Unlocking MEP Data Insights with Autodesk Data Exchange and Power BI

PRESENTER: Hey, guys, welcome to Unlocking MEP Data Insights with Data Exchange and Power BI. So I think the problem that we're solving with these two amazing tools is the 3 Horsemen of Revit as an Engineering Tool. So data is often siloed in large models. Those models are bulky and hard to open. It takes forever. And then there's a pretty big learning curve with Revit. But today, we have new duo of superheroes, and that is the Autodesk Data Exchange and then Microsoft Power BI.

So at IMEG, we've already been using Power BI quite a bit. Here we have three examples. We've got my report card where we look at tool utilization. We have one that people can hop in and begin a project and do quick calculations, put in some stuff. And then we have our results baseline tool for loads and all that. And a lot of work has gone into making these very beautiful UX, UI, excellent UX, UI platforms.

So here's all example of the equimeter one. So a user could come in here at the beginning of a project, jump through these buttons. All right, select their office type, select their location, put in the square foot the site of their building, the estimated occupancy, the floors. Then it just keeps on going. I think that this UI is a lot nicer and friendlier than going through a Revit UI and trying to get all this stuff in schedules. Doesn't really have those capabilities of dashboards quite like this.

So what if we could marry Revit data in something like this? That's been my goal and what I got really excited about when I got my hands on this tool. So again, we're already doing it. We've already proven it's got legs over at IMEG, and my wheels just started turning right when I saw the data connector that brings in your Revit data into Power BI. Huge step.

I'm Sean Fruin, the mechanical product owner at IMEG. So I'm always looking at new workflows, new innovative ways that we can make our end users' lives easier and happier. So today, we're going to talk about just this, and our learning objectives are exploring different methods for creating a data exchange. We're going to go over some of the fundamentals of Power BI, data management, and the transformations that you can do, discover how design very nice, visually appealing dashboards, and explore applying data exchanges and Power BI together.

So our agenda is going to be kind of a explanation of what data exchange is 101, hop into a little bit about what Power BI is 101, and then we've got a couple nice workflows to bring it all together. One's going to be electrical project dashboard. One's going to be based around MEP spaces, and then our last one's going to be about building energy modeling and taking snapshots throughout the project.

So let's first dive in to what data exchange is 101. Remove some that smoke. So it's not a file. It's not a database. It's a data exchange. So they sit on the AEC docs, and the definition from Autodesk is it's a shared, granular set of data that can be shared across different applications and enables a high level of security, and trust, and control, which is really key when it comes to data.

We can write to a data exchange, and we also can read a data exchange. There's many flavors. This was a slide from last year, so it's already outdated. I know there's Tekla, Civil. The list keeps on growing. So it's pretty exciting to see all these different programs being able to be synced up and come together.

Again, some can write. So from Revit, I can go ahead and write a data exchange. Rhino 3D, I can write. Inventor, I can write, and Dynamo, I can write. I can also read from all four of those, but then I have some special ones that I can read, like Power Automate, and the one that we're going to mostly talk today, Power BI.

Here's a little demo of what data exchange is, the 101. So this is an Autodesk example, where they take, hey, we have this staircase that needs fabrication. I can create an exchange from Revit, send it out to Rhino with a couple clicks of a button, and now, I can consume that data exchange or review that data exchange on AEC Construction Cloud. I can then get permissions about who I share it to, right? So then that person I share it with can then consume it in a program, like Rhino, and then they can use the geometry from Revit to really base their design off, really, giving them context to what they're doing.

One of the other wonderful things is they automatically update. So if I was to publish a new data exchange, then the recipient would receive that update very quickly. We can also bring this into Inventor. Then here's the update part. I'm going to go ahead and send an update, and that update comes through in Rhino. And then down here, the same in Inventor.

In the Inventor properties palette, you can also see that those parameters are coming through. So you can get very granular data coming through, which is awesome stuff. So in this one, we can also send it to Microsoft applications.

So here, we have the Power BI, a power automate that is going to write to our Excel file. So this is really cool when a recipient makes that trigger. Automatically, data can be propagated into your Excel and up to date in real time practically.

This is one of my favorite examples. Here, they started this facade inside of Rhino, and now, they're going to bring that geometry back into Revit. So I think this has really cool implications for, like, energy modeling, and testing different facades, and stuff like that. So the potential is huge.

So then a changeover in Rhino, updates in Revit, and now, we're going to bring that into Inventor for fabrication purposes. So then we have the Power BI one that we're talking about today. So here, I'm drilling down into my AEC folder to find the data exchanges.

Now, I think the Power BI one's really cool, not just because of the geometry, which this is amazing, getting Revit geometry out of Revit and into a different program, especially one that revolves around data, and that's with this awesome viewer that they have built that was released not too long ago. So here, we're dragging in parameters, and with those parameters, we can build out color changes, do filtering, really, open up the doors to some really cool workflows. Again, this is my favorite part about data exchange going into Power BI, and that's a little teaser, while we do the 101 on Power BI in a minute.

So with this kind of methodology, this data exchange methodology, we could really rethink our workflows, where our authoring applications, like Revit and Inventor, just become a piece of the data that we're sending. And then the project itself is something that sits in the Cloud. So again, this eliminates the bulky files, the messy versioning, and then you can get that data out of the Cloud to more people, more stakeholders down the road. For example, Excel, Power BI, or then you can even-- already, we're seeing people build applications on top of this, like Allied BIM and a few others.

So with this big shift, we're able to share granular data. Hey, I don't have to give you my whole Revit model that's really hard to open. We're seeing interoperability. I can model stuff in Rhino. I can model stuff in Dynamo. I can model stuff in Revit, and all these programs can, finally, talk to each other seamlessly.

I also have an open data set, where now, the end user doesn't even have to open up Revit to be able to get that data that is so crucial to them. So let's move on to talk a little bit about Power BI 101. So I'm pretty new to Power BI, and I was kind of shocked to see that all it could do, right?

A lot of us, just what we see is the nice, beautiful visuals and reports, but there's a lot more under the hood come to learn with data transformations, data modeling, and then the DAX and text. Here's just a little overview, right? Power BI lets you take this messiness and turn it into beautiful dashboards you can go ahead and tell a story with, right?

There's tons of APS, including the Autodesk one, tons of ways to make visuals. We can share these boards. We can make these boards as templates. Most people have this with their subscription to Microsoft.

You can also use the Cloud, Excel. Tons of data can come in to Power BI. It's pretty cool. With that, we can tell stories of data.

There's also the Pro version, which just gets you a little bit more capabilities as far as sharing and publishing the dashboards, and then we have the Premium. And I'm not really sure exactly what you get with that. I don't have a Premium account, but I haven't really ran into issues.

I did try to use Copilot, and I guess I did not have an account good enough for that. They are getting us with that AI stuff. But yeah, so that's Power BI, locking your data in there all safely and secure.

So a little bit more about Power BI, we have these data transformation. So here, we have a simple example, where we can go ahead and make this table and. break it up, clean the data to what we need. We'll jump into some examples of that with ours, and then we have actual data modeling. So we can have data from multiple sources, find those relational keys, hook them up, and be able to start to bring data together from different tables and different sources. We have a pretty good example of that coming up too.

So we take all this data, and we're able to build visuals, build equations. You really get that data in a way that we can go through it with a really good UX and UI. So again, the typical workflow for Power BI looks like something like this.

You start off with Power Query, where you go and fetch the data from sources. We then typically have to clean and transform the data. We then build relationships. We can then create measures to get, like, sums of stuff, do calculations, add columns.

We can then build dashboards with that data visualization, and then, of course, we can share that with our colleagues and people that we need. So next up, we're going to jump into our first dashboard. Here, I have the red. There's kind of a funny story here.

So again, I'm a mechanical engineer. So I'm not too good at electrical, but I reached out to be like, hey, expecting-- well, I reached out to electrical folks and was like, hey, what would you guys like a dashboard to be like, thinking that they want to see their data. They actually wanted cross coordination data.

So I thought that was really interesting, right? They want a dashboard, where they can go and see the mechanical equipment, the loads on that. They also brought up a lot of stuff that's not necessarily available in the Data Exchange.

The Data Exchange really only includes, like, 3D elements, so things like project name, projects, all those project parameters, stuff like that. That, unfortunately, at this moment, does not come in the Data Exchange. So I had to let them down a little bit, but we're still able to do some pretty cool stuff.

So the problems that we have with our electrical folks is a lot of people just don't even have access to Revit, those senior engineers. Another thing, opening large models is slow. You can start to fall asleep, maybe get distracted by your phone when you're opening large models. It's a nightmare.

Also, Revit doesn't really have any high level analytical tools to build a dashboard with. So we can't really slice and dice our data, like you can with something, like Excel. For this example, we create a Data Exchange from a 3D model with all of our electrical components, and in that Revit model, we have a lot of good, clean data. Garbage in, garbage out.

Here, we have good, clean data, so we can make a good Data Exchange and utilize that data. So here, it's going ahead and creating the Data Exchange. So here's probably the easiest way to create Data Exchange, where we are going to filter down the view to only the stuff that we want to include.

So again, I said electrical stuff, and I should have probably done a little bit of mechanical stuff in there. And you just go up to the Collaborate tab, type your name. You can filter down more here, if you would like, and then send that off to the Cloud, and your Data Exchange is complete.

You can also update Data Exchanges from this Data Exchange UI. So once it's uploaded, you can jump to the Data Exchange with that ellipse right there up on the Cloud. Then you can review it in the Cloud. Again, you can share it in the cloud. Anyone that has access to this cloud project can go ahead and see that.

So now, we're going to bring the data into Power BI. So here, we're going to go to get data, and after I did kind of the legwork of downloading the betas and getting that installed, you'll have this here. Once the beta is installed, go to the Autodesk App Store to get that.

I'm going to hit Data Exchange. Notice my URL is already in there, so this is, like, the token to get the data. I know that my units are feet, and now, I just navigate down to the Data Exchange that I just created, that I'm looking for.

So the first thing we're going to do is bring that in and right away transform the data. So this is honestly my favorite part about the Data Exchange. Tons of data comes in with the Data Exchange. So pretty much every parameter that you can think of with those elements, a lot of them come in null.

So this is a vital tool for not only seeing what's in the Data Exchange. Of all the ways I've consumed a Data Exchange, this is the best way by far for examining what's in that data packet. Supposedly, there's a rumor. There's a new thing called the AEC data model, and supposedly, that's going to go to Power BI, which brings even more data, actually brings in the whole project. So I'm really hoping that happens, and it's going to be crazy just to be able to have that power and this power of filtering down the data to what you need.

Now, what we're going to do is we're just going to filter down to the columns that we want. So we don't need all these columns, right? So first thing we're going to do is go to categories, and then we start off by just saying, hey, we want mains. So these are the parameters that we're looking for.

Our goal, by the way, for this one was to look at all of our panels and see how well they're loaded. So that was the original goal, and right away with a couple of clicks, I can go into this big set of data, and I can say, hey, get rid of all the nulls, or hey, I just want the rows that are mechanical equipment. So then maybe from a little bit of poor modeling, I might have had some nulls in here, but I can in here pretty quickly and just say, hey, remove those. And we ended up coming back and adding a whole bunch of more parameters in.

So it's kind of interesting, right? So you do this working down, and then, when you need to go back, for example, it's almost like Dynamo in a way-- sorry, I'm a big Dynamo guy. --where you're building these links on the way. But you can go manipulate one of the links, and then that automatically propagates down. So here, we went back, and now, once we figure out what we're doing, now, we're adding a whole bunch of parameters that we want to use in the visualization.

This threw me through a loop a little bit, where I was like, wait, should I go back now and filter light fixtures out again? Well, I didn't have to, because I already did that in the step below it. So if you click on this one, it's done. So kind of tricky, but once you're used to it, it's pretty amazing to apply these steps, like that in this numerical order and be able to go back and change those.

So now, we can go ahead and take those changes and load it back into Power BI. Yeah, so now, we're in Power BI. We can start to build our visuals.

So first thing we're going to do is get this stacked bar chart. Then I'm going to take my mains for each one. That's my cheat sheet over there swinging by. All right, let's try this again.

We're going to take our stacked bar chart, and we're going to go, and the first thing that we want to apply to this is our panel name. So we're going to go find that. Add that, so that's the y-axis. Then for the x-axis, we're going to add two parameters for each panel name.

First is our main, so this is the total loads that could be on that panel. Then the next one is our estimated, our total estimated demand current. So now, you can see really quickly how loaded these are.

And there's another way to visualize this. So the cool thing about Power BI and kind of, honestly, one of the trickier things about Power BI is trying to figure out what the best visual is to go ahead and tell your story. So I'd love to hear from you guys, which visual you like better for this one. Yeah, first, we're going to do some color coding here.

A nice trick, too, is you can just copy a visual over and then apply a different visual to it, so it removes a lot of rework of adding all those parameters back in. Yeah, but now, we have the main in one, the big bar, and then the darker blue bar is that total loaded, that estimated total load. So now, what we want to do with working with one of my electrical partners is, now, we want to build a table, so we can go and click on those different panels up there and go see all the detailed data about each panel in a table form.

So now, we can go down here and just start rowing parameters in this table. So there's our panel name. Get those circuit phases, A, B, and C, our current phases, pardon. Told you, I'm not a very good electrical person.

So let's start with the estimated demand current. Go ahead and shorten that up to be, like, two lines. Got to keep it pretty. Right away, these totals don't make any sense, so we can go into the visual and turn off the totals.

We get our sum and our mains in here, the parent load, phases A, B, and C, and now that current phase, A, B, and C. You gotta make it look a little bit prettier. See, I was working on this with the electrical product owner up at IMEG, and he was really excited. So I think we'll dive into this example a little bit more, too, and give you some more visuals that we come up with, and go check those out in the handout.

Yeah, a lot of cool potential. So what do we get out of this? From this simple Revit dashboard, we can make it a lot more elaborate, but we're showing that we can unlock Revit data. You don't even have to open up those big Revit models.

We have a simpler UI that someone can go through, navigate relatively simple. And what's really nice is, if we get an update from Revit, the Power BI can update right after that. So for our next example, we're going to look at mechanical space dashboard. So this is the one that I was most excited about being a mechanical engineer, and I've been messing around with spaces for way too long.

Problems I run into with the whole space Revit workflow, number one, hey, I'm a really smart engineer, but I don't do Revit. Kind of understandable, because to build an entry model in Revit, there's a learning curve, right? So navigating all those UIs, it's kind of complicated. It does take some time. Senior engineers have a lot more on their plate, so I'll give them a little bit of a pass.

But another big issue that we run into is, hey, I do my loads in Trace 3D Plus. I don't do my loads in Revit. So right now, we have these two data sources. That would be wonderful if we could connect in a meaningful way using, like, a data model. So that's what we're going to do.

I wanted to bring this up, because this also is a testament to how fast everything's moving and how awesome it's been to be working with the Data Exchange team over at Autodesk. So I did a presentation last year on Data Exchange when the whole thing was fairly new, and I really wanted-- I'm stubborn, and I really wanted to get the space geometry into Revit or from Revit into Power BI. Well, that capability did not exist, so I had to do this big hack with Dynamo.

So number one, you can create data exchanges from Dynamo, which is really cool. So here, we get all the spaces. We get the phases to filter the spaces down. We then extract all the parameters, had to do a whole bunch of rebuilding those parameters, but then we're able to create the [INAUDIBLE], the Data Exchange, and I was able to somewhat do it.

There was still a limitation on being able to, like, color code the geometry and stuff like that. But hey, when you're in the beta, and you're working with them, and you give them feedback, sometimes, they listen. Quite a bit actually, so no more having to go through Dynamo to do this. And now, starting in Revit 2026, we had to do a little preview. Actually, I had to use them to build the exchange for me.

But starting in 2026 Revit, area geometry, room geometry, space geometry, all those spatial elements within Revit will be included in the Data Exchange. So again, already, we're seeing more elements come in that users are requesting. So in this particular workflow, though, we have two data sources. We have our Revit model with all the spaces, and then we have our train trace data, and we have a little workflow internally, where we can take that train trace data and get it into a nice, formatted Excel worksheet. So then I can load that Excel file up to Power BI along with the Data Exchange created from the Revit spaces.

So here is creating the Data Exchange. So for this one, I did it a little bit differently. So this one is done by publishing and doing it on Autodesk Docs. So the first thing you have to do is go ahead and publish your model, and the benefits of doing it this way, it's not quite as easy or quick as just creating the Data Exchange directly from Revit. But when you publish a new version of your model, that Data Exchange automatically fires.

So a workflow that we looked at last year, you can go check that class out, was we did through the published way looking at room changes. So when the architects changed the rooms, sent a publish, we actually sent that update, triggered that Power Automate to then even, like, trigger an email and a Teams message saying, hey, engineers, you better go check your spaces, because the architect made changes to the geometry in the rooms. But yeah, here, we're publishing the Data Exchange, the Cloud to go ahead and create that Data Exchange. So there it is, loading up into our thing.

So yeah, I was to hop in here. We've got some time just to play around, and do a little live demo, and see if we can get some cool visuals on these spaces. So here, I already loaded in the Data Exchange, and my space is viewed here. I also have room sum of cooling loads.

So what I did was I was able to build a data model here, where I load it in the train trace data, and I had this Data Exchange ID. So that's the name of the space and the number of the space, and then I was able to link it to the Data Exchange. So then, even though my data source is from trace and my Data Exchange doesn't have that stuff, I'm able to bring those loads in across, which is really cool, and we even got the breakdown of some of cooling wall, some of glass, so the actual total load.

And you can see here, we have totals for each one of these, and then I even was messing around with the little clustering algorithms. I wrote a zoning algorithm once with clustering. So I was seeing how well this could cluster, and you can see it does it kind of well. That one jumped. So not as good as the Dynamo workflow, but this was more of an experiment.

But what I wanted to mess around with was actually looking at the visuals and, like, the coloring. So one thing, too, is you can go in here and just click on certain spaces. So when I click on that, that office gets isolated, and then I go, drilled it down to see exactly what's going on with that particular space. Hey, is the design cooling load the greatest on this corner? Let me check compared to that.

Yeah, that's quite a bit bigger design cooling load. How about relative to this one? Yeah, it's about double. Makes sense. Is the one at the roof load bigger than this one? Probably a little bit, right?

So you start to get checks. What else we can do is go ahead and add a color filter. So I can go into my DX data, and I think I want to find zones, and I can take that zone and put it here. So the spaces were zoned in Revit, but now, I can get this context and bring it right into the Data Exchange. So now, a senior engineer could hop in here and say, hey, that's a pretty good zoning job.

I don't know necessarily if they had a wrong statement, how they would mark this up. I guess maybe a screenshot, but really cool to see it in. We could also maybe do it-- loads wouldn't really work. So something that I wanted to do, that I could not figure out a way to do it, so, hey, Data Exchange team. Maybe you could help me out here, because I've always had this fascination with, like, making the loads show up as a color. But, unfortunately, you can't really do that.

I can't say, hey, because this parameter is 100, make it this color. But you can definitely do it for zones. You could also do it for space types maybe. Let's do that.

So we use key schedules for our spaces, so I have this commercial space type here. So now, I have all my conference rooms look like they are in blue. My hallways are in this darker green. All my offices are in this lighter green, right?

So you can really start to go through. I believe, too, let's try to filter this down maybe with the levels. So how would I do that? Let's see if we can go into here and look at a slider.

Oops, don't do that. That's that clicking, where it switches. I tend to do that a lot. I'm a quick. clicker. So make sure that's not selected.

Count families, wow, I don't even know what this is. I accidentally clicked on this. It looks like this is some type of AI. So yeah, I'm still exploring Power BI quite a bit. There is quite a bit of a learning curve, but it's exciting to see it and play around with it.

Let's try-- I want to do this level thing, though, so we can figure this out. We go into here. I add fields. Let's do level. Did I not include level?

So you can go through here, and scroll down, and see all the parameters available. Let's go to elevation. Not quite what I was looking for. Here's level. Ahh, there we go.

I think I did it. Yay, right? So now, if you're trying to explore the space types, you can even come down here and filter by level to really see what's going on underneath. For example, if we didn't have this slicer, I couldn't really see what's going on in the middle of the building. So it really gives you a way to slice down, right?

And we could also maybe not-- what happens if we do zone on top of level? Does that work? Yes, I expect there to be a select all too. But yeah, a lot of cool potential to build out really cool, interactive dashboards.

There's a whole bunch more I want to do, like maybe putting in user inputs, like I showed in those original, on those really impressive dashboards made from our interns, actually, at IMEG. But yeah, a lot to explore. So I'm going to go ahead and jump back in the PowerPoint and move on.

All right, back in action on the PowerPoint. So what do we get out of those mechanical space dashboards? Again, we took away one source of truth for our data. We actually are building a data model, not separate Excel files that aren't truly connected. So one source of truth bringing all of our data together, really powerful stuff, especially for the mechanical workflows.

We don't have our geometry and data locked in files. One of my biggest things about Excel is you don't have the reference or the contacts, like we do in Power BI, to make the decisions or review stuff. The geometry is so important. And then, of course, we have those auto updates when we go ahead and publish it, create the Data Exchange through a published Revit model, through ACC.

So this last example, I want to go through pretty quick. I want to use this example to kind of just put this idea in everybody's heads of how maybe we might shift the way that we start looking at projects with these new capabilities. So here, the whole idea is we could take snapshots in time during the project's life, and since they're not bulky, heavy Revit models, we can store those in the Cloud and then reference them whenever we want. So again, my wheels really got turning on this one.

I did a lab this year about using Revit Systems analysis for early SD modeling. So the whole idea of Revit Systems analysis is, like, the energy model is always evolving, so wouldn't it be cool to take snapshots of that evolution and then compare the results? You could start to see the impacts that you have, and then, of course, we don't lose that data by changing the Revit model.

So to create a new energy model within Revit, you have to delete the old one. With Data Exchange, we're able to capture that old one and store it, put it on the shelf for use later. So the whole idea here is as we go through the design process, we start with just a nice Revit massing. Then we can get a little bit more detailed with doing, like, voxels, for example. Maybe we get a little bit more detailed model from the architect, and then, finally, we can go, like, our space by space type and get the exact geometry for that really good loads.

So this is just kind of a look. So this was a quick video of the lab, but here, I just added the extra step of doing the Data Exchanges. So in the lab, we first just did a rectangle. We didn't know what the-- we didn't have a model from the architect. We kind of knew the footprint, and we knew the amount of levels. So we just created a nice, very quick rectangle with minimum u-values, and we create the exchange from that.

So you could go through here and even review this stuff on ACC, but then we're going to move on to the next one. So here, we did a little bit-- we did the shell and course. We added some details in here, but then we go ahead and create another one. And then, finally, this is the big one, the grand finale of the lab, and that's building a really detailed massing workflow, recopying all the details of the windows, give some space types, add some curtain walls, and now, we're going to create a Data Exchange from this one.

So again, really quick and easy. Now, I have these snapshots throughout the project, and they're going to be saved to this project, where I have my three snapshots of the loads. So now, we're going to go ahead and pull this into Power BI.

So here, I was Messing around. I do want to do a little more, give this one a little bit more love. But here, the whole idea is to have your three visuals and then put a whole bunch of data underneath it. I expect putting total area. You can see, we do have some of the cooling loads, and they're pretty close.

Looks like, for some reason, I think, because the building was a lot bigger on these other two, the architect shrunk that building on us quite a bit, and you could see that in the loads. So again, we have these snapshots to even have that conversation and say, hey, I specked out equipment that was for this, and now, we have this. So what are we going to do?

So again, results of this one is keeping a good record. Again, we unlocked that geometry. We have it in Power Bi. Senior engineers can access it, and I'm kind of proud of this one, because I've been pushing this workflow for so long. So it's really cool to have a vessel, where I can start to compare loads from even different programs. Like, we could do those loads in Trace 3D Plus or Design Builder and bring all that data and build a dashboard to actually compare those different results. So starting to almost be like, I told you so, and hopefully, we get some adoption on the synergy model workflow thanks to the Power BI connector.

This is all just one piece, so kind of wrapping up now. This is one piece of Autodesk based future, and I just want to, again, plant the seed about what's possible with these pieces and where they're going. So again, one piece, so this whole idea of the Autodesk Platform Services and the AC case Forma is to give better access to people, to data, to people, trusted data to people, no more silos, secure. We can set off, and one of those ways that they're doing it is Data Exchange, where I can limit what I send the other stakeholders.

This is a quote from last year, but a really good one from my friend, Meche, who heads up Bird Tools. But yeah, the whole idea is to have this decentralized, open data, meaning it's not trapped in Revit files anymore. All these elements are kind of stored in a database. It's not exactly a database, but it kind of is up on the Cloud, instead within files.

So that's where we're going from, from these file based workflows to these more data based, Cloud based workflows, which really open up the door. So right now, we kind of have this workflow, where the architect does everything, right? They start with an SD model. They add a whole bunch of detail, and then we're given PDFs or maybe the model, but of, like, the finished product.

Then we take over that, do our thing, and then we hand off those PDFs, and then the contractor goes through and does their thing. And it's just not an efficient workflow. This is where you get those data drops along the way. So what is a better way, this is how I imagine the future might look with this Data Exchange, and actually, I have a really fun example that came up.

I was working on Data Exchange a lot, so that was in my head. And then we're starting to see more people ask about asset management at the end of a project. So there's a huge hospital. We were asked to find the space location of all the equipment and everything.

That was great. In theory, it should be done. But by the time we had the detailed architecture model, a lot of stuff in our spaces wasn't working that well. So if you look at here for, like, the mechanical guy, I picture being able to say, hey, let me go back and tap into that simpler Revit model, where I know the geometry is a lot simpler and cleaner, and let me find the location of my pumps, my switches, everything, using that model that saved the Cloud and do these calculations that are needed later in the workflow.

Our typical workflow, we lose that, right? We don't have that data anymore. So there's kind of like this, hey, go wherever you want in the life cycle of the project and grab what you need, because it's all going to be up there in the Cloud. There's no more models holding us back. It really opens the possibility.

Now, where I'd like to take this workflow is take all that work that our interns and graphic designers did on our Power BI, and rather than starting to fill out those areas and stuff, I picture us being able to use a Data Exchange to automatically fill out some of this stuff. So we can even do the baseline better, bring that data in, make some awesome workflows strictly in Power BI. So that's where I hope we take it. I'm really curious where you all think we could take this.

And that is the end for today. Looking forward to seeing where this all goes. Hop on board. Like I said, it's a fun-- it's been a fun journey, seeing all the evolution, and all the changes, and being part of starting to try to change this industry and our data problem. So thanks, guys.