How Model-Based Workflows Counteract Higher Costs and Labor Shortages

MARK HARRISON: Good morning, everyone. My name is Mark Harrison. I work for a company called Progress Group. Today, we'll be talking about a very interesting topic called "How model-based workflows counteract higher costs and labor shortages."

What I'd like to just quickly go over here is just what are our goals today for the presentation, what I'd really like to go over. I'll break it down into four main topics. One is to learn how to enable freedom in design and automation in fabrication. The second is learn how to improve workflows by using a model-based approach and creating digital twins.

The third one is learn how some first movers, by some examples of customers of our own, have benefited from this tool that we've created. And the fourth is to just receive some feedback and input on how we can help you benefit on your own, with easy steps, without any major changes to your company's current process, and in less time than you thought.

But I think what's important to start with is just kind of setting the table, like why are we talking about this? Why is this important? Why now?

So I think today, in the complexity of the world we have, if you're working in PDF and Excel-based workflow and document control, you're really going to be getting no help in terms of decreasing your costs of your goods and labor shortages. For instance, anybody working on a increasingly complicated and collaborative project and remaining in a PDF and Excel-based document system is in for increasing communication challenges.

So here is a nice, great infographic of BIM. I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with it. If not, I just want to show you that where we're really going to focus on this.

It's going to be in the blue half side of this, which is basically from the design, analysis, information, especially the fabrication, and then through the construction and construction logistics part of a construction project. Just to kind of let you know that it is really unfortunate that so many companies still use Excel and PDF because increasingly, we have such a high-quality model coming from the owners from these Revit models. And we're not taking advantage of the inherent automation tools that could be used.

So just to recap, using a model-based system really can lead to a lot of cost savings for you. And as well, there's a lot of automation capacity within these things and there's modern manufacturing technology that can address the labor shortages. And I really just want to show you that what we're going to try to do as a company-- and this is where our experience comes in-- is how are we going to tie these things together in this presentation.

So this is important to emphasize-- that this isn't just some theory. I'm not going to come into this as an academic. I'm not an academic. I've worked 16 years in the construction industry.

I just want to say that this is actually something that's already in use. And these toolsets are a proven and modular open system. While it was originally designed for the precast industry, it's not limited to it.

So just to kind of recap what we're going to set the table on is that we're going to show that this tool is-- you benefit from the cutting-edge technology inherent in model-based workflows. It takes out the burden of using different software applications, which I'll elaborate on later. You don't have to use old-fashioned interfaces.

I think PDF and Excel are a perfect example of that. And it's usually hard to really get people to buy into a new Excel sheet that you created from scratch. It just takes a little time to explain to them.

This is a very nice user interface. And it just it goes to counteract the complexity that's coming in these collaborative projects. And also, it's really easy to train new people. If you hire people-- and I think we're all hiring people and growing our teams-- and that if you have somebody who's never used a system before, having a much more polished Revit workflow model is much easier to train than something you developed in-house from scratch.

I just want to let you know that we came from the precast industry and we're using these tools that we've created in our own precast plant. We aren't just a equipment or software supplier. We're a precaster ourselves. And just to take away that we are focused on automation, and this is something that we sell and work with our customers worldwide on.

So just to get back to why now, what's the issues here? I think this has kind of been said at length by many people, but I just want to repeat this from a recent study that came out in the Precast Concrete Institute as a study. Basically, they went to all the producers around the US and Canada and said, look, what are your main challenges you're seeing in the next year?

And just to summarize it, the building material prices, availability, qualified labor are really the primary influences. And these are just some quotes from actual owners. These are major producers of precast.

All materials are experiencing cost increases. I think that's that, but I think steel was the most shocking to me, about 300% increases in the past few years. I mean, that's just unheard of in our industry.

The lead times-- I mean, I think that's something that you've heard a lot and there's been a lot of this in other industries. But really, if you're getting past six months, where you need to order major inputs into your production past six months, you're really dealing with a challenge that's unprecedented.

And this all goes to the last one, and this is the study itself, if you really want to read it. It's got a lot of great data in it. But the quotes I find are more hard hitting-- it says, it's increasingly harder to find qualified workers, and if you find somebody they might not come back next week. Keeping labor and getting it is really a core challenge, which really ties together what we're talking about here in terms of streamlining workflows and automation.

So I don't want you to just think that it's just my word for that. I was talking about a precast market study, which is a pretty in-depth scientific report. But here's two that's really new ways of thinking.

And I was introduced to this by a colleague. One is McKinsey. You know who they are. They're a large, successful consulting company.

And they produced this report in 2020. It's called "The next normal construction." Again, for the limited time, I'm not going to go through the whole report with you, but it's very interesting. I encourage you all to read it if you have a chance.

And I'm not just saying this because we're at Autodesk University. This is a very influential document called "Industrialized Construction." It's available on their website. You can find it pretty easily from Google, and I can send you some links if you need at the end, but it really just ties together what we're talking about.

So in the spirit of time, let's just summarize this. The McKinsey Report is just fantastic. It's got a lot of great infographics, but basically what it's saying is right now, the construction industry is a highly complex, fragmented skill- and project-based construction process.

And as I said, I worked 16 years in the construction industry. I know this. So what you're seeing here, and I'll walk you through this real quick, is that for every project-- let's call it 1, 2, 3, 4-- you need to develop it, design, supply the materials, rent material if needed, actually produce it, and then deliver the final building. And the means by which you become a larger and more successful construction company is your ability to take on multiple projects concurrently, thus increasing your revenue.

However, it limits you because your workforce is generally tied in and focused in on each individual project. There's not a lot of intersharing between some of your employees, took your good ones. So you're really governed by how many people you can scale up by increasing your company linearly, as to how much you can take on as new work. Makes sense-- it's what I'm familiar with.

What McKinsey is saying, and this is a really important concept to explain, is that we're looking at a more standardized, consolidated, integrated construction process, Industry 4.0, which I'll explain later. But point is, what does that mean? This is the same infographic showing, again, projects 1, 2, 3, 4

And I really want to highlight this particular area here, is that what we're dealing with in industrialized construction is a centralized offsite manufacturing that allows you to use much less people to deliver completed goods to the assembly and final building place. It allows your company to become much easier to scale and grow, and having minimal high-qualified people doing this in a highly controlled environment. I said I'd explain Industry 4.0, but really all that means is effectively, it's a means of manufacturing in which all your manufacturing is talking directly to each other.

There is no need of humans to communicate data from one process to another. It's all being done in the background. And can talk about this at length, but there's cloud-based data management. And what we have is called a "progress test server," which in our plants is effectively a server that manages this process-- that if you tell it what to produce, it will work out the intermittent steps to deliver the final good, as much as possible. Again, this is a way of collaborating in the teams, and keeping your workflow very streamlined, and using the modern tools available.

So just to contrast, we have the previous construction process, which is a much more dedicated and basically, a copy exact of the previous project, to a much more scalable one by just streamlining this process here, which we'll get into. Now, actually this graphic is from the "Autodesk Construction Takeaway." And actually, it's near and dear to me because I spent a lot of time in construction sites.

This is a job site. I'm not exactly sure what they're doing, but it seems to me that they're installing some kind of paneling or drywall on a steel stud wall. I count 10 people there. And most likely, this is in an urban construction project where most are, if not unionized, very high cost of labor.

And just to summarize from the study-- I think this is very important, and I can agree with this-- while there has been a lot of headroom in this, that the construction industry is among the least digitized sectors around, if you look at all the major industries in the US. I'm just talking to the US for now. Of course, in the world, it's probably similar.

As I mentioned before, all the processes are being repetitive and labor intensive. And this was even more shocking to me, as I've worked on several very large construction projects, is that most are already being pushed delays because of this, as well as up to over budget. 20% and 80% are huge numbers, and I can imagine those who are in the tech sector, when you see those kind of numbers, that's an enormous variance. And it's hard to predict that. So just going forward, these are just what we're seeing right now in the industry and the headwinds we're going up against.

So you probably get this a lot. There's a lot of people telling you these various things. I just want to just explain who we are, and why you should listen to us, and what we're talking about.

I work for a company called Progress Group. We're based in Europe, in northern Italy, at a location called Brixton-- very nice part of the world. But we have successfully produced plants for our customers, over 120 worldwide. Here's just some quick numbers of our annual revenue employees.

But what it's doing that sets us apart from usual technology suppliers is that we are an actual producer ourselves. Not only do we produce the equipment we sell to customers, we actually are precasters. We use this equipment in our own plants to do this, so we can fine tune it and really know what we're talking about.

And just to highlight, we're all here for collaboration. We're all at Autodesk University. We are really trying to better ourselves in terms of how we become more collaborative and how we work together as a team.

I just want to say that we really are a part of this. With our solutions, we support the blue part of the process, especially the fabrication. But these other ones are very important to us, as well. We focus on this, but we have a lot of different modules that we can talk about later.

I'll just show you a quick video here. I know this is not a true dog and pony show here, but this kind of shows what we're capable of and what our company does produce. We produce these robots that do highly automated manufacturing. We do a lot of focus on the steel industry, there's providing custom mesh weld, tailor-made meshes, and girders. These are some of the plant-level solutions that we've come up with.

Concrete is one of our core businesses in precast, what we really do, and software. I think this is why we're here. We develop our own tools and software in-house to deliver a high-quality product to the customer, with minimal manpower labor.

Again hopefully, that wasn't too over the top for you. But this was a very helpful video showing that what we can do. So we talked about Industry 4.0 before. Again, I'm not going to summarize it.

What I want to just highlight is that we have machine-level solutions, plant-level solutions, and company-level solutions. I'm not sure if some of you know what these acronyms are, but ERP means Enterprise Resource Planning. So we provide software tools for companies to manage their supply chains. There's many things to talk about there, but effectively, it's a corporate level.

Production level, which would be a plant-level solution, and then a machine level, which would be more localized software. This is what we call a digitized workflow. And this vertical integration, from the machines all the way up to the company, is what we're calling Industry 4.0. Hopefully, this graphic helps explain that better.

Again, I won't spend a lot of time here. This is just a rendering of what we typically produce. One is a carousel plant, which is effectively a means of which you move a workstation through a plant where various-- you bring the work to the worker as opposed to the other way around.

This is what we call a long bed, which is where they do a lot of hollow core, which is a very popular profile. They use them in precast construction, as well as doing specialty molds.

So just click on this real quick. This is not a marketing simulation. This is something that we actually use in our plants to monitor how the production is going. It's a real-time data readout graphical interface showing where every particular element is on the production line. It's very helpful, but I just want you to show this is actually something we use. And our plant managers can report any kind of discrepancies or any kind of efficiencies they want to improve.

Just these company names-- I just want to go over this, but this is really impressive. This is what we focus on a lot in the world. It's called a carousel plant, and it's a way it's moving the elements around, which is one of the most highly automated production facilities in the world are all carousel plants in the precast industry.

Where the name comes from-- Progress Maschinen and Automation-- they develop a lot of our robots and our custom tailor-made mesh welding machines, stair benders, and girders. As you can see here, we can make all of this with very minimal manpower. It can actually be automated and placed into molds to keep your process very streamlined without any human interaction.

As we are in concrete molds are a big part of this. This is Tecnocom. They do a lot of specialty molds, whether it's stairs, volumetric. And these can also be integrated very easily into a carousel plant.

And this is a very popular profile in the world. I call it the hollow core. It makes sense, might look like a honeycomb. But it's effectively a void in a concrete profile that gives it a lot of the nice structural properties of concrete, without all the added weight and mass in concrete.

And this is another company who specialized in the North American market, where they do a lot of prestress. And they use an extruder-type tech for it.

So that was kind a long introduction. I just want to really get to the point here, that why are we talking about this? And what the real goal-- the first one is this-- how do we enable freedom and design? So on the left here, we're all at Autodesk University. You are well aware of what Revit is.

But there's a lot of companies out there who work on designing actual structures and providing really high-quality models for the end user. And then there's us, where we spend a lot of time on the fabrication side, as I just showed from the previous video and pictures that we really focus on providing highly efficient tools to produce precast at scale, at low cost, with very high quality. But what was previously lacking was this bridge between the worlds.

And just to give you an example, this is our headquarters here in Brixton Italy, where we're showing from the original Revit model through the construction process through the finished, delivered product, of which some of my colleagues are working in today. This is what we're trying to do here. The whole goal of our tools and discussion here today is about bridging these worlds.

There was always a missing link between this. There was always something that had to happen in between to get a highly efficient fabrication process from the design world. So the fabrication sometimes lacked data from the actual architect as to what was acceptable in terms of changes, and the owners and the architects would sometimes lack the data.

It's, like, is this even producible? Can we produce this and deliver this to the site, this geometry that I want? What are some trade-offs that need to occur? This is what we're really trying to talk about here, is that this Model2Fabrication tool is connecting these worlds without limiting the freedom of design and the automation of the fabrication process.

So again, just this is a better graphic of this. I'm sure most of you are familiar with this. For any of you who's been in the construction industry for a while, this is effectively the big three.

You have the main owners and architects who are designing the geometry of the buildings. They do a lot more than that, but for simplification here, let's just talk about that. Then, of course, you have the engineering team. The engineering will look at the structure, provide the necessary detail and reinforcement to deliver a statically safe model that will stand and have all the necessary details.

Then you have these MEP trades, which for those of you who don't know, these are just the mechanical, electrical, plumbing. These are the ones who come in here, and they provide these ancillary services that all buildings need. And they deliver a final good.

What you're not seeing here is that in most of these companies, they usually have their own discrete and distinct software solutions that they're using in their company. And they use the Revit model as the end goal, but how they actually work inside their company is usually not in Revit. Or it sometimes is, but a lot of times, they have their own proprietary tools, which makes communication between these two limited or very difficult.

Hence that earlier slide about Excel and PDFs. And I spend a lot of time in this world where you would send revisions, you'd say, "Request revise," to the architects, and architects would ask for feedback, and it just became a lot of data management problem.

And this is what we're trying to do-- our solution is trying to bring these all together, using this model in a way communicating up and downstream any kind of information. So here's another graphic of it, just to kind of really highlight. So we call it A-E-F. For those of you who don't know, architects, engineers, and fabrication deliveries-- the three main steps of these processes. Again, keeping it simple, the architect, geometry, engineer, structural, and then fabrication is the end construction and delivery installation of these goods.

What you'll notice, though, is that in theory-- and Revit really does a great job of this-- is that they show that there's a streamlined, model-based workflow. But you see the arrow is purposely going in one direction. It's showing that from the architect all the way down, and that's what you think would happen.

But in reality, that's really not happening a lot there is a lot of communication that's necessary between the E and the F function with the architects and/or the A or the E, F to E, and so on. But keeping as much information in one system, keeping it over the whole workflow, we avoid double work. So the theory is great, that there is a way to communicate, within Revit, these changes.

This is just something that's really key to explain what we see in the typical process. And I just want to go to the next slide, which really is going to highlight what we're trying to achieve with this tool. And this is an important slide and I want to elaborate on it.

You see a lot of arrows here, but it's important to mention what is being shown here is the core and one of the great benefits of model-based workflow and what we call an "automated digitized feedback loop" for any and all changes regarding fabrication occurring in the overall design process. While there's a lot of sophistication and detail in these spaces that cannot be represented on a single slide, this graphic serves to show the workflow on a big-picture level. I want to just be very clear-- there's a lot going on on these projects, but this is effectively what's happening. I went past a slide there.

The architect takes care of the geometry, as we mentioned. The engineer takes care of the reinforcement and detailing. And then the fabrication takes care of the delivery. In the almost guaranteed and eventual event of the case where the elements of precast designs, divisions are part of the design, this information needs to be transferred to the architect.

So for example here's an element he wants to produce, but the plant can't produce it in that size. It has to break it into two. It has to communicate back to the architect, are you OK, for instance, there being a break, a panel break, in your wall? For instance, we'll give you the overall design, the geometry one, but there's going to be a reveal on it.

And this is a very simplified change, but this happens all the time precast. What we typically do is that there would be an RFI or PDF sent back to your architect. Are you OK with this change? But what we're doing right now is we're now using this tool to communicate, within the model itself, this change.

So what the fabrication team could do, and tell the engineer and architect at the same, they can change the model itself. And then they have a verify function that allows them to confirm that this change is acceptable without having to send any PDF and Excel documents or have teams of engineers creating these RFIs. This is the goal. This is what we're trying to do. So where in the past, the factory to cope with these changes and send back information about the parts, the feedback loop allows direct feedback without any human reaction and just in time.

Engineers are involved here, too-- I didn't mean to go over them, I was just talking about the architects there-- as they take care of the reinforcement design so everything is held in place in the finished structure. But they have to also take into account some of this manufacturing restrictions, too, because they are most of the time actually creating real 3D design. They're designing these elements in the model itself. They need to know where these breaks are because it won't work.

In the past, most of these solutions demanded design to put lots of details needed for production data. We call this tech-centric approach, where the interface demands the design input upfront. We at Progress Group follow a little different approach. We call it "human-centric approach," where technology helps humans do a better and more efficient job without lots of additional burden to enable using it.

With that said, let's look at the difference between target versus action. What does that mean? Target means the owner wants to achieve a specific result without the need to know and take care of all the fabrication deals. For lack of a better argument, they just don't care how you achieve it. This is what they want.

The actual is what the fabrication gives them-- feedback about the actual outcome-- and the fabrication point of view. All parties within the workflow have the chance to agree on this outcome or modify design specs accordingly. By doing so, we are able to collect all data and combine it in the actual fabrication instructions, and send any improvements needed to the engineers and the architects in the same workflow. This BIM collaboration format, and by using our production test service to its full potential.

Therefore, while we are communicating fabrication changes back through the workflow to the engineer and architect simultaneously, we are creating and working with the same data that is then being used for fabrication. So for example, we're not creating a document, hey, can you approve these changes, and then once they approve it, we then redesign our elements to do it. We're making these changes in the actual fabrication data.

I'll show this on a later slide. It's very helpful. But it's really important to note that we're not creating additional work, redundant work. It's all being done in the exact same data that we're going to use to fabricate.

Basically, this is like a stoplight, basically saying that if we in order to proceed to the next step, we need to get a verification. And it's all being done in it. To recall, recap, this digitized feedback loop for the changes allows the architects and engineers to verify their inputs into the design and check through these changes.

The highlight architect takes care about the geometry. Engineering cares about the structural integrity. And fabrication delivers the elements based on this.

Our servers here, at this point, check to make sure it can actually be made. And then we can work back up if any kind of change is needed. This is a really elaborate-- not elaborate, but a very efficient way of having freedom of design in the whole process without creating unnecessary work.

So I talked at length about that, about the freedom design, but what does that give you? What does this give you in terms of an efficiency? And we wanted to show you how we can improve the workflows by using this actual model-based approach.

I spoke at length to this already, but this is what we're going to call it going forward-- this Model2Fabrication. We're basically taking a model to fabrication. Hopefully, it makes sense. We're just going to go through this somewhat quicker.

But we like this term-- what you see is what you get. Here's an example of a good Revit model showing various elements that have to be manufactured and precast, with all the reinforcement, and lifters, and connection accessories in this actual element. This is what we're used to. This is what the customers get.

But the problem is that most of the precasters are not actually using this data to produce from. They're taking this model and they're basically sluicing it through an engineering department that is going to deliver paper that they're going to deliver to the plant to produce. So why is this giving any more efficiency? Truth is, it's not. And what we're trying to achieve here is to use these high-quality models and say what the engineers and architects are specifying is exactly what they're going to get because we're using the same data and model.

So here's another example of a real model. So what we're seeing here is a Revit model. It's got various elements on it.

And then when we use our Model2Fabrication tool, which I'll show later, is that it converts it to this format. And you see it says, "What you see is what you get." So you're effectively taking this model and putting it through here.

And it converts it to either one of these formats, which I won't spend a lot of time on. But if you're in the precast industry, these are very standardized formats that virtually any automated manufacturing technology can work with. So what you're doing here is you're saving the work of taking an existing model, and taking shop tickets and individual drawings for fabrication for each one of these elements. You're just converting it to a format here that can be now very easily used.

You might have noticed, just to make sure everybody is still awake, that when I said, what you see is what you get, you're looking at the Revit model. But this is what you're getting as an output. And you might notice that there's these voids. There's these gaps in the model.

That is intentional. For those of you who worked in the design side of Revit, what they do is that if there's a multiple of a detailed element, which is what we'll call it, they create these holes that fill in for it. It's basically just like a placeholder showing that this element through here is all the same, but they're not going to create redundant data in the model because it just takes so much time from a design point to stand.

So this is what you're getting from the Revit model. This is what we need to produce because the machines that are producing this equipment, they need to know every single element, even though it's multiple-- how much reinforcement, how many embeds, how many certain accessories have to go in it? We're creating a better model.

So just to give you an example of what this tool is initially doing, is it's filling in these blanks. Fill in the blanks-- that's a good example of it. And then our model is even more detailed than the original.

So this is what we're going to be using in the fabrication side, where we have a fully detailed, every element here is all the necessary data to do it. So just to explain the difference between what the first step is, which is a detailed element and a blank, to now a detailed and hulls. Without any additional work by an engineering team, you get a fully detailed 3D model where in Revit, the designer kept data and man hours to a minimum, did not fully detail identical elements.

Model2Fabrication does that for you fully automatically, without any manual input. I'll show you on a later slide exactly the tool in action. It needs only be defined once and it does all the work for you afterwards.

So here's is another example of one fully detailed one already available in Revit. And the picture on the right shows what we've created as a fully 3D model with Model2Fabrication. Again, this is just filling in the blanks.

You're not redesigning this. You're not copying it. It's effectively just filling in this information necessary for manufacturing.

This usually would take a long time for your team to verify that these blanks were, in fact, the same model as the other one. Again, the fill in the blanks is one of the first tasks of this model. And this model-based workflow cannot work with blanks.

Just to give an example, as I'm sure some of you have worked with robots and machines, that even if data is redundant, it still needs it for each individual instance when it produces it. This completes the model.

Even goes even further-- so for instance, you've probably seen a lot of buildings have doors and windows. And a lot of times, the architects will specify a type of window, let's say a thickness, finish, and the engineer. But a lot of times, they leave a lot to the manufacturer, how am I going to seal that window.

So for instance, there's going to be a lot of unique parts that go into the manufacturing that is not part of the Revit hull. I think we can all encounter it, whether you're in precast or not, you've seen that a Revit model may be fully detailed, but it's not accounting for drywall screw or anything like that. This is talking about really details that our fabricator needs to know.

So what you can do within this tool is that you can use this Attribute function that you can convert and add these elements at the model itself with this toolbar. So for instance, let's say you have 300 windows. You need to have this much linear foot of tape, glue, any kind of flashing, whatever you need in this element, you can add it this function to know for your entire model what kind of costs am I associated with.

How many man hours, for instance, is this going to take me? This is something this tool does very well. So our ERP system, as I mentioned before-- the resource planning system-- gets more out of the original model for accurate cost tracking and inventory management than the model ever had to begin with.

And we are not changing the model itself. This is entirely being done on the fabricator side because the architect, for instance, doesn't need to know or does not care how much glue and tape you use. But you do.

So for instance, this is another benefit of the system, that it extracts and adds this missing recipe-- let's just call that-- of labor costs, unique parts, accessories, that go into something that you define. So you could say for every door, double door, window-- I'm just giving some examples here, and you can set this actual function in it. It's very helpful and important.

So I always find it helpful to-- you show, you don't tell. Here's the actual user interface for those of you who've worked in Revit. I hope you have. This is a standard example of the model being used.

Again, you're setting the format. This is going to go pretty fast. We talked about PXML. You set these various rule sets we were just talking about, and you export it.

Now, I have to be honest-- we are slightly accelerating this part of the actual processing because some of these models are large. But in this particular video, this was actually 400 seconds of reading time and 70 seconds of writing. So just to give an example of that, you're looking at 8 minutes time that would normally take an engineering department-- and I'd love to get your experience on this in the feedback at the end of this-- weeks and days of man hours, of just redundant data management that's already in the model itself. This is just doing it for you automatically.

And for those of you guys really keen on the details, you notice there's a failed production unit line there, just to give you an example. It's highlighting that there's some data in this model that's just not possible and that's not relevant to the structure. It was just kind of an extraneous data-- so just to let you see that failed production. There's no reason to convert it because you don't need it.

So this is what we're getting. This is in our own software we call IB CAD. It's a very stripped-down format of reviewing three-dimensional data. And we have it. This is what we got from that model. This is now a PXML file, which can be used in our manufacturing facilities directly for manufacturing.

And what it does even better is that it can actually take this particular element, and then what we have is what we have a PTS-server. And I mentioned this before, that we're actually checking this element to see, can we actually produce this with the equivalent in our plant? And it's really important because there's a lot of reinforcement detailing that goes into a structure that's just not possible to produce, because that rebar shape is just not possible.

So there's a lot of back and forth between the engineer and the fabricator, saying, OK, how do we get the same structural stability of the element while just making changes? Well, this does it for you. This is saying that this particular element is 100% producible. There's no errors on it, which would highlight it on the actual element.

So this is just an example of how you could streamline what normally we take a lot of engineering issues to work out. And a lot of times-- and I've been around precast plants-- that a lot of times, they don't even notice these problems until they get to the floor and the elements are already queued up for production. They have now idle tablespace while they're working on a solution, talking to engineers.

This does it beforehand. You don't need to worry about that because it will not get to the production floor until it passes this test. This is just another example of how you streamline this workflow in an efficient way.

And I think this is something that's important to talk about, is that no two precast plants are the same. While we do want to achieve a lot of standardization, realize that there's just a lot of limitations around the world. A country this large is definitely going to have limitations to what each market can produce.

So what you can do is you can define a rule set, saying that I can only produce elements up to a certain width and length in my plant. I can only use a rebar diameter up to a certain number, let's say a number 6. So anything that is going to be above that, I'm going to automatically flag it, and then communicate that back to the engineer.

Again, this is a streamlined way of communicating the limitations of fabrication back up the stream to the engineers in the model itself, in the language they know. And you can suggest changes. It really is a wonderful tool for giving a rule set for your particular production facility that only you can produce, and that if anything goes outside of that boundary, that is where you can focus on.

It's really helpful and important to know that because a lot of times, you'll only get to that if it gets to your actual production bench. Wait a second, I don't have a wide enough table for this element. That's an extreme example, but it happens all the time in precast facilities.

Again, so this is going to talk about it. This is just the company-specific rules. You can do it plant-specific, company-specific. There's just a lot of things you can do with this toolset that allows you from a logic standpoint, predefine what is the most efficient way to produce something and communicate that with the architects and engineers.

So here, a lot of that was theory. That last model I showed you that the video of the tool being used was actually from real customer data. And I just want to give a shout out to them.

They're called American Precast. They worked with us, and they really had some goals, and they shared a lot of their data with us. And they're the ones that really opened our eyes to the fact that most, if not all, the models that they're working with are extremely high quality.

So just to give you an example, again, and PTAC, I think it's important to mention, is a leader in the industry in terms of automation. They are a general engineering service. They do a lot of work in the precast industry. And they were partnered with us in Taracon on bringing the solution to a market solution that we could actually use on real data.

Again, I have to highlight-- this is not just theoretical. We're using this tool on actually produce projects right now. This is Taracon, just to give you some examples of the projects they do. They're a very successful precaster in the Minnesota area.

So just to kind of give you an example, without knowing this presentation scope, that they came to us with this these problems that they had. They wanted to digitalize their production. They wanted to cut costs by 30%, and they wanted to stay in the BIM system.

The BIM collaboration form is something they really are moving towards. They see the future, and just get away from all this redundant paperwork and handling, particularly which was a heavy burden on their engineering and production teams. And as well, they would set up a digital twin with all of this updated data we talked about for the actual erection of the structure, which is a large part of their business. Again, this is almost a textbook definition of what the Model2Fabrication tool benefits the user.

Again, we talked about this at length. I really do like this graphic. It shows that we have unique and individual modules that go in every one of these elements. And I just think it's important to show that we are part of this process.

And this one really highlights the practical side of what we showed in a more technical manner. This ties together what an actual user of this tool would see in benefit with his or her own project. Sure, you're going to get the design benefits that we talked about, but this is the part that they're really concerned about-- the technical design, the actual detailing of these elements, and then the construction, production, planning, and preparation of these elements in an efficient way. This is really where we're focusing on the market. And this is what the customers want to see from us.

I won't get too much into this, but just to give you an example of the various tools we have for this, if you have a fully automated 3D model out of existing Revit models, this is what this Model2Fabrication tool does. If you want more of what we've talked about the ERP systems, where you could do a lot of higher-level functions on this, we call it "ahead." And then our company itself, we can do tailored solution.

So just to giving an example, this is the tool we use for this. This model may look familiar to you because it's the exact one we're using in this example. And these are the actual delivered goods that this company produces. These are all large, successful precast projects that they're using this tool on.