or galvanized systems or something.

We've only just recently overhauled our ductwork content to do the same. So that's all about pipes and ducts of specified material, and that's what we want to provide you. The thing that we're not going to provide you if we're looking at ductwork there-- we're not going to provide you with the pressure class, because we never gave you that anyway. It's something that you would always have to go in and look at the specifications and understand the code requirements and do yourself. And so it's quite an easy step to add at your end. But it's a hard step for me to teach hundreds of Revit modellers. The first step is just to give you some basic exports, and then we can progress from there.

So just an example, once again, of BIM-MEP AUS back home. Getting together and actually collaborating before you go in to the database of the model and start building content, get together. Have meetings. Record that. Understand your goals. Look at the formulas and parameters that you want in there as a team. And then go do it. Otherwise, you go into the model and all of a sudden you spend six months and you don't know what you've done where you've got all this inconsistency. So that's a bit of an example of what we did with BIM-MEP AUS.

And then of course it's all about trial and error. When you built your first Revit content, you built it up and you thought, this is going to work great. And then he put it into a project and it didn't work. It's no different to fabrication. You're going to sit there and you're going to go off with this great database, yeehaw. And you're going to go in and it's not going to work. And you're going to want to edit that. Well, fabrication's got a lot more limits where you can't just edit it easily. Yes you can, but it's a lot more harder.

An example of what we did with our first project-- this was when I was a contractor. Splitting the model up floor by floor, purely for the reason that we can trial and error to the first floor, didn't work. No worries. We still finished the project. We manually had to detail it. Second floor, third floor, and by the seventh floor we're exporting straight to our supply chain. And that's how we achieved that with one project. So it's about thinking outside of the box and breaking it up to get it to work. Appreciate that you never got Revit to work on your first project, so appreciate that fabrication is not going to work in your first project.

And don't get overwhelmed. I sort of mentioned that, as a designer, look at our goals and what we want. So look at what's working right now. Ducts, pipes, and the associated accessories. We don't need to look at ducts and structural framing and equipment, air terminals. It has no interest to us, because it's not ready to work in Revit and that's our platform of choice. And that's why it's perfect to get on board now, because it's such an easy time to get in there. And then when all these other things start to unroll and become available, we're ready to go with it.

And of course, the software. You've got free choices. You do need one of the platforms. CAD-MEP. You've got EstMEP and CAMduct. Well, we don't want to get back to AutoCAD, so we're not interested in CAD-MEP. We're not manufacturing anything, so we don't care about CAMduct. So we're just going to go with EstMEP because we're looking at that next phase, we want to help the tender process, and it's cheap software. We only need a couple of licenses because we can boot up the database and put that into Revit and then anyone can use it. So a couple of licenses within the company and we're set.

But here's a bit of the workflow that we're looking at in Burohappold. Traditionally, this is a contractor style drawing. You know, you can see obviously your flanges and then little gaps for pipework there. As a designer, we don't need to do that, because we don't know what connections you're going to use. And then, of course, if we go to that length, we have to get it all right and that's moving on far, far more than what we would have to traditionally do. So this is what we're looking at, just putting the raw components there, because that's what you need to get your first price. You can then add an allowance to-- if you've got a strainer there or a butterfly valve, you can make the allowance and say, I'm going to use these connections quite easily.

And what you get is a far more consistent schedule more than anything. There's no point me giving a schedule of all these butwell gaps and flanges and connections here and there because I'm going to miss half of it. But this is reliable because you can get a far, clean, broken down schedule. But the great thing that the software is allowing us to do is you can take my simple MAJ export and you can bring that into your database and you can go into the biddings and say, oh, I want that strainer to have those flanges on there. And then you can bring that back into Rivet and they're there.

And then of course you can just click and drag and disconnect and the flange will appear again and fabrication's a lot more stable so it's not going to crash. So very quickly you can start to rebuild models. And what we're going to look at providing you is a MAJ export. We're not going to provide a fabrication model. We're just going to give you an export on the side so that you can bring it back into our model with your database.

And what we're lacking is closing this gap. I've thrown away hundreds of models when I was a contractor. And now we're moving into this place where we are getting better coordination and the models are becoming reliable. And so we're moving into this next phase we can also now really assist in that tender estimating phase. And we're closing that gap and moving forward to get better collaboration and better clarity more than anything.

The global rollout-- I've mentioned this before and I'm going to mention that again because it's such a critical part. It's not an overnight journey. This is a three year journey that we're on right now. We're coming to the end of year one. So next year, like I said, we're going to start rolling out and training people and educating people better. Then that last year is that trial and error year where we're going to actually be using it in projects and getting it wrong and fixing it. But it's going to take three years to get there.

Let's have look at modular framing as well, because this is such a important part of the industry. It's modern construction now. And it's about the workflow. Whether or not it gets built, we really have to appreciate that designing of a modular construction workflow is simply about optimized design.

I wanted to start here. We had these focus groups in the company. The guy up there, Andy Keelan-- I've never met the guy and I'm sure I never will. It doesn't really bother me. He's a top dog. He's a partner in the company. And we get so many things wrong. But one thing that we got right is this: we actually had high level support to do this. So many times we hear about people failing, and why did they fail? Because they never had that support. So he's giving us support. He's given us money, resource, but I don't know the guy. And I'm sure he's not that technically capable to run a project like this.

So he's assigned this man over here, John. John worked in our London office. He's high level. He's a director. We've got good support and John works in the residential department. He's working on prefabrication projects now. He's done them in the past. He's quite passionate about the subject. And then of course he's assembled a team down here on the side. And where the people like myself are coming in and giving our experiences building the content, teaching people. So it's not it's not something that's happening in isolation. It's something that's happening as a global initiative.

And a bit of a statement from the man himself. He's got the dream. He said, I want you to do this. I want you to get proper integrated designs with our clients and contractors. And so we know what we're doing. We're not just running around in circles. But where do we begin with modular construction? Well the tools have progressed, the knowledge has progressed. We don't need to just put a dumb gray box on the drawing. You can't sell that. People don't care about that. They will ignore that.

We're at a stage now where we can provide basic modules like this and actually parametrically constrain them. And they'll work just as quick as a generic box in a model. And we build these up as the components that they are. Because you don't want to build a super duper family that you can't quantify, you can't change. At the end of the day, that's how prefabrication modeling is. You build it up with the components so that it can progress and you can swap out a piece of steel and that everybody can use it. Because otherwise you've got a superfamily. Nobody can use it. But breaking it down into simple families, people can start to use it. And we've got hundreds of Revit models around the globe. Well that's the approach that we need to take.

So how do we do build these up, parametrically constraining things? Multiple different ways. I'm going to do an example in a minute. We constrained everything and we lock it. And you can start to see here, everything's locked. And it's locked, in this example here, basically like a catwalk system that we're seeing here. And so we've locked everything to the floor up here. So all we've got to do is just double click on that floor, change the size, and then all of a sudden everything's parametrically constrained and it will change instantly. So it's just as quick as putting a box in a drawing except it's far more detailed and you get a far better picture of it.

But let's have a look at a real example, some riser constructions. Because when we talk about modular construction that's probably one of the biggest things that we do is risers. So where do we begin? I guess-- beginning over here is our riser template. Everything's hosted to the floor. So if I move the floor up and down the riser's going to move up and down. All the components are hosted so everything's going to move together. That's important in the design world because every week we're getting new architecturals and new structurals and the floor's changing. I didn't think that would actually happen when I was contracting, but every week we're getting different levels. And so that's such an important part of moving forward.

Of course, everything is constrained to each other, which you can see here. And that's the sort of quantity of locks that you need to achieve parametric constraining for a basic element. And you can keep going. You can add brackets into there if you are contracting and you could lock them all together. It just means more locks. It doesn't take weeks to build. This particular example here took about 20 minutes to build. The one thing you do need to do is you need to have a bit of trial and error. You need to move every piece together and actually make sure it's working, because when you have this level of constraints you don't know the first thing that you're going to move. Is it going to be a horizontal member here, there, is it going to be a column?

If you haven't constrained everything to everything it's going to crash and it's not going to work. It's a bit of trial and error. And of course, once you got it all working you can very simply start to change things, change members and sizes, and they're all going to stay together. They're all going to stay hosted. They're all going to work. And so you can start to swap things out. You can start to change your design because prefabrication and modular construction is unique in the building services industry. We can standardize on our joining methods and things like that but it's never going to be the same thing on the next project.

And so like I said, the end result is simply click and drag. And we can change the size and it all stays there. And what we see here is that we can start to sell this. If I go to my client with a gray box on the drawing, they're just going to go, that's useless, I don't understand. But if I can give them an image here they can start to have a bit more and say, yes, I like that. Let's progress with that. Perhaps the contractor has not appointed the subcontractors yet. And it's quite a common issue.

And so we need to start to progress the design as the designer now. Going back on that previous slide, I can sell that a lot better. And the client says, yes, I like that. We want modular construction. We haven't appointed the subcontractor. Can you continue your design? And we can start to add that next phase in there and move into that more LoD 300 final construction style documentation.

Once again, we can get to a phase where the subcontractor's still not appointed, not being in this scenario. And so you can start to sell that image again. The contractor is looking at it. They do like the design. They are going to go with that. They're talking to subcontractors and while they're not appointed they're going, yes, I like that, get me a designer to continue on. And so we can start to add all the bracing in there quite easily. And we can add primary connections to make sure that you have those allowances in there. And it's all very quick and easy because it's all about putting the right categories to make it very quick and easy to work with, which I'll show you in a second.

And of course once the subcontractor is appointed you can hand over that design, and you don't have some ridiculous super duper family once again that nobody can use. You've got individual components built up and the subcontractor can change a few things here and there if they like. But really all they're going to do is add connections in there. This is a real example that we've worked through that workflow. And we began with that parametrically constrained first image and then we kept progressing it. And then we got to this 400 final fabrication drawing stage, and it only took a day and a half to do because we went through the process properly.

So what do we do with the components? I think in MEP, particularly, there's always an argument to use a generic model, to use structural framing, to use mechanical equipment, is there something else? Well, generic models, you need to add more parameters in there because they don't like to flip and turn, just like structural framing likes to have a host. So we use mechanical equipment to be able to do it quite easily. But mechanical equipment is not the right category.

So we quite simply embed structural framing as a shared component into the mechanical equipment. So now we can flip, turn, twist, mirror, do whatever we want with freedom. But we can also use still schedule that item as structural framing. So I'm meeting my BIM level 2 requirements. I've got the right category. Also if I export to IFC the mechanical equipment will translate and go straight into structural framing because that's the category it is. So that's what we used to be able to butcher shop and make it very quick and easy.

And this isn't official figures. This is just 15 years doing this stuff, speaking to the competition. Like I said, back home in Australia we had a very collaborative industry where we all got together and we all shared our thoughts. So this is a bit of an opinion that, if you start doing it as a designer, you can get the benefits. If you don't go through this process as a designer, and the contractor wants modular construction, they start later and later and later, all of a sudden if they're doing straight into 400 fabrication drawings, they're going to add 30% of the time at a minimum. And that's if you have a good project. And let's be honest, good projects rarely exist now.

So as a designer, it's money in the bank. I want to make money with Burohappold, so it makes sense for me to endorse this, basically, and keep moving it forwards. It's a win-win situation because, ultimately, I don't want the subcontractor to have to spend 30% extra, having to raise RFIs and say, the slab penetration is not big enough. And now the structural engineer needs to go and re-engineer something. Or I need to move this whole here. Doing it as a designer, or making those allowances early on, is absolutely key.

And the other thing is all about sharing that information more than anything. There's no point doing all of this and leaving it in a project and it gets nowhere. You have an amazing project and the next time you reinvent the wheel. We filed like that many, many, many times. But now we're starting to really share what we're doing. The great thing of all that modular construction and the parametrically constrained components is that we can copy and paste them into projects and all of these constraints remain. So we don't have to re-constrain everything together. But let's have a look at some BIM data sharing, one of our many solutions that we use in Burohappold.

We do a lot of our own internal developments, we've got our own system called Android, we've got our own software developers, and we also use other products out of the box. But one of the other products that we are using is Kinship. Like I said, they're here today. Certainly go check them out. They're a great team, a small team. I think it's only sort of three or four people. So you're not dealing with a mega company, you're dealing with the people that are going to build the software for you.

So Kinship started off as a software development company, and I guess they built this platform here that they can share content. More than anything, that was always the first foundation of what they want to do. They want to share content in the cloud, basically. When it comes to content sharing, they make it quite easily in Revit. So what we do with Kinship is we can get Revit projects and we synchronize that with Kinship. And all of the data, all of the families, are instantly taken to the cloud. And so very quickly we can start to boot up an internal database of information. I checked it a couple of months ago and I think we had nine and a half thousand families sitting in the cloud that we can use.

But ultimately, some projects are sensitive. Some projects, we might be partnering with the subcontractors and using their database. They say, look, we want to use that on this project and you can't share any information. So Kinship, we have an option there not to add that to the cloud and share that outside of that particular project. But its is quite nice, as well, with Kinship. You've got nice pictures there because we're all visual people. I'm dumb as hell and I need to see a picture.