Getting the Most Out of Bridge, Autodesk BIM Collaborate Pro, and Model Coordination: The Contractor Perspective

JAY MATHIS: Hello, and welcome to this recording for Autodesk University 2024. Today's topic we're going to be talking about Getting the Most out of BIM, Collaborate Pro, Model Coordination and Bridge. And so we're going to be delivering this presentation from the contractor perspective. My name is Jay Mathes, Professional Engineer and Virtual Construction lead for Miron Construction for commercial projects.

So a little bit about myself, again, a virtual construction lead for commercial projects. I've got 12 years of industry experience. I'm a licensed professional engineer in the state of Wisconsin, and I've got my master's in science from Iowa State University in Civil engineering and my Bachelor of Science from Iowa State in construction engineering. This is a little bit about Miron Construction, our vision, and core values, we're committed to staying grounded, thinking big, rallying together, digging deep and building legacies. Our commitment reaches beyond construction. Our passion brings dreams to life.

So we do seem to be an ever expanding company, but our main focus is in the Wisconsin area. Most of our offices are located in Wisconsin. We have had a strong presence in our Cedar Rapids, Iowa office for some time. And did also recently open our Marquette, Michigan, office in the Upper Peninsula.

Some markets that we serve. We've got commercial and retail, educational, environmental, governmental and community, religious, health care, and industrial. And break out out by market, these are some 2022 figures, so these are a little bit outdated, but we'll give you a general idea of who we are as a company. So we're about 50% industrial with the remainder of that being commercial with items like health care, environmental, education and commercial.

So starting to get into the meat of the topic here. What's the most difficult thing that we've been able to do using BIM Collaborate Pro? And I would argue that it's this. So this is our campus model of the Titletown District in Green Bay, Wisconsin. So what this is showcasing is a 20-plus year partnership with the Packers, basically summarized in one viewpoint.

So we've got this massive development next to Lambeau Field and years and years of projects and information and models and data that we've gathered over time. And we've been able to-- in real world coordinates, align these models, link these into an overall compiled model, and push out a single published 3D viewpoint from Revit, so in a Cloud work-shared model publishing this single view up to ACC. We're able to navigate online using the large model browser experience this overall model.

So some of the details of this model. So if you were to Zoom in on all the different areas throughout the model, we'll highlight some areas here. We've got the US Venture Center where our Green Bay office is located, Miron Construction's Green Bay office. And we've got stunning views of Lambeau Field from the third floor in that office. We've got Aaron Sledding Hill right across the way from Lambeau Field. Not a lot of hills in Wisconsin, so we ended up building one right, right next door and was able to slide down this sledding hill myself right before a game on Christmas Day against the Browns a number of years ago. So got to enjoy that one myself.

And then one of the Marquee projects in this district that we've been able to do is the Resch Expo Center. And again, this is the opposite direction, across the road from Lambeau, I was able to participate in this project, led up the BIM coordination effort and all of our subcontractors on the BIM coordination side of things for this project. And it is the home of the NFL draft in 2025. So everybody in our area is absolutely thrilled to be hosting that event.

So a lot of partnerships go into projects like these and a lot of effort from a lot of different parties. It's not just Miron Construction doing this. We want to make sure we credit our partners on this. This is not an exhaustive list, but just wanted to give people an idea of the massive undertaking it takes from the number of companies, and the number of people.

So Elkus Manfredi, Somerville, Rossetti, RA Smith, Design workshop, SGA, EUA, Populous, NBBJ, Greif, BNH, Thornton Tomasetti, HOK, and Stirling development. Again, this is more so on the design side, but we have a vast number of trade partners that have really helped us out over the years, and we've collected a lot of really good data and compiled it into these models as well.

So getting into our guide for the remainder of the presentation, we're going to get into Bridge, how we go about publishing viewpoints out of our Cloud work-shared models, BIM coordination, utilizing those viewpoints, all the different ancillary use cases that we found, stuff that we weren't really expecting to be able to do but have found benefit in doing. And then some of the tools inside of design collaboration that we have felt have helped our BIM coordination process and overall construction process as well.

So the first piece of this is bridge. And I do want to reference a previous Autodesk University presentation by Hayes Johnson with BL Harbert. He talks last year about advanced bridging and ACC and went through a lot of the picks and clicks and a lot of their strategy and how they approach Bridge. I'm just going to talk generally today about how Miron approaches bridge. If you want to learn more about the Picks and Clicks, either go reference that presentation or look up training material that Autodesk has produced online. But in this example, we've got a very simple project. In this case, this is an example of a one-way bridge connection to Miron Construction's BCC site of Cloud work-shared models.

So we've got three-- this is a little bit simplified but designated areas that we show here. So if we are bridging models from the architect and engineers site into our site, we have a designated design folder for that. If we're doing an integrated project delivery where more of our subcontractors are acting as designers, we've got our design coordination section that will put them in. Or most typically, if we have a regular construction coordination project, we'll have them bridge files into our BIM coordination folder.

So this is a fairly simple one-way bridge connection from somebody else's site onto ours, fairly simple setup, not a whole lot of documentation needed for that. The next setup, here's an example of a project where Miron has an ACC site. The architect has an ACC site, and we wanted to basically just have a meeting, hash out all the different locations that we have set up in our files and where we are pulling information from and where we're pushing it to.

We just wanted to be transparent with the architect and this is our tool to do so. So we're bridging from Flad, who is the architect in this case into our design folder and then our partners, JM Brennan, Staff Electric had their own sites that we were bridging into our BIM coordination folder. Likewise on Flad's ACC site, they wanted everybody's information over there as well. So we created bridge connections from Flad's site to the subcontractors directly, kind of bypassing Miron in that case. And then bridging from JM Brennan, one of our subcontractors, Miron and Staff Electric into the architect site.

And so we're starting to make a lot of connections. We take these graphics and paste them into our BIM execution plan so everybody understands these and can reference them later and understand where this information is coming from. Now, kind of a pie in the sky situation here. We did have a project that was a full design build project where all partners were on ACC, so we were able to set up a bridge connection both bidirectional and unidirectional. And we basically had to hash out and spend quite a bit of time thinking about how we wanted to do this, not only who was hosting the design effort, but who was going to host the construction coordination effort and the decision, and what those decisions, the implications had on how we had to set up our bridge connections.

So we set up this graphic, basically indicating in blue the one way connections from all the different partners to Miron site so that we could do construction coordination. And then the bidirectional bridge connections that all of the design groups had in order to make sure that they all had the latest information. So again, this is the graphic that we produced and pasted into our BIM execution plan so that everybody understood who is bridging from where to-- from who to where and what they were bridging.

Above and beyond this, we also had screenshots of the folder structures and which ones they are going into, but use this as a graphic to simplify, give a visual of what everybody was to do on that project. So things are really starting to get complicated. And so what's really important is that you have a standard in place so that you can keep track of your bridge connections. So here we have a screenshot of that initial setup. So we're sharing it with another project. We will go ahead and click automatically sync upgrades or updates to the target project. And this title becomes very important.

So in this case, Tweet Garrett, one of our trade partners, is highlighted here. So in this case, we are bridging from Miron Construction to Tweet Garrett and we are sending them fabrication models. So they wanted a copy of the steel fabrication model on their site. So that's what we're highlighting here. So the standard that we have in place is from who, to who and what files we are sharing.

So you want to avoid doing this! The reason we have that standard in place is because we've messed it up in the past. A little bit of shame to show this because this is a real project. What we've done is we've gone through and we've set up a bunch of bridge connections. We didn't give them titles as to who was bridging what, and you don't know what information is going where without digging further into this automation. And so it's difficult to turn off connections as needed.

So the hypothetical situation here is that you've gotten all these bridge connections set up, maybe a company goes belly up or the owner decides they want to go with a different designer. You end up having to sever that bridge connection. You need to be able to go and find that connection so that you're not spitting out information to their site unknowingly.

So the next piece of this is publishing viewpoints. So we've got all of our models in the correct place, and now we need to start setting up our project to publish viewpoints to ACC so those models are a little more useful. Pictured on the left is actually that sledding hill, so that's the view of Lambeau that you get while cruising 20 miles an hour or so down that hill.

So we'll talk a little bit about licensing. So there's two different licenses when it comes to BIM collaboration, so you've got your regular BIM collaborate license that gets everybody access to Model Coordination to view models, view issues. And then you have BIM Collaborate Pro, which allows you to basically co-edit inside of a lot of the different authoring files.

And so this licensing is managed through your Autodesk account executive or your customer success manager, you go in and assign that member subscription and Autodesk BIM Collaborate Pro license through your account admin. So make sure you got to have the proper licensing to be able to do this. And once you're set up, here's what we would start getting into.

So the next piece of this that becomes really important is your Revit template. And what's really important here. And what we spent a lot of time setting up is all of our dummy links inside of our coordination model, so our overall compiled coordination model so that we can take any architectural model or any subcontractor model or any supplemental model and replace the links that we have in place. And what that does is since we have these links already turned on and off in all of our coordination viewpoints, it allows for the project setup to go way faster.

Then in the future, even if we have all of our design files and all of our subcontractor files set up, we want to bring in a random kitchen equipment model. We can replace one of those supplemental models and it won't show up in all the other views because that supplemental model placeholder is turned off in all of those other view templates that we have set up. So we'll get into that here in a little bit.

So our View Templates using our 3D subcontractor electrical view. So again, this subcontractor 3D viewpoint that we want published up to our ACC site. We have a view template already set up where the only thing that is turned on in that is the electrical contractor's subcontractor model. Now when you go and replace that model in the dummy links, it'll show up in this viewpoint. But none of the other dummy models that we have in here that you'll replace along with it will show up in this viewpoint.

So you can set up these viewpoints using the dummy links to set up your projects faster and more consistently. Obviously, from project to project, you're going to have to edit these view templates. And this is kind of a scrap down version of all of the different view templates that we do use. But wanted to show you an example, kind of a cleaned up example of what this looks like in practice.

So the next piece of this is setting up your Publish settings. So we've got our Dummy Links set up. We've got our View Template set up. And now getting into our Publish settings. We've got three different sets that we take a look at and try to decide what makes sense to publish and when. So we've got our pre-construction views, we've got our design views and then our BIM coordination views. So highlighted here in our BIM coordination views, we've got an architectural design viewpoint, we've got a structural viewpoint, our subcontractor viewpoints, and then any sheets that we might produce using our compiled model that we want to go up to the site for the teams to reference.

So this becomes very powerful. And we'll talk a little bit about how often we're publishing and getting these views up, but having all of this set up in your Revit template ahead of time creates a lot, lot of efficiency for you to save time in your project setup. The next piece of this, and again, this is starting to get pretty complicated, not going to be able to go into every pick and click on this process, but want to make sure that everybody has an understanding of the process in general. so that you can work with your customer success manager on getting this process set up for yourself.

So saving this model to the Cloud. And again, in the case that we're talking about right now, this is the compiled model that we're publishing views out that Miron is creating. So we're starting with bridging over those Cloud work-shared models, again, our design and subcontractor content, getting our work sets turned on in the compiled model. We're saving our compiled model to the Cloud, checking that our views are publishing correctly.

And we're going in and creating our coordination spaces, one with our Clash Detective turn on, one with the Clash Detective turned off and then setting up our shared NWF. And so this is the general process for setting up our BIM coordination effort on ACC. So we'll get into those individual items here.

So starting off with turning on our work sets in the compiled model. So we're going to go into your collaborate tab. This is your compiled model that you've set up. You've maybe started replacing some of those dummy links and done your training on how to get your subcontractors set up on this. You're going to go in-- go into your work sets under the Collaborate tab. And go ahead and turn those on.

Are these work sets are a very powerful tool. Often what we do is we will mimic the work sets inside of our compiled model. We'll basically duplicate the work sets that our subcontractors have set up, and then we can use those work sets to filter out data in our viewpoints so that it just allows for granularity on the control over your viewpoints.

But ideally, at the start of the project, you would establish what work sets are going to be used in the BIM execution plan so that you're training everybody at the BIM kickoff on how to set up their files. Some examples of this could be your systems. You might have a separate work set for hangars, sleeves, so on and so forth. Again, it's just to make all the viewpoints set up and the drawing set up easier, later down the road.

So after you set up your work sets, you're going to save this compiled model to the Cloud. So again, we're still in that Collaborate tab. We'll click on Collaborate in Cloud. It'll bring up this prompt here and here. We're just using our Sandbox location, but we're going to save that out into our BIM coordination folder.

And once that compiled model is set up, again, with the View Templates all assigned correctly and our publish settings set up correctly, we're going to go out to ACC after it's done processing and make sure that the views are publishing correctly. And this can be done in Docs, you don't have to check this in Model Coordination. You don't have to wait for it to be processing. Basically, once it's done processing in Docs, you can go and check the 3D Viewpoints inside of the sheets and view in that compiled model.

And as long as all the subcontractor models or Cloud work-share models are linked in correctly, and all of the design models or Cloud work-shared models are linked in correctly and you have your viewpoints selected, they'll show up basically as you're seeing them here in this slide. So looking at the left side of the slide here, we've got our structural viewpoints, a couple example, mechanical contractor viewpoints, and there's just a gigantic list of views that made it into this project that are being published out of this model.

So now we can start looking into our BIM coordination efforts and setting that up and how we're using the Collaborate Pro for that. So we're going in and creating our coordination spaces. One with Clash Detective turned off, one with Clash Detective turned on, and we're pointing both of these coordination spaces at the same folder, so that they're pulling in the same information into both spaces. We'll talk a little bit about why we do that. It seems a little counterintuitive, but there's a lot of benefits to setting it up this way.

So we generally have three coordination spaces that we're setting up. We have a pre-construction self-perform view coordination space. We have a BIM coordination Clash On Workspace and a BIM coordination Clash Off Workspace. So the difference is the Clash On versus Clash Off workspaces and why you may want to do both. So for the Clash Off Workspace, one of the major benefits that we find is that as soon as the files are done processing in Docs, you can see the updates in the Saved Viewpoints and in the Shared NWF that you have in Model Coordination. So there's a lot less processing time to deal with.

This is the best for viewing overall models on large projects because people are constantly publishing. It doesn't take quite as long to run through all the Clash Reporting, doesn't have to go through that process in order to view it in the Clash Off Workspace. And if you're doing all of your class detection in Navisworks, you can still set up your models in Model Coordination and use what I'll call a Shared NWF to do your Clash Reporting. And then you're not waiting for the Clash Engine in ACC that you're not even using to be able to see the latest model content.

So in your Clash On Workspace, here's where we're setting up the individual areas, so the smaller views for Clash detection in that space, so that we can really pare down the overall view experience. And those smaller models are much easier to update on ACC. So we'll have our overall model that we're pulling from the Clash Off workspace, but the Clash On Workspaces, we're looking at individual areas, The Clash On Workspace, we're also pulling our clash report data and our issue data out of that space. And then you may be able to get away with a single Clash On Workspace where small projects don't take a lot of time to process and where all model viewing can be done online.

So the Shared NWF that I referenced earlier, I just want to clarify exactly what that means. So on the top left inside of ACC, we've got an example of projects. So we've flipped over to Model Coordination and are in the Views tab. We have a Clash Off overall Viewpoint that we've created in there with every model that's being published to ACC. And so if we were to click on that view and pull it up inside of Model Coordination, this is what it looks like.

So we've got our fire protection, our design content, our mechanical contractor content and our electrical content. And that is that saved view that is up on ACC. So through the coordination tab in Navisworks, we can open up this same view, we can color it up similarly, so on and so forth. But this is one-- and any data that you add to this model, the shared NWF will get saved back. And what I advise people to do is inside of your Favorites, your Recents inside of Navisworks, you can pin those models so that you don't have to go through the coordination tab every time to open these.

So again, the shared NWF is a model coordination view that's opened through the coordination tab in Navisworks. So the benefits of the shared NWF, you still get to set up your appearance profiles. We base all of our appearance profiles off of search sets so you can export those things out so that subcontractors can set these up as well. You can have saved viewpoints that are included in the NWD viewing in ACC. So if you were to export out or publish out an NWD and upload that to ACC, all of your saved viewpoints will make it into that file.

You can utilize the sectioning tools which I still really like inside of Navisworks for our BIM coordination meetings. And then you can also use third party programs like I Construct to do scheduled NWD publishing so you don't have to constantly babysit that file. And then we do use the Issues Plug in pretty substantially in our BIM coordination effort the way we have this set up.

So diving into one of the ways that we're using this issues plugin to really enhance our process is the issue type customization. So here, as an example, we've created a review during meeting issue type. Where this becomes really powerful is all the subcontractors that are messing around in this model, they're looking for issues, they're resolving issues, they come across something that they just have no clue what to do and just need to stop and talk about it.

We ask them that they create an issue, pin it, tag it as a review during meeting issue type. And then we'll filter our review during meeting issue types during our meeting, and that helps set our agenda and increase the subcontractor participation. So you can put a lot of thought into these issue types and really increase participation if you're thoughtful about how you create these.

Then once that issue type has figured out, what's causing that problem, we'll reassign that issue type to maybe either constructability issue or RFI needed and then assign it out to the relevant party who can take that and answer that question. So we'll backtrack a little bit here. We're going to get into publishing viewpoints and the effect that it has on BIM coordination. So we'll back up a little bit here and talk about what Viewpoints make sense to publish out of the compiled model for coordination.

So which view should you publish? We found that there are two approaches to this as a general contractor. The first approach is to publish all of the design and all of the subcontractor content out of your compiled model. Now, it seems like a lot. It seems like you're putting a ton of effort into one file that, what if that file gets deleted, whatever else? But we'll talk about-- talk about the benefits of that.

And then two, the other approach is only publishing design content and then depending on your subcontractors, to publish from their Cloud work-shared models, all of their viewpoints. So the first approach is, again publishing design and subcontractor content. And so if you as the general contractor are publishing all of the content out of a single model, you now have full control over the viewpoints.

So you can really set up to be the orchestrator of the concert here and really show, really take command of the process and not depend on or not be vulnerable to some of the mistakes that maybe a subcontractor messes up a section box in one of their views or they start turning on their fabrication parts when you only want construction parts. They start turning that stuff too early on in your coordination process. It really gives you a lot of control over preventing a lot of those types of mistakes from happening.

And then also pretty frequently we're giving subcontractor edit rights to this file so that they can make updates. So we're allowing them to open that file up, basically get it to kick that Publish prompt and then allow them to update the overall model, so that the content that they've produced is still getting up to the site. So again, we're giving them access to our compiled model in order to be able to publish it after they've made content updates.

So what this ends up looking like, we've got our BIM coordination viewpoints, again with our design content set up and then also our subcontractor content set up. And what allows us to work is that all of our subcontractors are using BIM Collaborate Pro. And they are all hosting models on our site, whether they're hosting the authoring file directly or that file is getting bridged into our site. So then going into the Publish Settings inside of our BIM coordination view, we've got our 3D views selected down here. And those are the items that are making it up to Model Coordination in our coordination space getting published out of our model.

So again, going to the Revit view. And what this looks like. So that latest publish doesn't always kick, so sometimes you have to open that model, make a very slight change sync it back and then click over on the right and publish that model. And then you're not depending on subcontractors down below. We're looking at the 161720 models here. We're not depending on subcontractors publishing their content. We can just only publish content out of our model, not have to wait on them to push out documents for their own internal process.

So the next approach on this is publishing only design content. So subcontractors are now responsible for publishing their views. So there's probably going to be a lot more one-on-one training on making sure that they're setting up their files correctly and that they don't again, make those mistakes that we talked about earlier and editing a view that they're not supposed to, changing the name of a view because they felt like doing something a little bit different or something that made sense organizationally on their end. You're no longer open to those issues.

But one of the other benefits is you do not have additional people in your compiled model. There's fewer updates for the general contractor to do. So if there hasn't been an architectural update in a month, there hasn't been a structural update in six months, that's a lot less work, opening the models every morning where you're going and getting your coffee and publishing those out to manage the process.

But you do lose that control over the viewpoints that are making it up to your ACC site that you're ultimately publishing out. So again, what that looks like, it's a much more scrapped down version of the previous one. Inside of our BIM coordination set, we only have a structural view and an architectural view. So that is the second approach that we take.

What that ends up looking like, again, if you've got subcontractors that are kind of hem, hamming around and not being diligent about their publishes, you may still have to go in here and select their items and publish on their behalf. But it's a training piece involved with this, making sure that they're going in and regularly publishing these models. So back to our guide here.

We've kind of gone through the BIM coordination process and in conjunction what viewpoints were publishing out to get the most out of BIM Collaborate Pro. And now we get into the tangible use cases again. Everybody understands the BIM coordination side of things, the Clash Detective, the assigning of issues, so we don't want to necessarily get into that in this presentation.

What we want to get into are all of the auxiliary use cases that we've found. And one way we've been able to do this is a lot of times we're sitting in on a meeting with the architect or the engineer and they're like well, can you just send us a drawing of this? Can you send us a drawing of that? Well, that answer becomes yes much more frequently now because we have all this information ready to go and because it all shows up in a Viewpoint on ACC.

So using this 2D view as an example included in our publish set, we've got a roof drain review drawings. And in this case, we had some roof drains that were clashing with building steel below. And so we had to move these roof drains around. So we've got a subcontractor model, roof drain location highlighted in blue. That is again coordinated with the steel below. We underlay the architectural model and show, cut a plane just below the roof and just above the roof.

And then using this, we can highlight to the architect how far that roofing insulation sloping needs to move in order to hit that new drain location. We can use these files, maybe export a PDF if it needs to be-- submit that as an attachment to the RFI. But in a future state you may be able to pin an issue to this and say, hey architect, can you please update your model? And then on your next publish, that coordination model now matches the architectural sloping for the roof that had gotten update as a result of our BIM coordination process.

Another secondary thing we've been able to do as a result of using BIM, Collaborate Pro is our deck penetration drawings. So on this project, there is a submittal requirement prior to all of our concrete deck pours that we show all of our penetrations that we have in the deck and the dimensions relative to gridlines and dimensions off relative to each other as well. And so not only are we producing this document for internal purposes so that we can do our quality control check, we again, have access to all of our subcontractors content. It's getting linked in here.

Those links are live living on our site, whether it's again on our site, are getting bridged into our site. And this information, basically at a moment's notice. I've been on calls where here in this drawing we're showing our yellow electrical-- that electrical wasn't showing properly. I give the electrician a call. I tell them, hey, can you update your model here or there and wherever else? Have them sync back to our site. As soon as it's done syncing, I reload the model on our side and the change is immediately there. It's amazing how collaborative this environment can be when you've got the entire project and all your authoring, your software, authoring files in that Cloud work-shared environment.

The next example, I'll highlight are wall type floor plans. So this often will come from a request from the on-site superintendent. They're doing planning for finishes. They're wanting to stage drywall, stage studs, whatever else. And they want to know quickly, basically at a glance what wall types are in what areas. So again, this can be a 2D published view that makes it up to ACC. And if you've got a really savvy superintendent that can be going into your compiled model and finding this information. Or again, you can be sending these out as PDFs, as drawings, and then they can print these things off, put them up in their trailers, and then use them for talking points out in the trailer for planning purposes.

So this has been another powerful tool for our on site personnel to be able to quickly tell where all the similar wall types are, where they can do their planning. And then again, this color coding system just ends up getting ingrained in the back of their head and they can very quickly read these drawings.

So again, going back to our Titletown District Model that we alluded to earlier. So this again, this is probably the most challenging thing we've been able to do using BIM Collaborate Pro. So we talked about that large model viewer, being able to view all of this content in a single published 3D view. So again, this is our Titletown District compiled model.

Here. We're flying over top of Lambeau soaring, soaring over that, going and having a look at our sledding hill, looking at Titletown building one. Here we've got our playground and our open to the public full size football field. Lots of people out there practicing field goals, seeing if they can hit that double doink. And then over here is the US Venture Center office again, where Miron has their office on the third floor.

And then zooming out, you can see all the detail where we zoomed in on just those handful of projects. We've got that amount of detail basically in this entire model, we're constantly adding to it. Again, just an impressive amount of detail that this large model viewer is able to handle and that we're able to showcase to our partners and showcase to the Packers.

It's another piece of this Titletown district model. Again, this is more so along the lines of the single source of truth, not as much to do with Cloud work-shared models, but we do have a separate compiled Cloud work-shared model of Lambeau Field. And so we've got a lot of information on all the different concourses on this. And included in that information are our laser scans. So again, we have a Cloud work-shared model with published 2D viewpoints set up in the publish set.

And then we have markups all over our concourses of where we've taken scans. And so if you were to click on one of these markups and go into the reference, it'll pull up the RCP with all of the support data in it and you can navigate that on ACC. Again, so this is inside of our Titletown District model. Again, you can see the laundry list of projects that we've worked on them or worked on in the past with them.

Inside of that-- inside of one of these folders is our compiled Lambeau model. And then inside of that are the published 2D sheets and 3D views where we have information like this stored in this ACC environment, this single ACC project. So we're staying grounded and we're thinking big. We're thinking about all the people in the field and the technology that might not be available to them. So we always got to think about how we're helping these people.

And again, as we get into design collaboration, there's a lot of bells and whistles that you as a general contractor might not use every day. But we'll go ahead and take a look at a couple of the tools that we found to be valuable inside of this. So design collaboration, again, from the contractor perspective, we found two example cases. So these are just two of the many ways that it's getting used, but two ways that I'll highlight here. One is the automated publishing of Cloud models and then the version comparing of models, so those version comparisons.

So that first case, again, the automated publishing. So what you can do is you can set up a team, point that team towards the BIM coordination folder. So this is the same folder that we have our model coordination, coordination space pointed to. We've set up a scheduled publish for weekly on Sunday evenings. We figure people are taking a break on Sunday evenings, so that's ready for everybody come Monday morning.

And so again, we made some decisions on this one on the bridge team automations and again, setting up the coordination space, so on and so forth. One of the limitations in this case is we can only publish once per week. So again, when I get to the office in the morning, I'm opening up however many projects I have that were implementing this process on, making sure my Viewpoint gets published so it captures all the data from the previous day.

In the next piece of this are the Model Comparisons. We actually really enjoy using the Model Comparison Tool inside of Design Collaboration. A couple of limitations, it does not work with NWCs. So again, this is one of the motivating factors for using BIM. Collaborate Pro is that you have those Cloud work-shared publish viewpoints that you have full control over. You can keep track of all of the changes that have happened throughout the project. And it will work with DWGs and IFCs.

And we found that often this is a more intuitive way a better way, a more detailed way to do our comparisons inside of Model Coordination. We do a lot of these model comparisons back in Docs and have had a lot of success with it. Here's kind of just another way to do it. If you are setting up design collaboration for your project.

That's kind of our overall guide. Again, we talked about Bridge, talked about publishing viewpoints, BIM coordination and how publishing viewpoints and BIM coordination go hand in hand and all the decisions that go into that, all the various use cases outside of BIM coordination that we found. And again, those are just a few examples. Those certainly not an exhaustive list. And then talked a little bit about how we use design collaboration in conjunction with our BIM coordination effort.

A couple of thank yous. Special thanks to the Miron virtual construction team. I'm only one person. It takes a team, a really talented team to be able to set up processes like this. I want to thank Nick, Noah, Sara, Lee, Jenna, Brian Blake, Laura, Melissa, Sam, Taylor, and Kacie. A lot of the processes that we put in place wouldn't be possible without this team. That concludes my presentation for AU 2024. Thank you.