Reinventing Construction: A BIM-Enabled World

DANIELLE DY BUNCIO: All right, cool. Good afternoon, everybody. Thanks for coming to my talk. My name is Danielle Dy Buncio. I'm the Founder and CEO of a company called VIA Technik. I see a lot of familiar faces in the audience, so that's awesome. Thanks for coming. To start, I'd like to give a little bit of background about myself so that you know the perspective that I'm coming from.

So I have over 30 years of experience in the construction industry. My parents started a company when I was just a toddler, so I sort of grew up in construction and was around it my entire life. My very first job site I think I was like three or four years old, which was sort of fun. Because I grew up in the construction industry, I've always been really passionate about the industry. But as I grew up and as I got more involved and I got a degree in civil engineering, I worked for general contractors in Silicon Valley and Australia and Chicago on both building and infrastructure side, I started getting really frustrated with how slow the industry was to adopt technology.

I'm sure a lot of people in the room feel the same way. That's why we're all here. So six years ago, I decided that I could affect greater change in the construction industry if I sort of removed myself from one company and could work with hundreds or thousands of companies. So VIA Technik was founded six years ago. Our mission is to improve productivity in the construction industry and to enable change through innovative technologies.

In 2018, so far we've worked on over 350 different projects. That's varying levels of engagement, but some sort of technology has been deployed by our teams on some pretty interesting projects from data centers to hospitals to universities, corporate campuses, all sorts of different types of projects totaling over $20 billion. There's some big projects like Apple Campus and Tesla Gigafactory that help bump that number up. A lot of people will ask me what VIA Technik stands for or how we got that name.

So the V, the I, the A is an important concept for later on in my talk. It stands for visualization, integration, and automation. And for me, that's the purpose of BIM, and specifically that's the purpose of the data within the BIM. And I definitely think that the industry is at that visualization stage. We know how to visualize our projects through the model, we're running clash detection, we're doing BIM coordination, we're solving problems virtually through the model because we're able to visualize it more impressively than a set of 2D drawings, but we're not really quite at an industry level at that integration or automation level.

And what I mean by integration is the idea of data integration, is taking all the different sources of data from a BIM, from our project controls, corporate level data, sensor data, IoT data, combining that, integrating it, and drawing meaningful insights. And if we can get to that integration, that's when we can get to the automation. So that's when we can start doing automated work processes, automated construction. So I'm going to start this talk by kind of high level what I see happening in the construction industry, and then I'm going to zoom down into if this is what we're seeing in the construction industry, here are some things that we can do to start reinventing the industry.

My hope is that some of the case studies and examples that I'll show in the second half of the presentation, maybe one or two of those concepts resonates with you and is something that you can take away and actually implement in your companies. At AU, sometimes there is a lot of high level talk, big ideas, everything sounds awesome, but I want to make sure that the examples I show are actionable. The best compliment I could get is you guys come find me and say that you implemented this on your projects.

So there's four industry dynamics that I'm seeing happening a lot. And those four dynamics, the way they interact together are really setting a very complex landscape in the construction industry. So the first dynamic I'm seeing is that owner requirements are becoming more demanding. Raise your hand if you are a demanding owner or have worked with demanding owners. You raised your hand really fast. Are you an owner? OK, yeah. So I mean, everybody has had that demanding owner experience. I actually think that's a good thing, and I think that they should be demanding and I think that that should push us to be more innovative.

One of the projects we worked on in the last year or two was the Tesla Gigafactory. So Elon Musk, although we were like 20 steps removed from actually dealing with Elon, I am on a first name basis now. He is the most demanding owner. It was really interesting, though. So when we created the BIM, everything needed to be fabricated from the BIM. It was entirely linked to the project controls, so pay applications happened through the BIM. You didn't get paid if it wasn't in the model, and you didn't put in the model the data associated with the day that it was installed on the project.

And so that was really interesting. It was also really difficult when Elon would change his mind. And he said, actually, we're going to build the cars like this, and we're going to change this, and this is going to be a battery plant, this is going to be something completely different. And everything still needed to be modeled before it was built. So very, very quickly, we needed to get all of those design changes into the model, which forced innovative processes. And so it was a really interesting dynamic for us, because those demanding owner requirements forced innovative processes.

The next dynamic that I'm seeing, and this is really awesome, is that building designs are becoming more complex. Another project that we worked on is the Apple Campus Two, the new Apple Campus in Cupertino. And actually, it's just a lot of little things about this project that are really complex. The fact that it's a circle is really interesting, because there's almost no 90 degree walls. And surprisingly, or maybe not surprisingly, a lot of our work processes are set up, right, like wall layout is set up with 90 degree angles.

Quantity takeoffs become much more difficult when you can't very easily put something on a whole bunch of 2D planes. And so we need to come up in the construction industry with the skill set to enable us to build those more complex designs. All this is happening at the same time that there is an incredible skilled labor shortage. So actually, raise your hand if you're a construction company. OK, so like half the room. Raise your hand if you are having a hard time finding skilled labor, whether it's in the field or in the office.

OK, I'm pretty sure everyone who raised their hand that they were a construction company also raised their hand that they're having trouble finding skilled labor. Autodesk and AGC partnered to survey a whole bunch of general contractors. 70% said they're having a hard time. I actually kind of think that that other 30% just didn't want to tell everybody that they're having a hard time. And this is really difficult, because construction is booming. There is a lot of demand. And globally, there's a lot of need.

People are moving into cities, population is booming, and so we really need to figure out, a, how to attract more people to our industry, or two, how to build with less labor. And it's probably a combination of both those things. But the fact that there's a skilled labor shortage makes the construction industry really complex right now. The fourth industry dynamic that I'm seeing is this issue of labor productivity. And so this is an issue that's already been talked a lot about at AU and is probably something that all of you guys have seen before.

This chart is from the McKinsey Global Institute. They looked at labor productivity over time across different countries. So the way this chart reads countries, countries on the far right are accelerating. Their productivity is improving as compared to themselves in years prior. On the left, productivity is declining. The y-axis is the cost of labor. So if you're on the top left, which is where the United States is, it means that our productivity is declining, and we're a high cost labor country. And so those two things together are really bad.

And the fact that productivity is declining is a big deal. This is the chart that more people are used to seeing. It's that idea of, let's look at the manufacturing industry and see what their productivity improvement has been versus the construction industry. This chart was originally created out of Stanford University by a Professor named Paul Teicholz. Since its been published, it's really interesting. The construction industry gets really agitated by seeing this chart. So even since the last two days at AU, here's what I hear.

Well, of course productivity is declining. If you just look at the number of safety incidents that happened 20, 30, 40 years ago, our job sites are much safer. Well, manufacturing is much safer, too. I also hear that, you can't compare us to manufacturing, because we're not a manufacturing industry. We're a prototyping industry. So look at productivity gains in a manufacturing prototype, like the prototype of a Tesla car versus this residential facility.

Here's the thing. There is a lot of reasons why this is the case, and I actually think a lot of those are legitimate reasons. But the because or the whys behind this I don't think should just be where we end. The excuse is not where we should end. We still should figure out how to improve. And I think the reason why we need to figure out how to improve is because of the impact that it has on our global society. We combined a few different data sources to come up with some of these numbers. If we could close that productivity gap between construction and manufacturing, we'd increase GDP by over $3.9 trillion dollars. We'd generate over 2.5 million jobs.

So this is really interesting. This is the type of thing that I think people in the construction industry should be thinking about when thinking about how to reinvent ourselves is that societal global impact. So those four industry dynamics-- owners are becoming more demanding, designs are becoming more complex, the skilled labor shortage, and this declining productivity-- have created a really complex environment for construction companies to navigate. I've seen two things actually make really meaningful change.

The first is Building Information Modeling, BIM. And it's a lot of why what we're talking about these last couple of days is what we'll be talking about until Thursday. For me, I think what's really interesting about BIM is the idea of spatial data and integrated systems. We really need to start moving BIM beyond design and construction coordination and start thinking about how the data in our BIMs can feed our other work processes. How can we link supply chain data to the data in our BIM?

How can we manage our project controls, our costs and schedule with the BIM? Facilities management is another great example. BIM is a really powerful tool to locate facilities management data in a spatial way. So we actually asked over 500 of our clients, partners, colleagues to tell us how is BIM impacting their projects. I'll be honest. If you answered my survey, it was probably a little bit skewed. Like you believed that BIM could make an impact on your business. But I thought it was really interesting because finally for the first time, I was seeing an industry impact beyond resolving clashes in the field.

And so actually, the number one and the number two-- well tied for number two-- things that people said about the impact of BIM was an improved ability to plan construction phasing and logistics and improved communication. And I loved that. It went beyond just creating 3D models into increasing collaboration, and there's something really powerful about this construction phasing in logistics example. BIM is often very static, or the way we run our BIM processes are often very static.

We're figuring out what the model looks like on the day that the project is complete, but construction is in its nature dynamic. And very often, we don't take that dynamic nature of construction into account in our BIMs. So I love that people were finally responding about this phasing and logistics, because they're starting to think about how do you bring the dynamic nature of construction into BIM? The second thing that I've really started saying move the needle in construction is this idea of pre-fabrication.

And I was very intentional when I talked about BIM before pre-fabrication, because you cannot do pre-fabrication without a high level of sophistication in BIM. Trust me. I've seen it done. It doesn't work. It's really interesting. So this is a project-- we've worked on a lot of different pre-fab projects, both single trade or multi trade pre-fabrication. These are images from a hospital in St. Lewis where we've been enabling multi trade pre-fabrication bathroom pods as well as hospital room units as well as the adjacent corridor. So it's kind of gone beyond just that traditional bathroom pod example.

This would not have been possible without a high level of sophistication and BIM and without changes within the supply chain. And this sort of change is coming more rapidly. Katerra is a company that I'm sure most of you have heard of. They've been infused with over $1 billion in capital and VC funding to change the game, and pre-fab is at the core of their business. It's interesting, because the way we treat our projects is very different than other industries that do fabrication.

So if I asked anybody at Boeing what the parts list was of the Boeing 777, they could go look that up. They could tell me exactly how many nuts and bolts of this size, where they all went, how it all came together. There is a parts list of the Boeing, and that parts list enables that factory fabrication. If I ask anybody what the parts list was of this Venetian Hotel, they would look at me like I'm crazy. And I bet you if I asked you the parts list on any of your projects, you could say, well, here's our estimate. Here's our quantity take offs.

This is close, but I don't know how many nuts and bolts there are. We actually need to get to a closer level like that Boeing 777 if we're going to get to the industrialized construction that so many people are talking about. Industrialized construction is here. Most of our industry is still here. We need to bridge that gap. So pre-fabrication BIM is making meaningful impacts in the industry, but something about the industry is still broken. Most of our projects are still behind schedule and over budget.

And so I do like to ask, is there something about the construction industry that's fundamentally broken despite this technology, despite the industrialized construction revolution? So this is from a survey from the Dodge Construction Outlook. They put together really great outlooks every year. They surveyed over 100 owners, and they asked their owners, tell us about your typical projects. Are they ahead of schedule, behind schedule, over budget, under budget? And then they asked them to tell them about their best projects.

So 21% of owners said that their best project was still behind schedule 17% of owners said that their best project was over budget. That means these companies have never had a project on time and on schedule, and we're not even talking about building it faster, building it cheaper. We're just saying, build it for what we said we were going to build it for. Can you imagine in any other industry, if this would be acceptable? Like you go in, you want to buy a car, they tell you, OK, this is how much it is and you're going to drive it off the lot.

Then you actually start paying them. There's real money that used to be yours that's now in the car dealer's hands. And they said, well, hold on. We're not ready. And it's actually going to cost five grand more, and come back in two weeks. That would never be acceptable. But that's unfortunately the experience that we're giving the owners in the construction industry. So what is broken? I think a big part of what is broken is the digitization.

Raise your hand if you've seen this chart. Oh, only a couple people. It's new, yes. All right, so McKinsey Global Institute again put this chart together in 2015. I doubt it's that much different today. So they've charted various industries and different processes across those industries and decided what percent digitization was happening. And so up at the top are industries with a high level of digitization. Down at the bottom is the construction industry, almost entirely in red.

The only industry that they've charted as worse than the construction industry in terms of the level of digitization is agriculture and hunting. So I'm from Chicago. One of our great universities outside of Chicago is you U of I Urbana-Champagn. And let me tell you this, there is so much ag tech going on right now. They use IoT. They use machine learning. They're using drones.

I'm pretty sure if we don't step it up, construction's going to be dead last. And so I want that to kind of be our burning platform. We've been talking about this for a really long time. One of my professors at Stanford put together the first BIM prototype in 1986. So not going to make you raise your hand, but some of you weren't born. And so we've been talking about this for a really long time. Nothing's changed. There needs to be something that changes.

So I like to look at other industries when thinking about, all right, what needs to change, how we're going to change it, do we need to change? Or actually is it fine, because our companies are profitable? So I like to look at Amazon. I thought this was a really cool thing that happened pretty recently. I think it was just earlier this year, like April or something, Amazon bought Whole Foods. And it was really interesting, because before Amazon bought Whole Foods, all these grocery companies thought that they were in a different market.

So Target and Walmart and Costco and Kroger, Supervalu, all of them were competing in the grocery market. And they were outperforming each other with innovation in marketing or innovation in supply chain. They were in the traditional brick and mortar grocery business. And then one day, Amazon announced that they bought Whole Foods, and everybody woke up and realized, oh actually, we are in a fundamentally different business now. And Amazon's our competitor. That's a big deal.

So this is what happened to stock prices the day after Amazon announced that they bought Whole Foods. Whole Foods went way up. Amazon went up. Everybody else lost a ton of shareholder value. That was a big deal. It woke them up. Well, we should wake up. Who saw that Amazon invested in a company called Plant Pre-Fab? So Amazon is now in the construction business. That's a big deal. So raise your hand if you want Amazon to be the one that disrupts the construction industry.

You do? Are you from Amazon? I love Amazon. I want to be the one that disrupts the construction industry. I want you guys to be the one that disrupts the construction industry. I don't want it to be Amazon. And it's not just Amazon. Other people are noticing, too. Just a side story, a lot of my friends have no idea what I do. They're like oh, technology, VR, construction, something. There are a lot of things out there in the industry now that are waking everybody up to the opportunity.

It's an $8 trillion global industry, and we have declining productivity. If that were a math equation that you could do, that equals money. And so McKinsey put out the article which I've already quoted. There was this article in the Economist. After the article in the Economist about construction productivity, I got a bunch of calls, because they actually mentioned BIM, and my friends were like, oh, is this what you do? I read about it in the Economist.

I'm like, yeah, that's what we do. And so other people are starting to wake up, too. Not just my friends, those in the VC Industry. So in 2017, there was $433 million in funding. That's like double what it was the year before. This year, there's been billions of dollars in VC funding. In January, Katerra got $800 something million from SoftBank. SoftBank and other companies have invested over $12.6 billion in real estate technology. There's $4.4 billion in investment in WeWork, $550 million in a company called Compass, $200 million in Airbnb, so there is definitely investment in trying to make change.

So change is coming. So what is this reinvented construction industry going to look like? I don't totally know, because it's really hard to tell the future. I have a couple I think fun analogies about how hard it is to tell the future. So in 1943, the President of IBM, Thomas Watson, said that he thought that there was a global market for maybe five computers. Raise your hand if you personally have five computers, right? Your work computer-- oh, there needs to be way more hands. Your work computer, personal computer, your iPad, your cell phone, your iWatch, Apple Watch, whatever. You might have more.

And so he predicted that he was going to sell five of these, and now he sold me five. And he was right, though. There was a global market for five computers when they looked like that and you needed to have an entire university building in the basement with intense cooling to get it to work. But a lot has changed. Similarly, a major consulting company told the landline, the old telecom industry not to invest in mobile, that cell phones was a niche market. They were also wrong, right? So a lot of stuff changes.

Just little changes, actually, can be the enabler for this boom. And I just told you there's all these problems in the construction industry and things are going really badly, but the change is coming, and Amazon's coming, and all those sorts of companies are coming but that I have no idea what the future is. How do we prepare? I think the only way to prepare is to make innovation part of your DNA.

So I'm going to tell you about what I do at VIA Technik to make innovation part of our DNA that I think is pretty applicable to most companies out there. So one thing I do to make innovation part of our DNA is I try really hard to learn from other industries. So if you look at the communication industry-- I mentioned cell phones before-- communication was very slow. Ideas spreading was very slow when it was in an analog world. When I communicated because I physically went and talked to somebody, I got on this old fashioned phone, or I mailed a letter.

That is an analog world. It took a really long time to communicate, but all of that communication, it wasn't digital and it wasn't connected. One letter that I wrote to my mom was completely separate than the other letter that I wrote to my mom. There was no digital connection. There was no learning from that. So what happened when the communication industry went from analog to digital? There was a boom, an innovation boom.

There are so many methods of communication now it's actually kind of crazy. Sometimes I get confused over which medium I should use. But it's not just that there's so many ways to communicate now that it's digital. It's also the power of what happens when that communication is connected. So this idea of digital connection is really important, I think. I'll give you an example. So we have a party tonight at the Rock House. Many of you may have gotten an EventBrite, and if you didn't, you can look it up.

So you can register for our party tonight on EventBrite. My phone, probably your phone too, reads the email receipt that I got from Eventbrite and it says, oh, I think that you have something to go to tonight. So it automatically puts a calendar request on my phone. And then, the party starts at 9:30. If I'm in another building and it's going to take 20 minutes to walk to the Rock House, it's going to notify me through my maps that maybe I should leave now, because it's 20 minutes to the Rock House. I can click that little notification, and it tells me exactly how to get there.

That's the power of connected data. I'm using that sort of silly example, because I think it's something that everybody can relate to. But just imagine how much time that that frees up and how much power that is. It automated me getting to that party. So much of our life is connected. The world that we live in outside of our work lives is connected. The cell phone connects to my Amazon Alexa, which connects to my Nest, and all I have to do is just tell Alexa to turn on the heat, and eventually she starts to know that hey, I'm home at 6:00 every night, let's turn on the heat for her.

And so that connected world is because of that change from analog to digital. And that's what construction needs to get to. We're still sort of in this analog world. We are starting to digitize our processes, but we're not linking them. And that's the key. I think that's the explosion that's going to spur the same sort of change in the communication industry to the construction industry, that digital connection. And I think we really need to start demanding a workplace that is equally connected and convenient and digital as our everyday lives.

So that's the first thing I do. So to make innovation part of my DNA, I look to other industries to learn. The next thing I do is think about this trifecta of people, process, and technology. For those from VIA Technik that have come to my talk, they've seen this chart like a million times, but it's so ingrained in who we are. The technology is what we're talking about most of the time at AU.

But the people and the process is really interesting, and I do want to enlighten you to one aspect of the people side of things that I think is sometimes overlooked. I hear a lot of companies think that they've figured out the people side of this people, process, and technology, because they have a guy. They have that BIN guy or they have that technology guy or they have that innovation guy that does all that cool stuff. So I go to a CEO of a construction company and I'm like, hey, do you guys do BIM? They're like, yeah, we have a guy.

That's a problem. And actually, I've seen a lot of companies' organizational structures are kind of like these silos, and BIM and technology and innovation and LEAN is all over to the side. You can almost imagine that you can just remove that from the org chart and nothing happened. So I actually would urge you-- and actually, raise your hand if you're that guy at your company. Yeah. And it's super cool to be that guy. But here's what I want you to do. I want you to infect them like a virus.

So we're working with one of the largest real estate owners. And in addition to getting them that BIM guy and creating an org chart that does have a BIM group, we've also created a side organizational chart that talks about how different parts of the organization interact with the BIM guy and also interact with the BIM processes and the innovation processes. Who are the decision makers? Who approves it? Who recommends changes? Who are the users?

Who are the people who input data? Who are the people that take out data? And it sort of becomes this spider web throughout the organization rather than it just being within that guy. So that's something I'd really like-- we talk a lot about people, process, and technology, but that's something I'd really like you to take back to your companies. So I'm going to show you a few examples of ways that we're using technology in different ways, ways that we're connecting various sources of data to enable change on our projects.

We're still, to be perfectly honest, working towards that reinvented construction future. But I think that all of these are good examples that anybody can implement today. So virtual reality is something that's talked about a lot. I mentioned before, visualization, integration, automation. Most VR that I see only lives in that visualization bucket. People think, all right, 2D plans suck, 3D BIM is better, VR is even better. It's immersive. I can visualize it. I'm in it.

I'm one to one. I understand what my building's going to be like when I'm there in real life. But there's actually this really interesting concept of data that I think can be linked to it. So what we're doing now at VIA Technik is starting to do more data tracking within VR. Don't look at this too much, because it's going to kind of make you sick. So here's an example of somebody walking through this penthouse suite. And what we've done is we've tracked where they go.

So we can see all the paths, we can see the yellow or the red if they spent more time in that area. So you can start to understand, OK, how are people using this space? Does the layout work? Is it convenient? Does it flow efficiently? Is there something wrong about getting from the kitchen to the dining room? And so what you're doing here is you're taking data that's not normally seen until after construction, after you're actually already using it. You're kind of creating synthetic data, and we're looping that back into the design. So rather than building a project and then finding out, ah, it doesn't really work, you're adding sensors maybe to the project to understand how people are using it, we're synthesizing that so that we can create more efficient designs from the beginning.

And so that idea of a data feedback loop is really interesting. For me, I think VR and AR is something that lends itself very well to data integration. Something else that I think is really important for the construction industry is this idea of simulation.

So I mentioned before how construction by its very nature is dynamic. However, most of the tools that we use to plan our projects are static or at least way too slow to make the dynamic changes that's needed. So in line with me learning from other industries, if you look at pretty much any other high risk, high cost industry, industries that also deal with that same struggle, like we want everybody to go home safe and alive at the end of the day where safety is of great concern, they run simulations.

Nobody ever does anything for the first time in real life when it comes to the military, when it comes to pilots, when it comes to NASA, they run simulations so that when there is a crisis, when there's an issue, they've already been there and they know exactly how to react.

So we're trying to run more simulations, again connecting different sources of data so that we can solve problems virtually and practice virtually before we have issues in real life. So here's an example. It was a large hospital project up in Marquette, Michigan, where we were brought in more as scheduling consultants to figure out the right schedule, the right processes for the project.

The project had a BIM, and so in order to optimize the schedule, we linked to the schedule to the BIM data. We used a software called Fuser, which also has an immersive aspect to it. So what you're going to see in a second will be the schedule simulation in Avatar mode, but you actually can bring it into VR mode as well. It's just a little bit disorienting to show people. So what we did here, we really wanted to figure out the proper steel sequence. This was a really large project, so hundreds of pages of CPM Gantt chart.

Honestly after a certain point, people were sort of confused if the steel sequence was right or not. Obviously, the steel was on the critical path, obviously the steel was a big dollar item, so we said, hey, let's create the simulation and let's check it. So it was really interesting when we got the field team into this simulation, what they started noticing. So we had a superintendent virtually walking through this construction simulation. It was sort of interesting.

They're on one of the levels, they saw partitions being installed, and then they looked up and they said, oh, cool. That's the steel erection. And they instantly realized that if they were on the same floor as the partition construction and looked up and saw steel erection, that was a major safety violation. So actually, their whole schedule was sort of messed up. They had not linked the slab core to the partitions below. So very quickly, walking through this virtually before they had to walk through it in real life, they found a safety issue, they found a schedule mistake, and they weren't able to come up with a more optimal solution.

So the idea of simulations is really helping us improve. Our projects are high risk, and they can often afford the time to run through a simulation before making that major mistake in real life. Here's a similar example of a simulation. So this was a project that was at a nuclear power plant. The client came to us because they needed to figure out the best way to install a new reactor vessel into this existing operational plant. And the problem that they came to us with was that every day the plant was shut down was $1 million a day.

So they wanted to make sure that they knew exactly how this reactor vessel was going to go from point a to point b as quickly as possible. So we started with laser scan data, and actually they originally called us because they wanted us to turn the scan into the BIM. We realized that wasn't actually solving their problem. It was just getting them a little bit closer. But we took the laser scan data, which you see here, and we turned it into a Revit model.

So we used a combination of Revit and Edgewise. We tried to put as much data and information into the model as we could, because that enabled them to make the decisions. They knew what types of pipe it was, what sort of steel structures it was. They could then decide, all right, is this something that could be demolished for the installation, or could it not be demolished? So then, we brought into virtual reality. We used Unity, and we brought into virtual reality the path that they were originally going to take.

Anything that turns red, it was going to hit. So right there, it just hit a structural column. So we showed them very quickly that their original plan wasn't going to work, and that they were about to lose at least a million dollars. They did not pay us half of that million dollars, although I tried. So what we did then was we created a customized path, and it's sort of interesting. It was a big deal for the team. In the world of video games, it's like nuclear Pac-Man.

It's actually not that difficult. But there were some important things that we did. So we made sure that the vessel only moved the way it would move in real life. A lot of people ask me, where's the rigging and all that equipment? It comes in on a wheeled mechanism that's below the vessel, and it only rotates about its center and moves forward and back. So we made sure it was as realistic as possible. The environment was realistic because of the laser scan to BIM, and so as you saw, they were able to adjust the controls, try it out, Simulate, it 100 times so that once they picked that optimal path, they knew it was going to work. They saved themselves $1 million.

Another example of things that we're sort of trying out in beta mode is this idea of connecting data to the real world through augmented reality. So a couple of years ago, we created an augmented reality application called Punch AR, and the idea was that there's many sources of data that we deal with in our daily construction lives that actually make much more sense in spatial form. If that data is located in the real world in a place where it makes sense, it's much more powerful and it's much more understandable than if it were just locked in a spreadsheet or a database.

Punch List is one of those items. We also picked Punch AR because to be honest, most augmented reality applications are still fairly dangerous for a job site, and we wanted something that could be real. And if you're Punch Listing it, it means most of the really intense safety hazards are removed from the job site. So it's sort of like this Pokemon Go for job site issues. Rather than finding your little Pokemon characters, you're going around and finding construction issues.

And then you're going around again and seeing those little bubbles of all those construction issues in real life and seeing if they've been fixed or not. So this idea of spatial data we've extended a lot to the ownership and operations side of things. Actually when we first came out with Punch AR, it was more facilities managers who wanted it for their operations than it was construction people who wanted it for actual Punch Lister QA QC during construction. So there's definitely a big movement to make sure that the BIM is valuable beyond design and construction and lives on during operations and maintenance.

So we're doing a lot where we're making sure that the BIM data then links with the facilities management data and can be spatially oriented. So here is a video that-- you can do this with a matter port scanner, create the virtual tour of your space, and then start linking it with operations and maintenance data. So really quickly, you can start to understand what your facility looks like even if you're not there, you're able to pull up information, you're able to hyperlink out to your cut sheets, your O&M manuals, your warranty information. And it just makes the data that much more accessible.

And remember I said before that I think this idea of digitizing our data and making it connected is really going to be the catalyst for a change in our industry. I think when we can do that, the data will finally be like that central nervous system of our projects. We can actually control our projects much more thoughtfully, and that's my moonshot. My moonshot is this idea of connected data for the construction industry. I showed you before how McKinsey says, we're really bad at digitizing our data. But we are getting better, but we need to go one step further and not just digitize the data. We need to connect it.

And it's that idea of connecting design and construction and operations data together. It hopefully will make construction as connected and convenient and digital as our everyday life. Data from construction schedules and budgets and supply chain and procurement and field data, productivity data, labor data. If all that's connected, we'll really have the power to change the industry. So now before you guys ask me questions, I'm actually going to ask you questions.

What is your moonshot? What is that thing that might sound kind of ridiculous, but if it were to happen would be incredibly powerful for your companies? And if you tell me, I'll give you a shirt. Anybody? Yes.

[INAUDIBLE]

And you have to build four of them, right? So if you can simulate it and figure it out, you're going to get 4x the return of somebody who's building one of it. Yeah, that's awesome. You get a shirt!