Enhancing AutoCAD Plant 3D: How Autodesk's Custom Plug-in Transformed Artelia's Design Process

STEPHANE BOUN: Everyone, thank you all for attending this class. I'm very happy to be presenting a custom plugin that we developed for AutoCAD Plant3D here at Artelia and with the help of Autodesk consultants. The idea of this presentation is to show you the specifics of this custom plugin and how it fits in the general strategy of Artelia regarding digital transformation and the deployment of BIM processes.

So we're going to go through our need, the plugin itself, its benefits, and then open with some next step ideas. So I'm Stephane Boun, head of the BIM Department at Artelia Building, France. I joined the company in 2012 after various experiences in the construction industry as a project planning-- project planner, sorry-- study coordinator, project manager, and many other tasks.

And I am now a member of the Artelia Digital Twin and BIM team, which contributes to defining the strategy regarding BIM and digital transformation, And I will let Ludovic, which will go present this class with me, introduce himself.

LUDOVIC FOURNIER: Thanks, Stephane. So my name is Ludovic Fournier. I'm an Implementation Consultant at Autodesk since more than 16 years now. And during my 16 years in Autodesk, I work with many different customers, meet lots of challenges. And my role in Autodesk is really to help customers to optimize the use of our tools and meet the different outcomes. Back to you, Stephane.

STEPHANE BOUN: So I want to give credit to the team that worked on this development. Both at Autodesk and from the Artelia side, the project was done with the participation of the industry and business unit of Artelia, and more specifically with the help of Serge Morel, Fabien Bessieres, and Matthieu Lorman.

LUDOVIC FOURNIER: And on the Autodesk side, let me introduce our international team for this project. So we have Areti, the Customer Success Manager, based in Switzerland, Roberta Chianese as Project Manager. She is based in a Barcelona office in Spain. And Gungadhar Gupta and Rahul Muralidharan for the Plant 3D and AutoCAD API part. And they come-- both from India.

STEPHANE BOUN: OK, so just a few words about Artelia as a company. Artelia is an independent, multidisciplinary engineering and project management company. And those words are very important to us. Independent first, as the entirety of the capital of the company is held by its managers and employees. Multidisciplinary then, because we work on five main markets, which are mobility, water, energy, buildings, and, obviously, as we will discuss, through the plugin industry.

We are currently approaching 9,000 employees and are proud to consider ourselves an international company operating in over 40 countries. The company was founded in France, and is in our home country, still a major part of our activity. But in 2023, we reached a turning point for the company where we have now more staff outside of France than in our own country.

The Artelia group is organized in 10 business units, being a mix of the markets we address and their geographical location. So our mission is to contribute to projects through their entire life cycle from consultancy in the early stages of feasibility to design and engineering, to project management of construction, and asset and facility management. We can also provide turnkey solutions.

So let's talk a bit more about our journey in BIM. Well, this journey for us started in 2009 with our first project modeled in BIM. And then in 2013, we created our first working group about BIM, aiming at the time to share methods and more specifically, to organize training for staff. It's been a strong belief since those days that the deployment of those new tools and those new software and methods should be very inclusive, accepted, and adopted by everyone.

In 2014, as we felt that we reached a fair level of maturity, we had our first project as being managers. And in late 2015, we signed our first Autodesk EPA and soon after deployed the Artelia BIM toolbox, which is a platform to share tools and methods. And we developed our first Revit plugins.

In 2022, we created the digital twin and BIM team, which is a group-level working group where we discuss our strategy, share modeling standards, methods, and automation, and data management tools.

So as you heard, I mentioned the word sharing a lot in this slide. And it is a strong belief that the digital transformation should not only be about a few experts within the company, but adopted by everyone. So in that journey, we're not alone. And Autodesk has been a partner for a long time. And Ludovic will tell you more about this partnership.

LUDOVIC FOURNIER: Thanks, Stephane. So this timeline represents the strategic partnership between Artelia and Autodesk, focusing on operational efficiency and innovation. So the collaboration journey began in 2015 and extends to 2024. And I hope, last time. It was marked by key milestone known as a enterprise business agreement. It's a specific contract we have with Artelia.

And during this, the first EBA, we talk about the design, standardization, and BIM implementation, laying the groundwork for Artelia's digital transformation and design management. In the second EBA, it is where design optimization and quality take center stage, signifying the maturation of process and the pursuit of excellence in project outcome.

The first phase of the [INAUDIBLE] office's design automation and improve collaboration, showcasing advanced integration of Autodesk's tools to streamline workflow and enhance team synergy. So as you can see in this timeline, the traditional EBA at each phase,

Artelia was able to present something to Autodesk University, like a topic around BIM operation and maintenance, the use of-- for me, Dynamo, also the design and optimization and quality.

And last year, [INAUDIBLE] run the design process and the CO2 footprint. And today we are here to present this custom tools we made with Artelia on Plant3D.

STEPHANE BOUN: That's good. Like we just told, Artelia is now thinking and working on the benefits of this digital transformation. And one of our main subjects is automation in our workflows.

For the past couple of years, the community is talking about digital twin and generative design. And, obviously, for this last year, many of us are discussing AI. And all those buzzwords for us are real subjects that need to be considered. But I think that compared to other industries, the AEC industry has a lot to do to transition to a digital era. And in order to be inclusive, we have to demonstrate the benefits of those new tools.

So we need to work on efficient tools that address specific issues. That is why we don't want to think about it in terms of, how can I bring AI in my workflow? But instead, we work on analyzing our workflows and try to identify tasks that can be automatized following simple criteria. We are looking for tasks that are repetitive and time consuming.

And I think everyone can relate if I tell you that more often than I would like, the deliverables numbering of a file has to be modified. And we struggle having to open numerous documents and typing new numbers, so those kind of tasks, the tasks that follows simple rules, whether they are regulation or simple physics. And those can easily be explained by our engineers.

We have experienced a few failures trying to develop custom tools in the past with software developers, just because we were unable to precisely define the need. So look for tasks with low added value. And I mean by that, too often, we have to mobilize staff for tasks that doesn't require their specific skills. So it feels that we do not benefit from the full potential of our staff. And, obviously, we aim for tasks that lacks tools.

Well, the AutoCAD Plant 3D plugin that we want to show you is a good illustration of those kinds of tasks. So this tool is a requirement that was expressed by Artelia Industry Business unit. And Artelia Industry contributes to a wide range of industrial facility projects, goes from petrochemicals to pharmaceutical and nuclear plants, for example.

And all those different kinds of facilities have something in common. It's pipes. There's lots and a lot of pipes. And those pipes need supporting. And actually we need to design those supports. So the purpose of the plugin was to help us design a more efficient way those supports-- and this is what Ludovic is going to explain to you in more details.

LUDOVIC FOURNIER: Thanks, Stephane. So the topic of the plugin is to be able to create 2D drawings for auxiliary support. An auxiliary support, this is what will support one or more pipe brackets to the steel frame, the flow on the other walls.

And why to automatize this kind of drawings? During the life of a project, the supports evolve a lot, requiring time to update the plans and to keep different stakeholders for the project up to date, according to this drawing.

And as you can see here, Artelia gives us some figures regarding number of project periods, the number of support by project, the time to create one support for the project and at the end, the total time for one project. So, according to this, Artelia contacted Autodesk Consulting to check what could be done and how to improve these figures.

So if you are familiar with Plant 3D, you know that there are no tools in Plant 3D to automatically produce this kind of drawings. And today, even if for some project, Artelia can choose the product to use, if the number of supports is to high, the project will not be managed in Plant 3D.

Artelia's the tool to produce this kind of drawing on another software. But it brings some additional constraints. Therefore, the request was to explore how and if it could be done in AutoCAD Plant 3D. And we will see that it will be a plugin.

So to begin, we divide the process in four main phases. So the specification, maybe-- or not maybe-- this is the most important one to clarify the needs.

This is really the key phase where Artelia designer and Autodesk developer must be aligned on all capacities of the tool, and clearly identify or define a MVP, Minimum Viable Product, because if we failed here, the plugin will not fit to end user and can be never used.

Once done, then, we explore different solution, workflows with out-of-box capabilities first. If we can involve advanced [INAUDIBLE], if we can use Python script to create these kind of secondary support. And the conclusion was to create custom tools to use only Plant 3D.

After this, we go to the second phase of the project. It was the most challenging one, first, technically, as it never been done before. And, secondly, due to unpredictable events, or was ready to start. And the people in consulting in charge of the development, left.

And finding someone with expertise in mastering Autodesk Plant 3D APIs inside Autodesk is possible, but manager availability on a short notice is more challenging.

So we checked across Autodesk community. We can help and critique with a [INAUDIBLE] software, raise the end. And we bring them into the boat for this second step, and many thanks to them. Once we checked, it's technically feasible.

We switch to the third phase to create the plugin. And during this question of plugin, of course, there is always some iteration between testing and update. And at the end of this phase of plugin creation, Artelia testing the plugin on the real project. And in a second phase, the request of some additional days to make some announcement to this plugin.

That was 3D blocks. So the user can create 3D blocks of the secondary support. So it could be managed with Plant3D structural component, 3D solids. And all these blocks of support could be shared on a library. So many users can use the same library.

In parallel of the 3D blocks, you have an XML file that contains information regarding the supports. It will allow to create the bill of material in your drawings. And also you can manage which dimension the tools need to calculate. We will see this dimension question in the next slide.

So, of course, to produce a drawing, you need a template with the view needed, as some support may be a request for view, reviews, just to view. And it will really depend on the type of support. And, of course, you need a title block to for your drawing.

So to manage this, you will have to create an orthographic drawing as a standard orthographic drawing in Plant3D, and also define this orthographic drawing. It will become your template to produce many drawings of your many supports in your project. And the template could be also shared across your Artelia team.

Just for the 3D modeling files, first, the user will have to choose the needed support from the library. Then you can explode this block and adapt the [INAUDIBLE] length, as you can see, actually, in the movie.

And you can easily create a library of blocks by using the out-of-box AutoCAD tools, The blocks library. And you can share this library across your network or across ACC, if you use ACC. Next slide, please.

Once the support is good, the 3D part of the support is good, the user will use a custom user interface to convert the support as a real Plant3D object. So for this, you can select a base point, the type of the support. Define the local orientation because, as you know, on the project, support are not always parallel to X or Y-axis.

You can also manage the view range around the support. The view range is the Plant 3D auto cube size around the support. You can change it if you need to manage your display to display other elements around your support.

We can also indicate a reference point for the coordinates. And we'll see in this coordinate, the output sample. So once you make all these steps, the plot for your support is ready for a next step.

So just to summarize the 3D part of this, first, you pick a block from your library. You explode this block to change the line for future among there. And then you have to convert it as a Plant 3D support by a custom interface.

To produce the drawing, though, so as I mentioned, the user can select a template according to the support you need to produce. You can select a specific output folder. And, of course, you can select the support you want to print. You can select all, or just select a list, or use the chart tools to filter with, for example, block them.

And with the tool you can expect the result you have on the right part of the slide, where you can see the different label to identify the different parts of your support.

And then you have all this label in the bill of material in the top right of your drawings. And you can see also the coordinates. The two drawings indicate the coordinates of the support.

So some words about the benefits, so regarding the tool capabilities, you can manage different templates according to support specific. You can automatically generate views. It's really where the user saves time. You can have also automatic annotation and the material list automatically produced.

So after testing this plugin on a real project, Artelia came back to us with some matrix. So basically, it takes 75% less time to produce the different support drawings on the project.

So before I take four hours to produce support drawings, now it takes only one hour at doing all the project life.

And you can easily change or calculate the number of hours you can-- Artelia can save on an average project. And this automatic orthographic drawing engine we create can be used for other use cases for in Plant 3D. Over to you, Stephane.

STEPHANE BOUN: So yeah, Ludovic just mentioned the technical and productivity benefits from producing this tool. And our teams are very happy with it.

I think I also need to emphasize on the benefits for the company, as in how this specific example of development and tool is a good way to demonstrate the efficiency and how this investment in development was beneficial for us, not only as in the productivity aspect, but also in how it helps us understand better how we can work on developing custom tools and how those tools can be beneficial.

And then, I think it was interesting for us because a few years before this project, we worked on the development of some custom plugins for Revit on another market. It was the building area. And actually, it turns out that those plugins were are not used by our engineers because in the end, the tool is not doing properly what the engineers are expecting.

And it turns out after trying to understand why one of the development didn't work and why this one was efficient, that one of the main aspects was, that for our team, it was kind of difficult to explain their needs and to break down the task they were doing in a BPM format.

So it might seem odd, but for our engineers, it might seem obvious to them that they have to do some specific studies. But it turns out that it's a bit difficult for them to try to put this on paper and try to explain step-by-step how it is done, what kind of regulation it has to comply to, and the different inputs you need to have.

And the work that Ludovic and the Autodesk consultancy team did with our engineers was a good way to learn how a construction engineer and a software developer can communicate with each other to explain the need to put it down in an understandable format for both persons.

And we learned a lot through this experience. And we could then convince our engineers that the investment in time they were putting into this work is beneficial in the end, even though it couldn't justify postponing deadlines on specific projects.

At the time, it was very difficult for them to understand that they had to spend time on this project instead of working on the industrial product that we're working on. And so we convinced them that, at the end, it was beneficial for them. We also convinced the management that this investment was beneficial. And we can now justify it with some metrics, as Ludovic just mentioned.

And also it's beneficial for the entire group, as in the strategy of development of automation tools. It's a good way to demonstrate how it can be beneficial to everyone.

So I think that other entities outside of the scope of Artelia Industry can understand why they should invest some time into analyzing their workflows and trying to figure out which are the right task to automate and how we can work with consultants as Ludovic, as software developers.

So we wanted to conclude this class with a few ideas of our next steps. And, well, as I said, this kind of development or major productivity improvement-- and convinced our team of the benefit of those new tools. So we are continuing to explore and analyze our different workflows throughout the different markets.

We address seeking for new aspects of our engineering processes that would benefit from automation. And there are still many, many things to tell.

LUDOVIC FOURNIER: And regarding this automation, automation is a broad topic encompassing many facets of modern industry.

And at Autodesk Consulting, our role is to assist Artelia, or our customer, both, technically and strategically in the development and the implementation of this kind of system development we can create.

STEPHANE BOUN: So now we believe that the data we produce needs to be put to better use to provide new services for our customers.

So we decided to rebuild our modeling standards to work, and also to work towards a data storage and access platform, centralizing data from models created anywhere in the group.

And as you know, Autodesk cloud tools are evolving rapidly, constantly, introducing new capabilities. And once again, Autodesk Consulting is here to support Artelia in navigating these emerging technologies such as the data connectors, as we just discussed, yeah.

And then, ultimately, we think that improving our software development knowledge and having strong standards and efficient data management will be the pillars to more complex digital transformation. So, hopefully, we will soon discuss with our [INAUDIBLE] partners of AI applications in our processes. And so thank you all for your attention and I hope we'll see you very soon.