Unleashing the Power of Data to Deliver Projects Using Autodesk Construction Cloud Connect

SATYA THENTU: Hello, everyone. Welcome to AU 2022. This class is on unleashing the power of data to deliver projects using ACC connect, or the Autodesk Construction Cloud Connect. My name is Satya. I'll be one of the presenters today. With me we have Sophat who will also be copresenting.

So the goal, let's start with the presentation, the goal of this session is to introduce you to ACC Connect obviously, and also teach you some of the no-code methods that are available to you to automate the data exchange.

We'll also dive into how Bechtel is using this to automate some of our data flows, and then also share some tips and takeaways, what we've learned in the past year implementing ACC Connect. So with that, let's dive in-- next slide, please.

OK, so here's an outline of what we will be talking today. So we'll take a couple of minutes in the beginning introducing ourselves. And then this is where Sophat and I will share our background. We'll then go into a little bit about Bechtel. For those of you who are not familiar with the company, just want to share the type of projects that we do and how we use ACC Connect.

And then Sophat is going to cover the next section where he'll introduce the key components and workflows for ACC Connect. We'll then dive into Bechtel's approach, how we are using it, why we are using it. And then following that, we'll do three demos.

The first one of the three would be a live demo, which is where Sophat will show you in life how to create a quick ACC Connect recipe to automate file movement from BIM 360 Docs to any document management repository. We picked SharePoint today.

And then the next two demos are a little bit more complicated. This is where we would walk you through a preconfigured or an existing recipe in order to just walk you through various steps and connections that need to be made to make that recipe.

And then at the end we will conclude with some takeaways and tips and wrap it up. So let's quickly introduce ourselves. So that is me, Satya Thentu. My current role is the operations manager for the infrastructure global business unit of Bechtel.

Bechtel is a US-based company. We're headquartered here in the Reston, Virginia location. So a little bit about my background, I have a bachelor's in engineering from Osmania University in India. And then I came to do my masters here in the US at the University of Missouri-- or now the Missouri University of Science and Technology, Rolla.

And I also have a professional engineer license from the state of Maryland. I've spent my initial years in design, electrical system design. And for the past seven or eight years now, moved into a digital delivery role.

This is where I use my engineering background to improve all of the processes for design management and utilize technology to solve workflow problems. So that's me in a nutshell. Over to Sophat, Sophat, would you like to introduce yourself?

SOPHAT SAM: Yeah, thanks Satya. And certainly thanks for having me as a part of your session here. So as Satya mentioned, my name is Sophat Sam. I am the Senior Manager of Integration Solutions Engineering . Within the ACS portfolio suite of products.

I'm based out of New York City. I've worked basically between Autodesk and PlanGrid for about six years or so now. And my role has not really changed. My focus is really to help our customers integrate our products with third-party products. And really that's why we're talking about ACC Connect today is really to help our customers leverage our tools to be able to integrate their existing workflows with what we provide.

Prior to joining PlanGrid and Autodesk, I worked primarily in the New York City region helping our customers deploy and implement content management solutions, so everything from city and state to financial services, to banks, et cetera, really working with our customers to make sure that they can digitize their otherwise paper-based processes into digital processes.

So as you, can imagine that translated pretty easily to the construction industry where we did see a lot of lacking in the digitalization process. So I'm really excited about that. My background is in architecture-- never practiced thankfully, so please do not hate me for that.

But I did work with a lot of our customers who obviously come from all various regions of the construction industry, and making sure that we can help them optimize and really make their business processes as efficient as possible. So with that, I'm going to hand it back to Satya to walk through Bechtel.

SATYA THENTU: Thank you, Sophat. All right, so next slide, please. So for those of you who do not know, a quick introduction about Bechtel-- we'll take a couple of minutes to introduce the type of projects that we do and a little bit about the company.

So Bechtel was founded in 1898. So we have a history of over 100 years. We are a private company based in the US, headquartered in the US. So as you can see there, we have delivered over 25,000 projects in 160 countries on all seven continents.

So we've done it all. Large, complex projects is our speciality. We have over 12,000 people across the world, 100 plus nationalities. And this last year, 2021, we closed with a $17.6 billion in revenue. So a couple of key projects that you may be familiar with.

Obviously with that 25,000 projects, there's one project in every-- which is very close to each of you, there should be one that we have delivered. But some world-class projects that are worth mentioning is the oldest one is the Hoover Dam project.

So we were one of the six companies that helped deliver the Hoover Dam project. And I'm proud to say that we are still the-- I think out of the six companies, we're the only company that's still in business under the same name and under the same leadership. So Hoover Dam, so that's our mega project, first one.

And some of the various signature projects, UK's first high-speed rail project that we delivered, help deliver in 2008, a Hong Kong airport that we delivered in 1998. And most recently even in 2014, Watts Bar Nuclear Plant that we've helped finish the unit 2 in 2014.

These are some large signature projects. Obviously there's quite a few large projects that are currently under development that you can find on our website, Bechtel.com. With that, next slide, please.

OK, a little bit more about the company-- at Bechtel we're subdivided into five global business units, or GBUs as we call them. The first one is the energy business unit that's headquartered in Houston, Texas. Infrastructure is headquartered in London. I'm part of the infrastructure business unit.

The next one is mining and metals. That's headquartered in Chile, South America. Our newest business unit, manufacturing and technology, that's focused on the new prospects in the data centers and the semiconductor fab manufacturing. That's coming back to the US. They're headquartered here in Reston as well.

And then the NS&E business, that's the nuclear security and environmental business where we do a lot of the DOD and DOE work, and as well as build nuclear plants under that business unit. It's also headquartered here in Reston.

OK, with that, let's end-- a couple of more pointers on this slide here, our CEO Brendan Bechtel is the fifth generation owner. It's a family-owned business. So Brendan is very passionate about decarbonization and sustainability.

And Bechtel as a company is committed to achieving net zero emissions by 2050. So we will do everything that we can and help our customers deliver net zero by 2050. So that's a little bit about the company-- next slide, please. Some more statistics about the global business unit that I'm a part of, which is the infrastructure business unit, we believe that improving infrastructure improves our communities lifestyle.

So as you can see, we've delivered over 300 subway and rail projects across the world. And there are other key figures that tell you our width and depth of experience in delivering large infrastructure projects-- next slide, please. OK, Sophat, would you introduce ACC Connect please?

SOPHAT SAM: Yeah, definitely. thanks, Satya. So I'll spend a couple of minutes, a couple of slides here just walking you through some of the basics of ACC connect for those who aren't aware of it. So just to start out with, really the goal of ACC Connect is to help our customers literally connect our applications, our Autodesk Construction Cloud applications with their critical software systems.

So we'll go through some of the examples as we look at the demos and things like that. But basically we've identified a couple of key construction-based applications apart from Autodesk that we're looking to really assist our customers in building more customized workflows to.

So typically when you work on the construction project, there's a lot of documentation. There's a lot of PDFs, et cetera. So one of the key components that we're trying to solve for our customers is connecting to their cloud storage, or really any other system that may house their PDFs, their drawings, et cetera. So our goal is to really help our customers connect to their document management systems and be able to create custom workflows between those systems and ours.

Other key applications when it comes to really being able to work on a construction project is really project managing, being able to extract data out of your various applications and being able to present that either in the external application or really in the dashboard that we'll go over in the latter parts of this presentation to make sure that everyone on the team is aware of what's happening in your projects and be able to react as needed, or really proactively manage the project as needed.

But really the goal of ACC Connect is being able to provide our customers the ability to connect not just to our applications, but our applications to external applications, and then providing them a platform where they can create custom integrations or workflows, as we call it, that allows them to match their business processes.

So, for example, not-- when you're using integration, not all integrations will work the same way or will work the same way that a customer wants it to be between different use cases. So the platform really allows our customers to not just connect the applications, but also create the workflows that's customized to their business processes.

And that's what we typically focus on is making sure that our integrations, our workflows, is really meeting the demands of the business process and not just delivering integration that doesn't meet that specifically.

So we'll go through what some of those things mean when it comes to a product perspective. But, as I mentioned, we try to deliver a platform that can integrate across all of our products. So within the Autodesk construction solutions portfolio, you do have a variety of different products, everything from Assemble, BIM 360, BuildingConnected, PlanGrid, and more recently Pype as a part of that portfolio.

So for some customers, they're using one of these applications. In the example of Bechtel, they're are using a variety of these applications. And these are all driving different workflows between their internal resources and what they need to accomplish as a business. So the ACC Connect platform can provide out-of-the-box connections to all of these applications, as well as additional third-party applications that we'll see in the demo portion of this presentation.

Within the last year or so, we've released the Autodesk Construction Cloud suite of products. So this, you'll primarily know it as Audodesk Build. But there are other products beyond that such as Docs, Cost, and Takeoff. So the ACC Connect platform also provides connectors out of the box for these products.

And our goal, again, is to make sure that all of the products within the ACS portfolio is covered within one platform so no matter what product you're using as a customer, you're able to use ACC Connect to build custom workflows, custom integrations between our products and third-party products that you're using. Again we'll go into more details. But for now I'll turn it back to Satya.

SATYA THENTU: Thank you, Sophat. So let's talk about approach. So one of the things that all businesses look for is, how does any of the work that we do benefit the business goals? At the end of the day, that's what we're here for is to meet our goals every year.

So one of the initiatives that we had and Bechtel had for the year 2022 was that we would establish centrally-located dashboards for all of our projects across the world. And as part of that, we've identified various KPIs. Sophat, if you can go to the next slide, please.

So one of the first things that we did this year was to establish key performance indicators, or KPIs, which are just metrics that we measure that have most impact towards our goals. So we established KPIs for various stages of the project because project management is our speciality.

As I mentioned before, Bechtel has helped deliver over 25,000 projects. And project management is what we do. So as part of our role, Bechtel either plays the role of a lead appointed party or lead contractor where we are responsible for the entire delivery.

Or sometimes on behalf of the owner, we are also act in the role of an appointing party or a delivery partner where we are helping a client. We're not necessarily the lead contractor. That's done by somebody else. But we are helping the contractor manage a large and complicated project. So that's where our expertise comes in is in the project management.

So whether we're managing the project for delivering ourselves or managing someone else, KPIs are very important because those indicate whether the project is on target or not. So we have we've had KPIs that were established for each function. But earlier this year we went through an effort of consolidating them and creating a project headquarters on identifying all of these KPIs across various functions at the project dashboard level.

So this visual here just shows you how a company goes about creating their KPIs and what are the steps in creating the KPI dashboards. Like I was saying earlier, we all start with the company's vision and the goals. And then we create our targets and the time frame that's associated with that, achieving those.

We then look at what kind of KPIs do we need to look at in order to find out if we are going, moving towards our target or away from it. So for that we've identified our KPIs. And then for every KPI, we then create a process map.

And the process map indicated all of the data sources that we need to visualize this KPI dashboard and all of the requirements, starting with the level of access, the connections that need to be made, the data flow. And that is where-- the frequency on refreshing this data. So all of this is what we used to establish our KPI dashboards.

And it's not done, even after establishing the KPI dashboards. We need to be mindful of who the owner of the data is that would be continuing to maintain that data. And then making sure that the KPI dashboard meets the end users requirements as well, and then any maintenance that's required in order to have the most accurate and accurate KPI dashboards information that's visualized everywhere. So, yeah, with that, next slide, please.

So this slide shows all of the different areas of the project lifecycle that we have KPIs identified under, so starting with our project control indicators in the cost and schedule category, to then the supply chain performance which has an overlap on engineering and construction-- quality as well, our performance, because large infrastructure projects require multiple levels or layers of supply chain in order to deliver those, whether that be from the engineering side or from the construction side.

And then also from a turnover standpoint, the technical requirements and system performance-- and as you can see, we've touched all of the major functional areas of project lifecycle. And we have KPIs that we have identified in each of these areas.

One tip that we've realized ourselves when we were creating these KPIs is maintaining these KPIs can be expensive. all. Data creation and data management takes time and effort. So it's important that we're not collecting information and dashboarding it just for the sake of it, but really identifying those one or two KPIs by function that need attention, that indicates the health of the project.

So also one of the things that we did after we established the KPIs and during the establishment was identifying the threshold for each KPI, what does good look like, and when does something become a risk item? So having an understanding of that and putting that into the dashboards was an important effort as well. So, yeah, that's the different areas that we have KPIs under-- next slide, please.

So with that, we'll talk about the first use case for our ACC Connect recipe. This one is outsider KPIs, surprisingly enough. We've talked extensively about KPIs. But this one is of more of a workflow that we needed a recipe to meet our ISO 19650 requirements and automate the process around that. So for Bechtel we use BIM 360 as our WIP and shared areas to manage our content.

But our issued content, we use that, we manage that in a document management system called Aconex. So Aconex, for those of you who do not know, is an Oracle company started in the-- I think in Australia. And we use that to manage all of our issued documents, whether that be engineering drawings, or contracts, or field change documents. All of that issued content we put it in Aconex.

So for primarily the engineering drawings and documents that we were creating, we needed to move the-- because when we issue our drawings, we wanted to reduce the manual effort or uploading these files into Aconex with all of the metadata that's required, like document type, subtype, revision number, and what's a format, whether it's a PDF or a DWG.

So all of that information we would load into Aconex. But a lot of this information is being fed from the BIM 360 platform because we manage all our WIP and shared content. So our models and our sheets and our drawings are all being created in BIM 360. And they're being reviewed in BIM 360 and shared in BIM 360.

So once a document or a drawing goes through the check process in BIM 360, we wanted to automate that loading from BIM 360 directly into Aconex. And in order to do that, we had to, first on the BIM 360 side, establish the naming structure, and then also establish the metadata for these documents that we are going to be moving.

And the requirement here was that the Aconex and BIM 360 metadata would have to be identical for the APIs to accept-- for the API to accept that document. So in order to do that, we did some extra effort to get that identical.

But this is where we used ACC Connect recipe, where Sophat is going to share an example of how we did it. But it's not going to be the exact replica of what we did. It's our process was a little more complicated because of Aconex.

But should your issued content management system be SharePoint, or Drive, Google Drive, or some other system that's not metadata heavy, this process should be a lot more simpler. I guess with that intro, long intro, I'll hand it over to Sophat and he will share-- probably take less time than I talked for in order to set that up.

SOPHAT SAM: Thanks, Satya. And, yeah, as an example here we'll walk you through a much simpler workflow just to get you through some of the key concepts of the platform. So, again, the idea behind ACC Connect is to allow you to easily detect changes from one system and push that data to another system.

So to start out with, I'm going to create a recipe. The first step in any recipe is just naming that. So we're going to name this-- push Docs to SharePoint. We're going to start building this recipe now. So what you're seeing after you create the recipe is the recipe editor itself.

So this is the visual editor under which you'll be creating your various workflows, your various integrations. The first step of any recipe is the trigger. So it's identifying what is going to trigger this recipe. So in this example, I'm going to connect to my ACC app. That's the Autodesk Construction Cloud app. I'm going to select My Account.

My Account then allows me to basically select which projects that I want to detect the changes in. So I'm going to select my WayneCorp account, my Wayne Tower project, and then additionally which folders I want to monitor. In this example, we're just going to monitor all of project files.

We can monitor also the subfolders if we wanted to, or in certain instances for a simpler example, we'll just select No. I'm going to save that. And then beyond that, what we'll walk you through is just a really quick and easy example of creating a test for that trigger.

So, again, I haven't really uploaded anything to this project. So we're going to switch on over to the project itself. We're using Build here. It will work the exact same way in BIM 360. I'm going to upload an example PDF. We're going to check it again just to make sure that we've set up our trigger correctly so we can see that the recipe has detected that file that I just uploaded into that build project.

So now that we've identified that it works, we can go on and configure additional option, configure conditions. So in most instances, you may not want to process everything. Maybe you want to process just PDFs. In Satya's example, you want to process DWGs as well.

So we can use all of the data that we get from BIM 360 or ACC, in this example, the project ID, the document ID, et cetera. We're going to use the document name or display name and a condition that says only if the display name ends with a .PDF, so if the file name is a .PDF we're going to run this workflow on that file.

So that's a pretty simple example of how you can easily set a condition or a trigger with a condition built into it. Beyond that, what we're going to do is add additional actions. So these are steps beyond the trigger that you can use to then push data between different applications.

I'm going to select my SharePoint app. I'm going to select the ability or the action to upload that file into a SharePoint library. Again, I'm going to select My Connection or Account. Beyond that, we now have to fill in information required by this action.

So things as simple as the site name, so I'll show you in a second here what that site name is. So that's my Client Group Connect site. So all I have to do is fill that in. We can see the folder in SharePoint has nothing, but it's named exactly the same as my project in ACC.

So now I just need to navigate and select that folder. So here, this is the visual side of ACC Connect where I'm not writing code. I'm just picking and choosing what data I want to transfer. In this example beyond the folder, we have to transfer the file name as well as the file contents.

The file name, again, we'll use the display name. That's what shows up in BIM 360 so it's pretty easy. For file contents, that's a little bit trickier for anyone who's used this. So the file contents is the actual file binary. So it's the bits and bytes behind the files itself.

The trigger and the data that you get from BIM 360 is just the metadata, so information about the file, but doesn't give you the file itself. So what we have to do is actually temporarily download that file before sending it to SharePoint.

So I'm going to go in and just switch on over to my account, my project. The folder here doesn't really matter because basically what we can work with is the ID from our previous step, our trigger, and specify dynamically what we want to download.

So every time we run this recipe, it's going to be a different file. So we want to be able to handle that dynamically. So, again, this is taking that document that was detected, moving it to the download action, and then beyond that uploading it into our SharePoint library.

So it's a simple three-step process. You can see how we can easily map data from one step to the next. And that's a relatively simple workflow. Beyond that, you can make this much more complex. We'll go through some of the lessons learned in terms of complexity.

But here I can easily add additional apps if I need it to, if I want to connect this not just to SharePoint but also an additional database in the example that we've been working with. But also beyond that, you can see that I have logical steps to create as well, so adding additional steps. Here we're creating condition that only files uploaded by myself we will process and upload it to SharePoint.

Maybe that's for your architects. If they upload a file you want to process it. If it's not, you don't want to process it. But, again, this is a visual way of creating workflows that meets your very specific requirements with out of the box connectors to our tools as well as to third-party tools like SharePoint.

So hopefully that gives you an idea of what ACC Connect can do, but also some of the key concepts embedded within the platform. So we'll move on to the next workflow here. And I'll rely on Satya to give us a quick walkthrough of what we were looking to do.

SATYA THENTU: Great, yeah, thank you, Sophat. So this next demo, the next use case that we had was on one of the light rail projects that we're delivering in Canada, we were using BIM 360 field, or BIM 360 issues app to collect all of the field, the punch list items.

So those are the punch items, or the snag items, as they call them. So we wanted to not just visualize that data, which you could quickly do it via the export, Excel export, and then bring it into the dashboard, part of your dashboard. But our use case was different here.

So we were looking for two things. One is we were looking for the export of the issues along with the custom attributes not just for the sake of export, but also bulk edit those and import it back. So just as an example on the project, we have thousands of snag items or punch list items. And we have about 200 contractors, subcontractors.

So BIM 360 until recently lacked the ability of creating a custom report based on custom attributes. So we would use the contractor name as a custom attribute to collect these punch items. And we wanted to-- we needed an ability to create a report that we could just email out or give it to our subcontractor of all the items that they needed to fix.

But that functionality out of the box was not available back then. It's available today. It's been released recently. But there was another requirement that we needed to also bulk edit some of these items because some of these items we wanted to estimate the level of effort and write back to the custom attributes value.

So in order to do that, we needed not just the ability to export these-- excuse me-- these issues, but we also needed the ability to import those back into BIM 360. And so that's where we used ACC Connect recipe was not just to export where once a day, or in our case once every hour, we would get a quick Excel dump out of the issues module. And it would put the exported Excel file in a folder in BIM 360.

That is where our users would go, open that-- download that file, bulk edit that in Excel. So they could filter and bulk edit 1,000 issues at one time. And then they would put that in another folder called import. And by placing that we could use ACC Connects, that trigger functionality that Sophat just talked about in the previous recipe.

And the ACC Connect recipe would pick up that file and then process it and update multiple issues at the same time. So that was a use case there with that. Sophat, could you walk us through the recipe there, at least the first part of it?

SOPHAT SAM: Yes, definitely. So as we've discussed, so ACC Connect can be used for managing large volumes of documents. In this particular example, we're really working with large volumes of data. So it's no longer document centric, it's data centric.

So this is a quick example that, as Satya mentioned, of really being able to export the data out. So our trigger in this example, instead of detecting newer update document, we're detecting new or updated issue. Similar to what you saw before, it's all visual in terms of configuring this.

So I go in and select the project, the hubs, et cetera. What I'm going to do here is a quick test just to show you how that trigger works. So I'm going to click Test, edit one of our issues on my test project here. Once I've made that edit, I'll trigger the test again. And we can see that that change in the recipe has triggered our workflow.

Typically when you're building recipes, you do want to test as often as possible just to make sure you have all the data available. But you can see in this example data, not all the information is human readable. So you'll have things like user IDs, root causes IDs, document IDs example.

So within ACC Connect, you're able to then create custom structures in terms of how to get that data with those unique IDs into the external system. So in this example we're getting the users, the root causes, and here the documents that the issues are marked up on. So I can simply pass some information.

And then beyond that here's an example of how we can connect to a data warehouse. In this example we're just connecting to a database, selecting which table we want to, use a unique ID to do the upsert process. But, again, this would apply to your SQL database, any other databases supported on the platform.

Beyond that, it's really just a mapping exercise between what you want to send from the BIM 360 application to your database. So something as simple as the issue ID, I'll populate that into the ID and the issue ID for whatever reason.

The description, we can see that that comes directly from BIM 360-- the due date, similar process. But basically you're able to construct a data structure on your database and then customize what fields from the BIM 360 side should go into the database.

Again, this is a pretty simple example using relatively simple calls to the BIM 360 APIs. But in the work that we've done with Satya and his team it can get much more complex if you want it to where we do import that data back in when those files are updated so that we can bulk update the issues using a recipe. So it's not just for pushing data out of BIM 360. You can use it to also import data into BIM 360.

SATYA THENTU: Thanks, Sophat. I think we lost your audio for a couple of seconds there, but thank you. So with that, the next one, the next demo is the second walkthrough which is about Assemble data. So as a project management company one of the key things that we look at is quantities, quantities of various components that we are building.

As an EPC-AEC project, we build physical stuff. But we build it in the virtual model, our 3D models, our BIM models before we actually build it in the real world. So we start tracking quantities early on starting from the estimating phase where we have our baseline established.

But one of the things that we use Assemble for is to normalize the data, the models that are coming from multiple design consultants or contractors. And once we do that we want to then take that into a dashboard so just to see how our quantities are growing from phase to phase and how do they compare to the initial estimate.

So all through the design lifecycle and the construction lifecycle, we are tracking quantities closely as part of our project delivery. So in order to do that, there are other ways of getting data out of Assemble. You could use Excel. You could also use the Power BI connector.

But we use ACC Connect recipe because we felt that it was more robust and predictable. And Sophat is going to walk us through the steps that it takes to get data out of Assemble into either an on-prem database or a data warehouse and use that for dashboarding your quantities-- Sophat.

SOPHAT SAM: Yeah, thanks Satya for introducing that. But, yeah, this is a great example of where we're seeing a lot of customers use ACC Connect is loading data into a data warehouse no matter what the application is. So, again, we'll show a very simplified version of this just to keep it simple and straightforward, and walk you through some of the core concepts.

But basically within Assemble, Assemble different from BIM 360 where you can actually customize all of the individual fields within Assemble. That means your data structure may change from project to project or even from model to model.

So in this particular example we're creating a recipe that works based off of a schedule. So every four hours-- you could do this every hour. But depending on what your business requirements are, you can set these recipes to basically run at specific schedules and also at specific times.

If you want to run at less resource intensive times like midnight, you can specify exactly when you want that to run. But within the steps itself, within the actions, now you can then specify exactly what you want out of Assemble. So in this example we're going to select a project. I believe it's called Autodesk Hospital.

We're going to select a specific view within that project as well. So that's architectural and mechanical. This view within Assemble has very specific data structures set up for it already. So this data structure could be standardized across all of your projects. It could be very specific to this one project. But basically we can work off of the data that exists within Assemble

So we're going to go into that specific view here. And when I say view, we're referring really to the table that you see on the screen here. So alongside each element within Assemble, we also have all of the quantities that Satya mentioned. We also have any other properties that you want to include as part of this view.

So if there's something that doesn't exist, you can create that property and then associate that property as part of your column structure. So this gives our customers a lot of flexibility in terms of how you they want to work with that data.

But basically within ACC connect, based off of the view that you select, we can automatically refresh the data coming from that view. So within the architectural and mechanical view here if I open up the recipe data, look at the output, we can see within each one of these instances, there are rows or elements within your Revit model, or within Assemble.

Each one of these has specific properties that has been defined for that view, so everything from the cost code, the height, the thickness, et cetera, all of that has been specified within this column structure. So, again, the customer has the ability to customize this. And then that is exposed on the ACC Connect connector for Assemble.

With that, based off of the data and what you want, we can push that into your data store. In this example, we're processing I think 100 or so records at once. So part of the flexibility of ACC Connect is processing large volumes of data. So in this instance we're processing hundreds records or rows at once.

Beyond that, it's really a matter of where do you want to send this data. So, in this example, we use Oracle Database. We've selected which table we want to send it to. And then it's really a matter of selecting, again, similar to what you saw in the issues use case, what fields do you want to send to your data store?

So if it's the model name, the model number, the category name, et cetera, it's as simple as selecting what you want from the source and then where you want that to go in your data store. So, again, this is a pretty simple example of how we've worked with other customers, including Bechtel, to really get the specific data that they need into either a standardized data store or a data store that's very specific to one project.

But, again, hopefully this showcases really the ease of use of ACC Connect from an end user's perspective where you can just go in and select exactly how often things should run, what specific projects and models you want data from, and then also where exactly you want to push that data to.

So, again, it doesn't take an engineer-- maybe a project engineer-- but it doesn't take a software engineer to actually map all of this. So with that, I'm going to hand it back to Satya for the conclusions.

SATYA THENTU: Great, thank you, Sophat. I guess one last thing to mention on that, I think Sophat covered it, but for the BIM folks, I think quantity dashboard was the main activity that we had. But there are other use cases that we use the same set of data for with regards to checking the information on our model elements, the ILOD.

So all of the attributes, whether they have been populated is a value correct. So once you can get out the data out of the models into a database, there's things that you could do with it. So, yeah, so there are other use cases as well of that view by data-- value data.

OK, so with that, that brings-- we've gone through the three demos. Let's quickly do a recap on some takeaways and tips. So the first one being, why did we choose ACC Connect, or why ACC Connect? So as Sophat was mentioning, you don't need a developer. So the time to create a recipe is really small. it's. The least time.

So if you have a use case and you've process mapped the entire data flow, then creating a recipe should be within hours or a couple of days if it's a complicated one, versus months of development time if you just use Forge.

So this is for those teams or companies that don't have a lot of developers, or dedicated developers on staff. ACC Connect would be ideal. Now, granted, all of the complicated recipes might need assistance from Autodesk SME's like Sophat. So we'll talk about that in the lessons learned. But do notice that we don't need developers on staff.

The third benefit, or why, is unlimited usage for a flat fee. So depending on the contract, your fee may be different, but basically once you get the subscription, you could run your recipes every-- as the frequency is whatever works, whatever you need.

So it could be in some cases like I was saying we have a recipe that runs every five minutes. But there are others that we only run once a day, so depending on the business process and the use case.

So the second takeaway is when to use ACC Connect. So I think whenever you're looking for a quick and simple solution on data transfer ACC Connect would be ideal. When you don't have a lot of time, and you don't have developers on staff, and you want to automate something, I think I'd encourage you to look into ACC Connect for those types of use cases.

Another one, this is both a caution and advice is ACC Connect, although can handle some rules, it cannot handle complicated rules. So some of those you might be better off handling it once you get the data out of the system.

So, for example, when I was talking about our BIM 360 to Aconex integration where we're moving data from BIM 360 to Aconex, And we were doing that both for the native files, the models or the DWGs, as well as the PDF files, and we wanted it to go into Aconex with all of the metadata. And we wanted to load the native file first and then the PDF next so that the PDF would be the latest version when you go into Aconex.

So some of these rules can get complicated. So even though there are some rules that you can build into the ACC Connect recipes, it's advisable to handle it outside when it becomes complicated, is to handle that in the database, some of those processes and rules.

And then let's talk about lessons learned. I think with our integration with BIM 360 and Aconex I talked about this. The metadata requirements was fairly time consuming in testing it out. So when we're moving files between systems that require metadata to be structured in a particular format, it is important that the source and the destination have the identical metadata for the process to work. So that's something that we've learned on how to handle that.

The second one is one of the things that happened recently was a recipe failed because of the large amount of data that we were pushing. And we didn't know about it because we did not go check for it. we. Just assumed that it's been running for months. So we just assumed that the recipe is running successfully.

But we got a call from the project saying, I don't see my dashboards updating. What's going on? And when we looked back we noticed that the recipe was failing because we were pushing it too much data in a little bit of time. Our frequency, like I was saying, for some of these recipes was fairly small. And so we were triggering the next recipe, the recipe to run again before the previous run was complete.