Using Forge to Revolutionize Coordinated Project Information

STEPHEN HAMIL: OK, hi, everybody. Can you hear me at the back? That's good. Thank you, everybody, for coming. Today the class is "Using Forge to Revolutionize Coordinated Project Information." We've got Jim Quanci from Autodesk, who's got a few slides to start. I'll let Jim introduce himself in a second-- and myself.

My name's Stephen Hamil. I'm innovation director at NBS Specification Organization in the United Kingdom. I'll say a little bit more about that later.

I remember in the keynote yesterday when Jim was talking, he was saying about connecting and things that people are here to meet new people. So if you want to connect on social media-- and I'll be checking later on-- the hashtag #AU2018, #DiscoverNBS. If you take a photograph of any slides or have any observations, maybe keep the conversation going on social media afterwards.

We're going to look at three things today. We're going to start-- just have five, 10 minutes looking at the state of the industry and hopefully make a case of why we need to go from a paper-based, PDF-based industry into an industry that uses rich digital information. If we're talking about information and data being key, we'll talk a little bit about why that has to be well-structured. And the more structured your information is, the easier it is for doing things like Dynamo scripts, analysis, machine learning, et cetera. If the data is nonsense, it makes it really hard work.

And then we'll have a good 20 minutes, 25 minutes at the end showing how NBS, the organization I work for, has integrated a number of its offerings with Autodesk Solutions, originally through Autodesk Developers Network-- as you know, Jim's been heavily involved with over the years-- tools like Autodesk Revit, and then, more recently over the last two years, Forge and the cloud-- some really exciting developments there, as well. So I'm going to hand it over to Jim now, who's going to have four or five minutes to set the scene and then back to myself-- Jim.

JIM QUANCI: Yeah. For anybody who wasn't here yesterday-- so Jim Quanci. I work at Autodesk. My team is responsible for supporting software developers, working with Autodesk platforms, whether it's Forge-- so cloud based-- or whether it's desktop, Revit, Inventor, AutoCAD, Max, Maya, whatever it may be.

For me, this is a little bit of a story on what you can do, what's possible to think different-- how a partner we had a conversation with for a few minutes on what's possible changed the way you think about CAD information, about BIM, about models to really get at the data. And for those of you who were here yesterday, you heard a lot of that. It's about the data.

Today we have well over 1,000 partners who are using Forge to connect CAD data with other parts of the processes, whether it's upstream, whether it's downstream, whether it's construction, whether it's manufacturing, whether it's operations and maintenance. And one of those great partners is NBS, National Building Standards. Now, you didn't really introduce NBS.

So National Building standards of the UK-- so these are the specs for all the materials, for how you put things together in a building in the UK. Here in the US, a lot of this kind of information is regional in nature. In the UK, things are quite organized. Royal Institute of British Architects owns the specs for the design industry, for the construction industry.

Now the story starts. And it's about three and a half years ago. We had our Forge DevCon in San Francisco. After that, Steve-- I didn't know Steve at all. It's like, who are these folks? They said, hey, can we meet? Can we talk?

So he came to our office on 1 Market Street. And he showed me what they had done. They had taken all the specifications, and they had digitized them. They put them all online on the cloud-- easy to search, easy to find, easy to point to.

But during that discussion, I said, well, wouldn't it be nice if you hooked it up to BIM? So you had perfect coordination between the specs and the BIM. And I could tell at the time we had the discussion, Steve was like, can you do that? And then what some of you may have been through-- a few demos of what you can do with Forge, with Forge Data Management, Model Derivative, with the Forge Viewer. He was like, yeah, you can do that.

And this is based on web standards. This is not that hard to do, to connect your data-- to connect different kinds of data-- BIM as one pool of data and the specs as another pool of data. And it was about two months later we had that conversation. Steve said, hey, let's have a conference call.

He has one of his engineers look into it. And that first-- it's working. You're right. It wasn't that hard. We were able to hook up the Building Information Model, 3D views, 2D views with the specifications.

Now, keeping in mind-- what do most people do today? It's stacks of PDF files that are referenced. And it's pretty disorganized. It's very file-based. Where what Steve at NBS has done-- this is about the data. And this is about getting great value from the BIM that people are creating.

Because it's not about the model. It's about the data. And with that, we'll hand it to Steve. And he can talk about what they've done now three years in.

And we had have breakfast this morning. And we were talking about-- the next step, Steve, is tightly connecting this into BIM 360. So the whole project team has got easy, fluid access.

STEPHEN HAMIL: Thank you, Jim. Thank you. So just a little bit about NBS. The problem that we solve is-- there's lots of unstructured information in the industry. So we think of things like the standards, the building codes.

We employ a team of architects and engineers that spend all day, every day studying what's out there, seeing what's changed, what new technologies are there, and give that information structure so that our customers, the architects and engineers in the UK, can come together on construction projects and work collaboratively. So you've got a hexagon of the structured data. You've got the circles of the collaborative team coming together. And that's where our logo comes from.

So internally, our content teams will research and structure the content so that our customers can work 100% on projects. And then us having to have people over there studying what the latest standard is, and what does that mean for my specification I've written using my bespoke Microsoft Word system? So we'll show that a little bit later on.

In terms of the history of NBS, it was originally set up-- the idea came in the '60s from the Royal Institute of British Architects. How can we show [? examples of ?] ways of working to our members? And then over the years, we've gone from a paper-based offering in 1973 when it was first published to using digital technologies.

And nowadays, we've got two major shareholders. One's still the Royal Institute of British Architects. But last year, we also had Lloyd's come in and give us some investment with their LDC private equity on.

And we've taken that concept in built teams now in Canada. We took over the Digicon at the business and brought that into NBS. And we've set up a team in Australia, as well. So we want to have one fantastic software platform that you can use around the world when you're writing up your specifications.

But just to set the scene, let's have a look at the state of the industry today. How much has it changed over the years? And this is a structure called Hadrian's Wall. It used to separate England from Scotland 2,000 years ago. It was the edge of the Roman Empire.

This is where I'm from in the north of England. And if you look carefully at that picture, you can see that they've built it by putting block on top of block. There's a cavity wall, because it's quite cold in the north of England. And they've got under-floor heating.

2,000 years later, we see a building that's block on top of block with a cavity wall and under-floor heating. So has the industry changed that much in 2,000 years? It's a bit of a lighthearted example.

And we do create fantastic buildings, fantastic built environments. But it quite often feels that everybody's pulling in different directions like the [INAUDIBLE] So the car will eventually get from A to B. But it's not through everybody pulling together and working collaboratively in the same direction.

And as an industry, you have to be more like-- so we've got Italian engineering 2,000 years ago building the Roman Wall. And there's some Italian engineering changing the tires on a Formula One car in four seconds or what have you.

And part of the reason for the inefficiencies is that we're increasingly creating fantastic data using tools that you see this week at Autodesk University. But then that fantastically-rich information gets dumbed down to a bit of paper or a PDF that gets passed to the next person and the next person. I think this slide here could be presented by one of the BIM 360 Team at Autodesk or anyone else. But that person at the front's got to care about the rest of the people. And you've created some fantastic data that share, that collaborate.

Less lighthearted slides-- this was a tragedy in the UK, Grenfell Tower. I imagine, around the world, everyone heard about it. It wasn't renovated in 2016. 2016, it was renovated. And through a fridge/freezer-- that's the likely cause, just a fridge/freezer catching fire-- 72 people died.

And there was a major report. Hackitt Report did lots of research, talked to all the stakeholders in the industry. And in this report, it illustrated damning findings and really clear recommendations about how the building industry quite often goes quicker and cheaper. There's almost ambiguity there instead of transparency and responsibility. Enforcement is supposed to happen but not actually being pursued.

The lack of a transparent audit trail from that brief design, through the construction, to handover-- so you are getting information, but you can't check it against anything. Because it's in paper or in a box-- and the need for more rigor and oversight from the start of a project.

And in terms of what's needed, a digital record-- and they used a phrase "a golden thread"-- so that thread of information from the start all the way through to in use. Looking at different recommendations, legal responsibilities for clients, principal designers, contractors across all building types, not just high rise-- and then key information records. In the UK, this is what's needed-- so a digital as-build model, digital specs as a minimum in respect for structural and fire safety, and a digital control process, digital record keeping.

So it's a good read-- 150, 160 pages. But I'd recommend downloading and have a look at it. And there's tragedy that's happened. But throughout it, it's better information and move to digital responsibility enforcement.

And this isn't the only report over the last two or three years looking at maybe different outcomes. But you've have the Hackitt Reports. You've seen these in some of the keynotes at Autodesk events and things-- but Boston Consulting Group saying, if it's money that we're looking at, it's potentially 13% or 21% savings.

If it's productivity we're looking at-- this is the McKinsey Report-- 14% to 16% productivity savings. And World Economic Forum concluding, looking at the construction sector, that digital will have the biggest impact in terms of the external drivers. If I ever see someone with the iPhone with a picture, I'll just wait. There in the audience, I was trying to take a photograph, and then the slide goes. And I'm like, ah, missed it.

At the end, I've got some USBs, as well. So if anybody wants a copy of this, come see me at the end. So the second part of the presentation is structuring information. When the UK government said we're going to have a BIM mandate in 2011, they didn't just say we want BIM and then step to one side and see what the industry provided.

They started out by saying, what are the outcomes you want to see? And it was lower costs, faster delivery-- and the cost in delivery not just in terms of construction but operation, as well. So when you go to fix something, you fix it first time instead of analyzing, working what's third, fourth time-- less of an impact on the built environment in terms of sustainability and upskilling the UK industry.

And they did that by defining what they called level 2 BIM. So I like this illustration showing from people working paper at the bottom left all the way through to this cloud future internet of things. In that level 2 BIM, UK government defined the set of standards. And these standards defined the process that had to be followed, but it also defined some of the data structures.

You might have heard of the [? colby, ?] which is a simplified data structure, which you can have in its simplest forms of spreadsheets. And in the UK, the government funded a project called the BIM Toolkit. And as part of that toolkit, we produced a brand-new specification system building on some of the good work that had already gone on, a specification system that aligned to the framework from [? ISO 12006 ?] part 2 called Uniclass. And it was ourselves at NBS that worked with the industry to develop Uniclass.

So standards are needed. And if you look at the standards at the moment, they tend to be around maybe geometrical sizes and things. So you have standard sizes for openings, for doors, windows, blocks. So you can come together, and efficiently you know that's all going to fit together. Light fixtures fit inside ceiling tiles, and lamps, et cetera.

You can drive a car from Norway at the top of Europe all the way down to Turkey going through nine different countries, and you can fill it up with petrol with exactly the same nozzle size. And if you're doing coding, we have standards for things like CSS, and JavaScript, et cetera. So people can create a website which works just as well on a Mac as a PC, Internet Explorer, or Google Chrome.

And that's what happens as technologies mature. When new technologies come out, there tends to be a battle over standards. So we have a look here at electric cars.

It's a new technology that's coming out. And this is a little article here about everybody wanting to be there as the first standard. But that will settled down, the same as existing.

And just as a comical look at standards, it was nice to see that this morning's fun run was in metric, 5K. So you never know. One day, maybe we'll have metric around the world.

It wasn't called the AU 3.10686 miles. It was the AU 5K. Everyone was talking about, what was your pace per mile on a 5K run. I don't quite get that.

But one thing we did at NBS-- and that's what BIM level 2 mandate came out-- was to look at, what are the standards around creating good, quality BIM objects? And things like the COBie properties, the IFC properties, classification versus a standard called [? BS8541 ?] in the UK.

And we pulled that all together in an easy-to-understand guidance document and associated with things like Revit templates for RVT files, families, shared parameters with all the GUIDs. And we gave away free to the industry. And what I'm going to do is try to go between PowerPoint and live software examples.

At any point, any of these software things could break. And I've got little videos to fall back on. But there's three things when we did our research groups around standards for creating BIM objects that were really frustrating the industry back in 2011.

I'll show live examples of this-- but the quality of information being one. So yes, it looks very nice model. But when you do your data extracts, do your schedules, just that the data be nonsense inside. There was also getting the geometry right-- not too much geometry but not too little geometry. And then finally, the objects function correctly and don't break.

So let me just show a few light examples of that. And hopefully, this will work. But this is a sample Revit file, which, again, is on the USB stick if anybody wants to grab it afterwards. And we look at this functionality first behind an object. Look at this in 3D.

I've got two objects here, one which I'd say it's a bad object and one which is to that quality level. So we have a look at here. And we want to change this generic tank to be different dimensions. You might spend 10 minutes searching for it on the internet-- like, great, I've found it. I want it to be 900 millimeters in length.

So I go down here. And which one's actually the length? You have five properties there. They're all parametric linked into the geometry. [INAUDIBLE]

And I'm going to change that one here from 1,500 mil to 900. And if you watch what happens to the water tank, it just explodes. And that's probably going to happen to 100 different people in 100 practices.

They'll find their objects. And they've wasted half an hour of their life. And they have to create one themselves, or they have to go and search and find a different one.

And this one here's to the NBS BIM object standard. And if we have a look at, it in terms of functionality, these are nice little things. The parameters are always named the same. For the MEP stuff, there's always clearance zones. So you can see that these objects are too close together.

So I can move that into the right area, so you can maintain it in the new spheres. And if we have a look at the change in the actual geometry here, everything is named to the BIM object standards. They've got the correct GUIDs in. So it's the same across all of the MEP set.

And if I change the dimensions now to, say, 900 in terms of the depth and 450 under the radius, when I click Apply, you see everything change so gracefully, everything flexed nicely. And that's what you want. You want the objects that you create in-house, the objects that you download off the internet all to function nicely.

If we look at the second problem that our focus groups told us, it was rubbish information inside. So we look at these two doors. And we look at the shape. They look great. They're great-looking doors.

But you have a look at the information inside them. And these are from the same-- they were probably created by the same person in the same week. And they've used different terminology from the frame width. One's called frame without the space. Once called frame space thickness-- different GUIDs.

And that's the job, again, for 1,000 different people in 1,000 different practices-- to open those in the family edit. They realign it, so you can work with the data and not just have something which is helping you do your crash detection, helping you do your drawing generation. The objects to the object standards-- all using the same GUIDs.

They're from seven or eight different UK manufacturers-- so rival manufacturers, manufacturers that probably don't like each other. But they're all created to the same object standard. So when the architect comes in to do their door schedule, there's just a selection of the properties there.

They've got the same naming convention for the object name, for the manufacturer, the model reference. And if you pass this further down the line to someone who's going to do analysis on this model, it's a dream come true when you're doing your scripting, when you're doing your Dynamo and things. Because the data has been structured well, as opposed to no care and attention whatsoever with the other example.

In that final pin point [INAUDIBLE] either too much geometry or too little geometry. So we work with manufacturers in the UK. And here's one manufacturer that says, great news. We've got objects. Can we put in on your website?

But this Revit family was about 5 megs in size. And the manufacturer all proud of it-- and you can see, they've got all these beautiful curves and all the threads on the bolts and things. But the first thing we did was drop it down to just over a mg in size, and give it a sensible level of geometry that you'd want on a frame for an air conditioning system.

And the opposite of that is not enough geometry. So this is the standard for symbols when you take [INAUDIBLE] models, models in the UK. And this is a door and windows should look like at low-detailed representation and then high detail-- so how it should show the frame, et cetera, the different glazing.

And we look at bad objects, first of all. You see, there's no frame there at all. Drop it from course define.

And then you look at the good objects that have been done at BIM object standard. And you see, they're looking just like how they should look in the standards. So that balance between the Goldilocks, not too hot, not too cold, not too much geometry, but enough geometry that allows you to do the job that you've got.

So the BIM Object Standards-- free resource from NBS with the GUIDs, and the shared parameter files, et cetera. You can download and use if you think it would be useful in your organization. And then the second big, free-to-use standard information is the Uniclass classification system that we've developed with industry in the UK. And this is 13,500 classifications that you put against all the different items in the built environment, whether that's buildings or the wider infrastructure.

And at the top level, you have these numbers that are consistent-- so everything to do with transport, whether that's a runway for an airport, or a motorway, or-- a tunnel will be an 80-- everything you do with water, and waste, and land management, a 32. I think there's a little video sequence here-- so yeah, relevant to all sectors and allowing you to classify different scales of items. So there's classifications here for whole buildings, for whole complexes but then going smaller and smaller.

So you've got classifications for elements, like a whole wall element, a system like maybe a cladding system, all the way down to a product, which could be a fastener or the cladding panel itself. And that's used for asset management, for manufacturers, for architecture, for construction. And what was really nice when we did this in 2014, 2015 was then just seeing how the industry would react to it.

And there's been some fantastic examples of usage from really big clients, a Metropolitan Police Environment Agency, a transport for London Ministry of Justice. And the UK government released a booklet, which is a free download, showing how it's been used to analyze the content inside of public buildings in the UK-- prisons, hospitals, schools. And first of all, they analyzed the activities-- so what activities happen the most-- in the UK buildings, what spaces are needed to support those activities, and then going down the actual spaces themselves and looking what the system is, what the products are.

This is a publication done by the architects Bryden Wood for the UK government. Their practice is based in London. And then four or five months later, they said that's good for buildings, but what about infrastructure?

And the same publication was then done looking at the principles for infrastructure. So this is the new underground line in London, the Queen Elizabeth line, formerly known as Crossrail-- but again, analyzing what activities are going to happen in this big train complex and then breaking it down into the different entities like the tunnels, then the systems like the tunnel lining systems. And these have all got those codes that have been taken from the 13,500 Uniclass codes.

And then only four or five months ago, I got an email saying transport for New South Wales and Australia have adopted Uniclass at the other side of the world. And they'd commissioned AECOM to do a report analyzing classification systems around the world. And they recommended Uniclass should be now used for those public buildings, public infrastructure in New South Wales.

And there's some preview. This document is not released at the bottom right-- but examples of how they've classified the Sydney light rail system from the complexes, again, to the systems, to the products, down to the wires that the trains run on. And around the world, we're hearing these stories every day now.

OK, the last part, the main part of the presentation-- the cloud and connecting information. At NBS, we have a research department. And we were commissioned by Microsoft to do a report looking at digital trends in the UK industry. And it's quite a nice download if you're interested.

But we did this question which said, what digital technologies are you currently using? And what digital technologies do you expect to use? And we asked this many of architects, RIBA working with us on it. But if you have a little look at the segments 2, 3, and 4, there are the bits where the adoption's got over 50% now in the UK. And it's building information modeling, digital collaboration tools, cloud computing, mobile apps.

And those four things-- now it's happening. It's not, this is going to happen in the future. This is happening in the best organizations in that AAC sector. And there's a company like ourselves that sell specification products.

We saw this trend coming, as well. And we thought, well, we've got to move our desktop products to the web to make them faster, to improve collaboration. And that was why we went across to San Francisco two or three years ago to see what Autodesk was doing with the Forge initiative, as well.

Not to touch on these today-- but interesting looking at what's next. It's things like AR, VR, internet of things, bots, AI, et cetera. They're the ones that maybe will come in the next 2, 3, 4, 5 years more into the mainstream-- but those main cloud BIM collaboration.

And what we launched a couple of months ago is our new specification tool, which is that cloud-based tool. Now, the Wi-Fi is reasonably poor. So this demonstration may not work. But I'll give it a go.

So here you can see what's called NBS Chorus. And the first thing you can see it is a modern web app. So it works just as nicely on a phone, as it does on the iPad, as it does on a wide screen. Let's check I'm still signed in here.

And then you can control who accesses which projects. So this is user A at organization B. And this person got access to nine of the projects of maybe the 100 projects that the company is working on. And you can come into a project and invite team members. We look at that in second-- but create specifications, as well.

And within those specifications, you can have the access control. So you can have an architectural specification that the architects can edit and edit building services, specification that the engineers can edit. The client can maybe have read-only permissions. So we've got the permissions model.

And you create a specification by coming in. Let's just put UK Demo. And you'll see the different content sets you can pick from. So it's just like when you install Revit on your machine. You can put the UK content onto the US content or the Japanese content.

Here you can go with Canadian content, Australian, and UK-- so one software tool with content from around the world to their local standards, their local practices. So if you look at the UK content structure by Uniclass 2015 first, that creates the spec. And I'm just going to add the window-- so an external window system-- and you can see, classified by Uniclass 2015 guidance to help you.

And as you add it to the job, instead of creating specification in Microsoft Word where you're faced with either a blank sheet of paper or a specification from a project four or five years out of date, you've got a template now, which has been authored by our expert authors in-house. And you can specify as much or as little as you want.

So if you'll want to go through each of the components, you add them to the job. If there's no over-frame ventilator, you park it off. And as you come to make that decision-- what's the window made of-- you get the guidance on the right-hand side.

And you can come through and build up the specification starting at the entire system, like a heating system, and then going down to the products, like the radiator, the boiler, or the steel pipes-- or in this case, the window system-- with the [INAUDIBLE] the frame, the unit, cetera. And you see there that this is the structure for the window. But then when you look at what's referenced, it's the standards from the United Kingdom, BS 1234 approved document building code A.

If I went back and created an Australian spec, on the face of it, it's very similar-- so the Australian content. I search for a window. It's got the same classification code as Uniclass in Australia, as well as the UK.

But if I look at the window system and specify it maybe by the overall performance-- let's choose fire, and safety, and security. As I get down to the fire performance, the standards are the Australian standards, AS1-530.4. And it talks about things like bushfire attack resistance, which is not something we have to worry about hugely in England.

So it's still a window. It might actually come from the same factory from the manufacturer. But in terms of how it's described, it's to the different standards-- how it's tested, how it's certified in those countries to the different standards.

And if you look at the Canadian example, it's a little bit different now. Because instead of Uniclass, it's the master format. So I search for window this time. And I'm not seeing the SS for systems. I'm seeing in the master format.

And when I add my window-- let's add a wood window-- you'll see it's more the traditional North American three-part specification with general information products and then workmanship at the bottom. And there you can see, from the Canadian content, it's a mixture of Canadian standards and the USA, American standards. So when I'm specifying the forced entry resistance of the wood window, I'm getting the values that are in the American standard as opposed to the British or the Australian. So you've got an online spec tool here.

And what we found is that-- the vision from NBS from the '70s is that you don't write the specification in silo. You write the specification fully understanding where it is in the design. And what's been possible working with Autodesk is to actually integrate our products inside of the design tools.

So let's just close this one down, and open this one. So what you can see here is I've got the model that I'm designing in the middle. And then through this classification code, you link the items in the model with the specification that you write to the right-hand side. So you can see that this specification's got the little Link button to show that this model is linked to that spec.

And because we've designed NBS Chorus, the spec tool, as a cloud platform, it just drops into the tool. So that's basically just the web browser control taking over what space it's got. You can have it on the nice, big screen layout, or you can take it down to the small layout, which we originally designed for an iPhone or Android phone. But it does work really nicely embedded inside a parent application.

And because these are linked, as I click on the items in the model, you see the project specification on the right-hand side. And that's protected by the permissions model. So if I've just got [INAUDIBLE] permissions, I can't delete anything from the spec. If I've got read-only permissions, I can just read it.

If this is the security spec and only two or three people in the office have ability to see it, then I won't be able to see it all. But if I have got the ability to work on this, I can actually just write straight into the specification from the context of Revit. I take all questions at the end.

So our customers in the UK tend to fall into two groups. There's the groups where, across the office, they share out the duties in terms of what you do in Revit, what you do in the specification. And both people do both jobs. But you also get the customers that have maybe a group of four or five in the corner that are the master specification writers. And the other architects, architectural technicians are doing the design.

This allows, even if you are just working on the design, to put the briefing at the top to the specification writer. So as you're putting the design together, you can contribute to the spec, add items, link things up. Maybe the architectural technician has four or five years experience. So then the master specifier with 30 years experience can come in and complete the specification.

Once they're linked, there's little IDs inside the objects. So if I look at this one here, you can see that the specification IDs can easily be shown as little annotation of objects. So you can see that this object here is made up of four parameters if they exist-- the classification code, the title. And then you might want to put a prefix or a suffix in to say, this is a mirror type A, and this is mirror type B.

Let me just demonstrate how that works here. You can see what has been specified and what hasn't in this tab. So these are all the items that haven't been specified. These are all the items that have just using the Revit categories here.

So I can see that this particular flaw-- I think it's natural stone tile flooring in the bathroom, the restroom-- you've got the standard terminology. That hasn't yet been linked together. And you can see that, also, from the annotation marks.

So I can click on the floor system, and then drop into the contents panel here, and link that to the internal floor tiling system. So I associate that with the model. It's going to say, am I linking the system or the materials inside it? It's the entire system.

And then that drops in there as the annotation. So you've got the QA in terms of what's linked and what's not linked. And then you can use these linkage to have them as columns in your schedules or annotations that come off.

There's the natural stone tiles, which are linked to the top layer. And you see and have the material tags and the-- I don't know what that this. Is that under the are? I think, it's the adhesive-- cement as adhesive. Link that, as well.

And you're doing two things here. You're speeding your workflow up-- so more productivity. But it's more accurate, as well. So you're reducing the risk of something going wrong.

You think of how much rework goes on on-site, where project manager or architect turns up, and it's the wrong floor tiling system in the restroom. Rip it up. It all goes in the skip. It's contributing towards waste and cost. If you can link these together and design timings can get it right, it's crash detection of the information as opposed to crash detection of the geometry.

Now we've got a North American example. I think it's quite a big file in Revit. So I'll just play this video through. But it's exactly the same principles.

So this is Alberta in Canada, NEXT Architecture, one of our innovation panel in Canada. Is this playing? Yeah, it's playing.

And it's exactly the same as that restaurant that you saw earlier. So you've got the model in the middle of the screen. You've got the plugin at the right-hand side of the screen. And you're connecting the specification that's in the cloud with the model. So you've got that one-to-one linkage.

And then inside here, you can click on the items in the model. The specifications are different. The classifications are different. But the principles are the same, that, as you are specifying, you want to see the extent of that. So I'm linking the metal door with the metal door, either at that section level if I [INAUDIBLE] the scope of the door or the article level, the [INAUDIBLE] level-- and then doing the same thing there with the gypsum board assemblies.

And maybe have a look around that model, and see that there's no specification yet for the stairs and the railings. And that's not a problem. It tells you they're not linked. And you can just go and search for metal stairs and then add that to your project.

So you're connecting that as you work, instead of working on the Revit model for five, six weeks and then thinking, oh, I've got a brief to specify, and things are going to get missed. You're keeping that information in sync all of the time using two of the best-in-class tools out there, your Autodesk Revit for putting your model together, generating new drawings in your schedule, and NBS Chorus there in terms of specification writing in the UK, in Canada, in Australia, and with plans to go further afield.

So let's reflect back on a typical project. Like we were saying at the start, we had the bits of paper getting tossed over the cubicle panels. You've got your designer, your engineer, your architect that's producing rich information, real, quality information and then turning that into bits of paper. So the bits of paper then get passed to the next bit of the party, to the next bit of the party.

And what we've got to do is change that way of working. So that rich information is shared on the cloud connecting platforms together like NBS and Autodesk, connecting the data together using common classifications so that the rest of the team that's collaborating can come to the URL securely with permissions. So collaboration isn't about creating a free-for-all where everybody can change the spec and everybody can change the model. But with the right permissions, the right things in place, collaborating properly where everybody knows their responsibilities-- and you've got that transparency of the information flow.

The software that really inspired me over recent years is Google Maps. I used to have a paper map. But you'd have to buy. And then you'd have the Yellow Pages that you'd flicked through.

Now in the space of five or six seconds, I can zoom from Newcastle in England to Las Vegas in Nevada and find out information in a matter of seconds. So I might want to know the postcode of the website of a hotel, or the opening hours of a restaurant, or a different ratings. And you're using the amazingly fast, amazingly intuitive visual model to get to the information that you want at that point in time. And that was unimaginable 10, 15 years ago.

I use Google Maps if I go for a walk in the mountains in the UK now. Whereas, five or six years ago, I'd take that map. You've got good 3G, 4G.

And the scale doesn't matter. I can zoom in. I can zoom out. And you got the information at your fingertips, digitally, as opposed to having pre-think and wait for things through the post and by paper.

And that's where we got to go to linking that model and specification in the cloud. So that's our next stage. Let's jump across.

And the technology hasn't let me down so far today. Let's give this one a go. What I've demonstrated so far is Chorus is live now-- getting used on some live projects. The rapid plugin for Chorus is getting released in December. What I'm about to show is a sneak preview of what we're going to release and quarter 1, working with Jim's team at Autodesk here, taking that Revit model, and putting it into the cloud so that the rest of the team can see spec and model together with the spec in the editable format.

So let's go to that same restaurant project. And let's look at the cladding that we were looking at earlier in Revit. And this could be a place with 20, 30 years experience specifying.

They're a bit scared of Revit. They don't want to go on a two or three-day training course. But they'd love to see what they're specifying in the model.

What they'd do there is just click this little button on the left-hand side, and see that, last Friday, the technician uploaded the Revit file with everything linked together. So when I'm coming and specify my cladding system now on the left-hand side-- on the right-hand side, I can see the model.

And even though I'm on reasonably poor Wi-Fi here and this is a decent-sized Revit model, you can see that it's loading. And as it's loading, I can still turn it around. You're not having to wait until it's fully loaded.

But once it has fully loaded, it's showing you the extent of the cladding system for the building. So I can make better specification decisions, more informed decisions knowing what the context is. So I can come in now and type away.

I can go to the dropdown values, pick the values. I can see the guidance, push the guidance back in again. So it's still the interactive specification environment but seeing the context of it here.

If I want to come and see the roof-- that's a stainless steel roof sheet covering system. I don't have to flick to drawing 45 and grab it from the other side of the office. Because when I click on the stainless steel roof covering system, it shows me it to the right-hand side.

The other way of working is using the model as a table of contents to get into the specification. So if I come across now and click on the Deck, it opens the deck system. And it's there ready to specify.

And it's the same controls as you'd use for Google Maps. You can do the wheelie mouse in. You can do it out. You can hold it down and pan it. You can twist it around.

And if you want to-- I never get this right. I'm going to try-- if you want to go full Fortnite mode or Doom mode, you can so click on-- let's go up. You can click, and have a little walk around the building, and look inside it. And what have I got for the roof structure?

Could you imagine yourself as a client sitting here, and having a meal, and looking out onto the lake? What have we got in the washroom? This little bit will definitely go wrong, But I'll try it anyway.

OK, so what are we doing for the washbasin? We've got [INAUDIBLE] shanks for the counter washbasins with thermostatic water supply sets. That's the sort of conversation you're having in design meetings with the main contractor, with the client, with the quantity surveyor.