Mastering Autodesk Build: Best Practices from Industry Experts

DAVID CAMPBELL: Hello, everyone. And welcome to Mastering Autodesk Build, where we're going to discuss some best practices. So today, my name is David Campbell. I'm going to go ahead and start with introduction, sorry. I'm going to go ahead and start with introductions. My name is David Campbell. I'm a lead application specialist with Topcon Solutions. I do a lot of our implementations and consulting around Autodesk Build and cost management.

I kind do a little bit of everything from in-person live consulting jobs to implementing large rollouts. And I brought with me Joe Whitney and Jordan Bullock. Guys, you want to go ahead and introduce yourselves?

JOSEPH WHITNEY: Yeah, hello. I'M Joseph Whitney. Joe, for those that know me. I'm a software sales manager. And I know that's not a title that screams industry expert like Dave and Jordan. But in previous roles here in this same company, I used to focus on implementing and supporting BIM 360, the predecessor to ACC. So I'm very familiar with this. And I came prepared and armed with best practices, as well as state case studies on everything from implementing the Construction Cloud and various modules for all range of stakeholder and project types.

JORDAN BULLOCK: And hi, guys. My name is Jordan Bullock. I'm a technical specialist and implementation consultant with Topcon Solutions. I help companies all over the United States really implement new software, figure out the best way to incorporate Autodesk into their workflows. And I'm here today as one of our Revit experts, as well as the Autodesk Construction Cloud.

DAVID CAMPBELL: All right. So before we move on to the agenda, just to bring it around, all three of us, we actually, we host the Brewing with BIM podcast, which was ranked the number one best BIM podcast by Feedspot 2024. So if you guys have heard of us or if you want to check us out, be sure to stop by our booth, booth 114. We're going to be live all week. But yeah, again, we're going to dive into the agenda. All right.

So for today's agenda, where I wanted to start was an introduction to Autodesk Build. We'll kind of move into managing your information flow. We're going to talk about the benefits of data in your projects. And then again, as Joey kind of mentioned there, some real world implementations. So let's get it started. With the introduction to Autodesk Build, Autodesk Build is a comprehensive construction management platform that really integrates different processes, different workflows, and tools for project management, quality, safety, and cost controls across all phases of your construction project, enhancing collaboration and efficiency from the office to the jobsite.

Now, we're going to see a lot of that here as we look at-- this is kind of really a breakdown of all the different tools or processes, workflows that we can utilize within Autodesk Build. We're going to have some project management, cost management, quality control, safety, and closeout. Now, one big thing I did want to make sure that I mentioned here, we have it down at the bottom, the foundation of all of this, really, is going to be, Autodesk Docs, which gives us that centralized document control center, our version tracking approval processes. There's a lot of pieces that we're going to talk about with this.

Now, overall, Autodesk Build, it gives you a unified project management kind of solution, where it consolidates critical control aspects, your quality, your safety, your cost, into one platform, reducing the complexity and the potential for errors. Now, the centralized data access helps to ensure that your team is really ready to go and can collaborate in all of the data, enhancing the transparency, kind of speeding up the decision-making process, and really enabling you to link seamlessly with your pre-construction and your construction stages to really minimize disruption, saving you time, reducing costs, right?

Now, in terms of managing the information flow, there is a lot of different types of data and a lot of different types of tools inside a build, as we kind of mentioned earlier with that other slide. As we start to break it down, quality, QA/QC, there's a lot there. There's a lot with safety. There's a lot with handover. Each one of these pieces, I mean in itself, each one of these, the RFI documents submittals, all of these pieces are going to have metadata and files associated with them. Now, that's just one kind of piece of it.

The other piece that we got to really start thinking about are the stakeholders. There's a lot of different stakeholders that need differing levels of access to that data. They need different tools, whether it's RFI, it's pay apps, whatever it is, change orders, what have you. These different stakeholders coming together in one environment. Now, obviously, as we start thinking about that with our files environment, the permissions that we got to do, our sheets, a lot of this starts to quickly feel quite overwhelming.

So with all of this coming together, how do we-- sorry, as I said, I'm not going to use my mouse wheel. I quickly use my mouse wheel. This all can get overwhelming really quickly. So how do we start managing that? How do we get away from that overwhelming, or that overwhelming feeling? Well, managing your data, and especially in a platform of this size where you're managing so many different streams of data, so many different processes, can really feel overwhelming. But it doesn't have to be.

Now, how do we make managing data easy? How do we start looking at how to make this-- using our best practices, make the transition, the implementation. How do we make finding this data easy? One, developing strong project templates or a strong project template. Two, make your files, your data, easy to find. Three, understand the various data workflows that are going to be needed on your project, but also in between those different pieces. So we're going to talk about quite a few different things today. As you saw in they kind of outline, I guess, we're going to talk about some files, sheets, RFIs, issues, submittals. There's a lot of assets. There's a lot of different tools here. And there's a lot of different data that's kind of going around inside of these projects.

So let's go ahead and start talking about one of those first steps, building a strong project template. How do we do that? Well, one of the first pieces, as I mentioned earlier on that slide breakdown, it's got to come from your file organization, because the foundation of build, the foundation of the Construction Cloud, is going to be Docs, where you keep those files, the file organization. Then we're going to start expanding into permissions, standards, and workflows. I mean, there's a lot that we need to talk about in terms of permissions standards and workflows. But with a template, that can really make or break it.

The file organization is going to be one piece where those permissions and the standards will be set. And then we kind of have to build off of that for the rest of it. Now, talking about that, 0.3, is building something that works. Now, that's a lot of times easier said than done. But what helps there is testing, feedback, and modification. So let's go ahead and talk about those.

With our file organization, creating a structure storage area, a logical folder set up reflecting, maybe project phases, but also maybe-- what I like to think about here is, typically, a lot of our clients will have a dedicated kind of folder structure, a template that is pretty standard for a lot of projects that they work through. The other thing we need to think about is creating a logical setup that causes the least amount of disruption for all of the teams that are going to be involved.

Something to think about here is, who is going to be accessing which folders? As we start expanding this to not just, let's say, our asset management team, our QA QC team, our safety or subcontractors, we're going to start expanding those folders and thinking about what team does what. What needs do they have? What information do they need to have access to? When is that information going to be needed? Where will it be coming from? And then again, how will they be accessing that information? Whether it's a subcontractor giving you an as-built Revit model, it's the design firm, it's the subcontractor accessing RFIs or-- excuse me, sending RFIs into the project.

There's a lot of different workflows here. But again, we have to start thinking about the project overall, and again, maybe start breaking it down in phases, or as we start increasing the need for rolling this out. But again, one of the biggest, I want to say, structural pieces with that, are going to be your permissions. So once we have that folder structure kind of set, the permissions from there, they have to be kind of rolled out. And if we're going to talk about in the template, obviously, roles.

Roles are going to be what's inside of the template to be able to standardize the permissions that we start to roll out for who can access the data, what they can do, what they can even see inside a build. But then again, as we get further and start expanding to those other pieces, we're going to build off of this to then start incorporating, well, how do I give members access for sheets? How can I give members access to RFIs? But then again, when we go back to all of it, you have to really come back after your step-- establishing those standards, building those templates, whether it's that folder structure and then the permissions, what you're seeing inside of the project once you've launched it. And this is what I mean here.

When you build a template, one of the first things you want to do is essentially launch a pilot project or launch a testing project off of that template. We need to go ahead and test that template and, essentially, start making sure that it does what we need it to do, make sure that the workflows that people can access, put ourselves in different roles, test things out, and make sure to document where we're having issues so we can take that back and essentially modify that. But taking it a step further, even after we've reached that, we passed that initial stage. We have it templatized. We have it rolled out. We have our project teams working in it. It doesn't stop then. We have to continuously take feedback for this and essentially analyze different feedback that we're getting from our project teams to modify those templates based on that feedback for better functionality, whether again, it's growing, roadmapping different features, or standardizing different processes based on new releases, what have you.

JORDAN BULLOCK: And one other thing you and I had talked about, Dave, is some project templates, they're not all one size fit all. It's OK to have multiple project templates for different scenarios, different projects that you standardize throughout your organization. As you're running through, it's just making sure you have some sort of feedback mechanism in place. That way you're getting and collecting that data and helping to build those templates to the best for those project scenarios.

DAVID CAMPBELL: That's a great point. Standardizing that feedback mechanism, making that available to all project members, that is really, really key. And then you can come back and figure out what you've been able to take care of, what hasn't been done, how high level it is. Great point, Jordan.

JOSEPH WHITNEY: And I like actually capturing that data inside of ACC on the project, so creating something like a project notes or Teams meeting or forums, so you can actually have your after-project review and have this kind of feedback loop mechanism tied to the project. So you know you can correlate what went well, what went wrong, where you can change, and make those immediate tweaks for the template based off of that project data or copy and create new templates for next projects.

DAVID CAMPBELL: Yes, sir. Yes, sir. All right. So how do we make data easy to find? One big thing we're going to talk about is attribute data. The second one is going to be standardizing your naming conventions. Now, as we talk about attribute data, we're going to start in files. But again, this is going to cascade to every single piece of build. Now, attributes can be metadata. It can be custom-- well, really metadata. It's going to be custom fields or locations, barcodes, manufacturer, serial number. There's so many different ways that we can start to, essentially, make sure we're inputting that data in so that we can make it easy to find, easy to search, easy to filter.

A specific example that I have for this, a client of mine, we actually started utilizing the Autodesk Construction Cloud as a host, like an archival kind of host for all of their existing-- their current buildings, their current-- well yeah, their current buildings. And essentially, they manage all these different buildings. And they were able to utilize the custom attributes to specify building number, different project numbers, coding systems, document IDs, different things like that to make it tie and literally make it to easily find and filter through that data, easy to navigate is really what I want to say there. They made it easy to navigate so they could go ahead and group certain data in their system by that. Now, riding along with that, of course, those standardizing the naming conventions, that is, again, going to cascade down across every piece as you're standardizing your submittals, you're standardizing RFIs issues. It helps to, again, find those different items and that data inside of that project.

JOSEPH WHITNEY: I think some of the coolest stuff with the attribute data is being able to auto-recognize and auto-populate attribute data. So those various attributes, those columns if you will, that you can custom create and tie to documents.

DAVID CAMPBELL: Yeah.

JOSEPH WHITNEY: And if you use things like a PDF and page regions and your documents are the same, it can auto populate this stuff. This has been-- I remember, dating myself here, the old BIM 360 Field Days and then seeing the evolution of Project Alexandria morph into the BIM 360 platform and finally ACC, seeing those attributes come online and being able to-- finding the creative ways for people to use it, it just seemed like an automated spreadsheet populating right before your eyes so that you can start filtering on that data. It's pretty slick.

DAVID CAMPBELL: It is very slick, man. I would completely agree. And as far as the naming conventions, dude, when this came up, I was actually pretty excited. I don't know if many of you know, but this comes along with a specific little holding area. And what I love about this is you can start to specify, as Joey was saying there, with the attribute data. But even breaking it down in the actual document name itself, starting to specify a phase, project location, a building number, a project type or anything like that, even just naming your documents in general so when you go to publish your sheets, it makes it easier. Or it makes it easier for the document to version-control.

Having this right along with a holding area where I can see all of the documents that have been uploaded and actually see what does not adhere to my standards, and then essentially update that and allow it to go back out into the system once it's been standardized. I mean, honestly guys, I've been in these systems before, where you get in and you're trying to navigate through. And there's so many different versions of a document, or I mean, honestly, it's endless. There's wormholes that you end up getting sucked down into. And it just drives you kind of insane. And even then, when I'm trying to find a document, when I go back and maybe a client is asking for a warranty or something like that, I want to make it easy to search and find that data. I don't, maybe, know that the warranty was called 1234 January 12, 2017. I don't really know that's the warranty document that I'm looking for. So a lot of times these naming conventions can help really, again, standardize the data and make it easy to find.

All right. So we talked about files. Let's get into sheets. Some of the key things I want to talk about with sheets are going to be the permission settings. And of course, that's going to be a common theme throughout the entire portion of Build. We have to start with the permissions. We got to know who can do what, who can get into what. But as far as expanding past that, sheet versioning. Those are going to be huge. Or set versioning, sheet versioning. Good Lord. Set versioning. We're going to talk about that one here a little bit more in a second.

Your collections. This feature came out a few months ago for sheets and has been amazing. We're going to talk about this in a few different things, or a few different kind of formats and ways that we can use it. Tagging. Tagging on your sheets is also another piece to help find and make your data easy, or make your data easy to find. And then associating those sheets with disciplines, that kind of goes back to enforcing a naming standard. If we can really start enforcing naming standards, not just for the PDF itself, but for the actual sheets, the individual sheets inside of that document, we can start to ensure that they publish easier. They're going to set to their discipline appropriately.

Obviously, if you have some different disciplines, we can go in there and kind of adjust it to make sure that it aligns with what we need, whether it's mechanical instrumentation, mechanical piping, architectural demo. There are so many different examples that we can get into there, but making sure that those disciplines correlate with, essentially, making the data easy to find. A common theme, guys. So let's talk about those sheet workflows, permission settings. Of course, this is the base. This is where we start to make sure what access level or what members can do what with sheets.

If you want them to publish sheets, if you want them to just view and be able to export, or you want them to be able to create markups. We need to go through and start setting these permissions. Now, obviously, the big point we want to make here is templates. You're going to see on the left here, a lot of times in my projects, I will recommend trying to standardize your roles and putting those in your templates. Now, we do like to talk about documenting that to make sure that you're mapping that role and the permissions that it has across the different features of Autodesk Build. We start with sheets. We look at what they can get into, what they can't get into, what they can upload, all that kind of stuff.

And then we start mapping it further. What are they going to do with sheets? And again, we're going to take that further as we go. That second piece was, of course, collections. A huge benefit of collections I've seen is for phase tracking, as you're going to see here. Eventually, we ended up combining phases one, two, and three. But originally, they ended up being their own sheet collections, phase one, phase two, phase three, and then phase four.

Now obviously, in phasing or buildings, like let's say in the example of a school, if you have a school job, you have multiple schools that you're going to be working in. In this example, when we go to publish our sheets, a lot of times we'll run into-- the common theme is if a sheet name and a sheet number is the same, even though it's for a different building, it's going to change the version. It's going to update the version. It overlaps. It gets confused, right? These sheet collections are essentially a way to control the organization of your sheets in terms of if I know this is building one, building two, building three. This is Kennedy High School and Johnson Middle School. And I know they're both going to have first floor classroom 101. This is a way for me to keep those sheets separated, essentially, by that overall collection.

Now, the next part about making that easy to find, I spoke about this a second ago, that version set. With the version sets, you're going to see that can start to go from the collection to the version set of that collection. So it kind of is like a filter or a layer of a filter in itself. If we start with the collection, we can then start filtering the version sets that were included in that collection, whether you're looking for addendum one, ASIs, permit sets, owner reviews, different things like that. We can start to find the data exactly where it was.

Now, that's the kind of nice thing about it too, is when you filter for a phase, or I'm sorry, for a version set, I'm thinking of phases here. When you filter for a version set, it's going to show you the document as it is in that version set. So even if there's a newer one, you're going to see that it's not current. You can go ahead and click that little button on the top left there and change our version and then update to a newer or older version. But it's going to show you exactly the way that it is then.

Now, the other piece I wanted to talk about there is tags. Tag is also a nice tool. You're going to see we started doing some disciplines there. We started doing contract drawings, electrical. But essentially, tags can be used in so many different ways, if it's certain details, if it's a specific room that you're working in, if it's specific items, whether they're outlets, bollards, doors, whatever it is. You have the capability to tag those sheets and, again, making them easier to find.

Now, this one of course, I'm going to beat it to its dead here, but this discipline. If we go back to those naming standards, as long as we are kind of standardizing the naming of our sheets, our sheet conventions, our sheet-naming conventions, there we go, publishing the sheets makes it so much easier to get it in there and get it done. You have less of this stuff right here where it's just reading random stuff or you have random letters and numbers popping up. We want to get to more of a standardized approach, where each time, it knows its discipline. It's going to architectural. It's going to architectural demo. It's going to mechanical instrumentation, mechanical piping, controls, whatever it is. We can get this system templatized in a way to, essentially, make it easier to navigate through. And once those sheets are published, they just go right into place.

Now, photos and videos. Now, there's quite a bit that we can talk about on these. The big three with photos and videos are going to be standardizing the metadata. Now, when we mean metadata, that could be your locations, your dates, your-- I'm trying to think-- tags, different things like that, to make them easier to find. I mean, when I say standardize the tags, I'm a little more-- you do want to do that on both sheets and photos. In photos, you're going to see kind of same thing where we can start to actually get through and filter and sort based off the tags. You do have some auto tag capability. But again, what that does is that lets us or helps us, really, filter and sort those photos and videos based on that metadata references tags, or again, those locations.

JOSEPH WHITNEY: Can you tag things multiple times?

DAVID CAMPBELL: Oh yeah, dude.

JOSEPH WHITNEY: [INAUDIBLE] next project.

DAVID CAMPBELL: Yeah, that's a great question. So we can definitely tag things with multiple objects. So if you're seeing concrete, if you're seeing rebar, if you see a safety infraction and an opening, you can start to call these different things out. And what you'll see as we go through some of these photos here, or some of these screenshots of photos, you'll kind of see that we'll start calling out some of the different tags there. And we can start stacking it. And that's another great point, Joe. They will recognize-- the auto tags will automatically start stacking. It can recognize those trends. Now, as far as trying to navigate the photos log, one of the big things, of course, we're talking about making data easy to find. You're going to look towards this filter. Because right now, we don't really have albums.

And a lot of people will talk to me and say, Dave, we don't have a good way to organize our photos. Well, let's start talking about that. Because if we really start looking at the filter, whether it's the location, the date that it was taken, the date that it was added, you'll start seeing last seven days, things like that, the photo type, who it was referenced-- or what it's referenced by, excuse me, those tags, and then who it was uploaded by. So if we start thinking along that kind of train of thought there with the filter in mind, One of the first things that-- well actually, one of the second things before I go into filtering here, is that each of these issues, I'm sorry, photos and videos, they're created on a mobile device. As long as they have the location on, what you'll notice is one way to start finding specific photos or looking for photos for project over project is really, one of the first places is the location or the map here, the GPS location.

Now, I'm going to reference location twice within photos. I just want to tell you to be up front with you. The GPS location is what I'm showing here. The other locations that we're going to talk about are something that's project-based that we can go ahead and reference into that, such as here. You're going to see, within the details of the actual photo itself, we can go ahead and start to specify a location, whether that's going to be a distribution room, it's going to be a server room, or it's going to be a mechanical room, a classroom, whatever it is. And to your point there, Joe, we can see that some of these pictures, they can auto tag. We can stack these with multiple items if needed. But again, what I've seen is very beneficial, just at one level as we get down into it.

If you're starting to-- if you're standardizing the project locations, obviously the map there in the background is going to help us start to look around at the location on a large site. But if you're on a smaller kind of site, a lot of those blips are going to be grouped together. In this case, the locations that you store on your project, whether it's first floor, second floor, third floor, breaking it down by classrooms or whatever it is, essentially that's going to, when you do that filter, it's going to filter that photo videos log to only show you the photos and videos from that location. But the other cool train of thought there is that you'll have the entire log of all of the photos and videos for that specific room or that location. So it's kind of like looking at a progress map, the progress photos and videos of that entire location from when it started to when it was finished. So that's a pretty cool feature there as well.

JOSEPH WHITNEY: Yeah. So essentially, you're giving yourself multiple ways to filter data without actually having to put them in a folder to group them by. And that's by design. Because if you think about it, you might have the same photo that applies to multiple groupings. And what are you going to do? You're just going to copy that and put that in multiple folders. This allows you to actually filter that down. So maybe you have, getting back to tagging there, maybe you have an air handling unit. That air handling unit might fall under a warranty tag. It might fall under mechanical. It might fall under equipment or asset or however else you're tracking that. How can you search for that? So maybe you have a folder for equipment. But then how do you differentiate that air handling unit from the rest of your equipment, which could be a truck on a loading dock or something. It could just be anything. So this allows us to do that and allows us to group that sort of data without having to worry about, is it in the right folder, sort of functionality.

DAVID CAMPBELL: Joe, I really love that train of thought, brother. As you guys can see here with this one here on the left with details and references, Joe's exactly right. Connecting this, as we were talking about earlier, photos is a piece just like sheets, just like assets, schedule, RFI submittals, that works into all of these tools, all these processes that we can really utilize within Autodesk Build, whether that's QA/QC, kind of like Joe mentioned. If we have an asset with a barcode, it's an AHU. We've mapped that from the Revit model. We brought that in. We've taken pictures of it getting delivered. We're taking pictures of it as it gets moved, as it's getting installed. The electrician is going in, taking progress photos, doing the Meggar testing, doing torque testing. We're getting photos and videos. And essentially, as Joe's kind of mentioning here, we can reference all of that together and kind of physically see the evolution of our project and the evolution of that data and make it easy to find by starting to connect those different dots together.

Now, talking about another one of those dots or nodes in this case, Issues. So Issues, these again, are another very, very awesome and versatile tool. We see these being used a lot of different ways. Now, when you start talking about utilizing issues, we do have some things that we feel is best practice for issues. One is going to be, of course, the categorization. Classifying your issues by priority type. You can streamline the resolution process for these. But really, again, it's also going to help you start filtering down to specific tasks, open items that you need to address.

And the other nice thing about Issues for me is they're like a markup on steroids, with the fact that they can start to take it another level. Yes, you have a pin that you can place on a sheet or in a model, different things like that. But it takes it to another level in the sense that we can start to assign the ball and core, define the deadlines, the review period, start to assign, give it a description, a question, anything like that, link it to the other data in the system. It starts to take on more form at that point, whether it's going to be something that needs to be followed up on and needs to be completed in terms of a to-do or punch list or clash versus maybe it's a safety infraction or many different things of that nature. But the last piece here too is tracking and updating. There's going to be dashboards and different ways that you can monitor these issues and make updates as you see these items being updated.

So with your Issues, we talked about these, of course. This one, again, as a standard, the locations. As your issues, as you start generating more and more issues, not just locations, but the statuses, the type, starting to filter, starting to search for those specific issues that you're looking for. Again, issues can take on all different kinds of shapes, whether it's punch listing coordination, safety infractions coordination, you name it. But essentially, as we start to look at how we're utilizing issues, one big best practice I could give you is to start looking and utilizing templates.

Your issue templates give you the capability to start, I want to say, templatizing, what issues are going where. And kind of like we were talking about earlier with files, in terms of how to ensure what data is going where, who's going to see it. What you can do with these templates is really start to dictate being able to create preset, whether it's tasks, like your field personnel work order, a plumbing punch item. Or it's something that you need to track, like a coordination issue, a safety infraction, or even in the data center project that I was working on as we received equipment that's missing panels or the torque marks were off, different things like that. It gives us a way to essentially, again, track the overall issue. But these templates give us a way to roll that out to our team members in a standardized way, specifying maybe who we're going to be, maybe the watchers, who's going to be aware, like who's assigned to it, who's going to be aware, the due date, the start date.

A lot of those different things for issues themselves. So we can start to, instead of letting users go through selecting all those different options, or not really letting, making them have to populate all this data. We want to make it easy for them. But we also want to make it easy for us. If you can standardize those templates, this is a potential RFI. This is a clash. This is a safety infraction.

We start to be, again, be able to filter and search for that data and find it a lot easier. Now, those locations, again, that is going to be another huge piece of making your data easy to find. The locations are typically stored in your project settings. But once you do that, you'll notice that you can actually start adding QR codes, so it can tie to your photos. You can start linking sheets to these locations, linking your issues, the photos. There's so many different things that we can start doing with this. It's very, very cool. But they work very, very well also into your issues.

When you think about building a punch list report. As you're walking through punching out all the different items or all the different issues that you see for either work to complete for yourself or you're tracking for a subcontractor, whatever it is, this builds you a list that you can then go ahead and export out and follow up on. Or you don't even need to really export it, because they're all living items at that point. They're living things that you can take. You have a task log to go ahead and follow up with other photos, comments, or go ahead and close it out when it's been taken care of.

JOSEPH WHITNEY: And the cool thing about issues is, getting back to your comment about them being versatile, there are a lot of unique ways you can use issues. So for example, maybe finding a way to use issues to dictate whether it's going to impact others in a project. So almost like a pull planning mechanism, if you will.

DAVID CAMPBELL: I like that.

JOSEPH WHITNEY: But using that issue to identify if it's going to be a three day fix, a one week, a two month. Is this a bigger issue? How does this impact you later on? Dave, you and I built this fun little chat GPT integration for ACC last year. Or maybe it was the year before. Time flies. I don't remember when. But utilizing something like that in natural language. A natural language processing tool, essentially, to analyze your data to figure out if where are these big headaches and hiccups are. And how much is this going to push my project behind? If you're analyzing all of them, is it on the first floor? Is it the certain sub? What's the big issue here? And how far back it's driving things. And again, we can get more into this with schedules and pull planning and stuff. But you can derive a lot of this power from issues with correct templates and tagging and setting this up correctly. Another comment, just on the versatility of it, not so much a best practice. But this is how versatile issues are.

Think about this. Again, dating myself here, but BIM 360 layout, again old in the tooth tool, ran on glue. It was pretty slick. They rebuilt it in the BIM 360 portfolio on the new Project Alexandria, predecessor to ACC, but essentially operating in the same environment. And when they did that, it actually uses issues to create the point geometry for the layout. So to tell your layout crew, your total station crew, where that geometry is to create those points, it's actually an issue. Just classify it as a point. So just crazy things you can do with issues thinking outside the box, just with the descriptions and the XYZ location.

DAVID CAMPBELL: Yeah. Yeah, dude. I mean, they are awesome. I mean, there's a lot of use cases here, like you mentioned. And there's a lot of capability, especially when you start tying it together with insights, when you tie it together with Power BI. You start looking at the actual KPIs and you start looking at, like you kind of mentioned there, Joe, with the connections of how this issue, if it has a schedule impact, if it has a cost impact and you've referenced it, you've connected it to the schedule, you've connected it to the potential change order that has become an OCO or SCO to analyze that and see how it's fully affected the project. But even then, to have the full data trail to tell you exactly where it started and where it ended, that's I mean, it's awesome, dude. It really is.

All right. So another one we got to get into here, of course, is Forms. For forms, there's going to be three big ones. We have your templates. Now, I'm going to tell you, this goes two different ways. Yes, you want to create good form templates. But you also want good form template folders. OK? We want to organize our form templates. Otherwise, you create chaos. And there can be a lot of chaos with these forms pretty quick.

Now, the other pieces here, Conditional Fields. We can implement conditional fields to ensure completeness and accuracy. Conditional fields, although like making a required field is one thing. But where this really starts to tie-in to some of the other pieces, like we were mentioning, with photos, with issues, these conditional fields or conditional, making your forms a little bit more intelligent. If you're walking through and you're doing a quality checklist, and is this element-- does the panel have the face installed? Is the panel cover installed? No. Well, the conditional formatting here, the conditional field says if you say no, I need to create an issue saying that this panel cover needs to be installed. Or I'm sorry-- what it does is it either requires or it suggests for those items to be created. That conditional formatting can say again, if this happens, this is what needs to follow. So we, again, start creating some intelligence in our forms. And then we can start linking those to other project data like our sheets, our issues, things of that nature.

Now as I mentioned, these forms, they can be great. They're very, very powerful. What we're looking at here is our overall forms log. How do we really start making this data easy to find? Because right now, as you can see, I'm giving a decent example here with our daily walk, some of my template folders. But as you're going to see, this can get filled up pretty quick. So your form templates, obviously you want to start thinking about how to digitize the templates, how to utilize the conditional logic, the roles, the permissions that will go into, not only utilizing these forms from their templates, but also who can view them, who can review them, and then who is managing these forms and their templates.

In this case, if I'm setting up a system and I have a QA QC manager that knows their checklist for electrical equipment a lot better than I do, I can go ahead and help them get established. But I'm not going to manage their form. I wouldn't mind viewing it and seeing what's going on. But I'm going to allow that QA QC manager to manage their own form templates. Now again, for staying a little bit more organized here, these four are the folders that you're looking at over here towards the left. Your folders really help you, not only stay organized, but they're also going to help your members with creation of forms.

So when they actually go to create a form, what you'll notice is if I select all forms here like it's showing, and I hit Create Form, it's going to show all of my form templates based on what permissions that I have, based on what permissions are what forms I've been assigned to be able to fill out. But if I'm a QA QC person or if I'm doing my daily, I don't really know if I want to see a dropdown of 20 to 50 different forms. In this case, what you'll notice is these template folders, one of the cool features I love about this is when you select it, and then you go to Create Form, it's actually going to give you the form out of that specific folder that you have permissions to, the quality folder, the punch list, the safety, timesheets, that you or you in that role have permission to.

Now, as far as making these things easy to find, because of course, we can search, and we can filter through these just like we can everything else. One piece is, of course, the metadata inside of that report. The due date, your form date, the location, of course, guys, again, common trend, right? We're seeing that location kind of tie-in to every piece here. And then again, references, being able to tie these things together. Now, in this next one, I just go back. We're seeing those locations there. That again, is coming from project settings.

That location then can be tied into the form. Then we can track who it's assigned to, the due date. We can add references and link this all back to the other pieces within Autodesk Build. Now, again, as we're doing this and making that data easy to find, the search, the filters, you can start searching and filtering based on when that form was created, when it started, when it ended, the due date, who it was created by, notes on it. There's going to be a lot of different ways that we can start to filter and find specific forms for this.

All right. So let's start getting into some of the bigger tools now. RFIs. With best practices for RFIs, you need to have some dedicated roles. And with your dedicated roles, there are going to be permissions in the system to create, to manage, and to coordinate, and to review your RFIs. Templatizing that in your-- standardizing that in your templates or templatizing it in your templates is going to allow you to essentially start generalizing. So if you know that an RFI is, like an architectural RFI, that's going to go to an architect. OK, cool. We can go ahead and make that architect a reviewer, give that role architect a reviewer permission. And we know that that's going to be across our different projects.