Introducing Autodesk BIM Collaborate: Design Collaboration and Coordination Made Seamless 

Successfully delivering a construction project requires a massive team of contributors to work together — but today, effective collaboration has become more difficult than ever. Projects have only grown in complexity, putting higher demands on teams as they collect, share, and process massive amounts of data. Because of this, there’s a widespread need for connected workflows that facilitate better collaboration and coordination earlier in the construction process.  

Nowhere is this more apparent than between design and construction. According to a report by JBKnowledge, 63.5% of general contractors say the highest value use case of BIM in construction today is model coordination. It’s easy to understand why given a recent Autodesk and FMI report showing rework costs the construction industry $65 billion a year. However, many firms still struggle to create streamlined model coordination and design collaboration workflows.  

Common issues include:   

• Inconsistent design data exchange leads to multiple sources of truth. 
• Clash detection and issue management rely on a single power user, creating bottlenecks. 
• A disconnected workflow spread across multiple solutions creates information silos. 
• Poor digital collaboration makes teams highly dependent on in-person meetings and emails. 

These issues – all centered around collaboration – can easily lead to negative business outcomes like increased schedule risk, rework, and cost overruns.   

Introducing Autodesk BIM Collaborate 

At Autodesk, we’ve recognized a clear need in the AEC industry to improve the coordination and design collaboration processes. That's why we’re excited to announce a brand-new product offering: Autodesk® BIM Collaborate.  

Autodesk BIM Collaborate empowers project teams to align and execute on design intent and constructability by managing the entire design collaboration and coordination process. This includes model review and markups, issue management, change analysis, and clash detection – all within a single, cloud-based solution in a common data environment. The improved workflow reduces rework, improves productivity, and accelerates project delivery.   

Benefits of Autodesk BIM Collaborate 

Autodesk BIM Collaborate includes solutions for design collaboration and coordination workflows to ensure high quality designs make it to the site.  

Design Collaboration 

Design Collaboration is Autodesk’s design collaboration and data management solution for the AEC project lifecycle. It enables teams, whether within one company or across multiple companies, to collaborate securely and in real-time on Revit and IFC files. As a leading solution for AEC collaboration, Design Collaboration helps teams centralize project data, connect their workspaces, and collaborate in smarter, more extensible ways on increasingly complex projects. As a result, AEC teams can reduce distractions and rework, maintain fidelity of design intent through construction, increase team productivity, and accelerate project delivery. 

Paul Nunn, National BIM Manager at Hansen Yuncken said, “As a general contractor, access to Design Collaboration provides us transparency into the model versions being used. The ability to easily identify changes between versions also ensures our trade teams are working off the latest models. This builds trust within the project team, and ultimately, speeds up the coordination process and gets higher quality designs to site sooner, reducing rework and improving project delivery.” 

With Design Collaboration, project teams can:  

• Manage the exchange of design data. Gain an overall picture of a project, tracking design progress in a shared timeline with the ability to aggregate and view different design scenarios. Also, exchange design data in curated packages with strict controls, easily managing how the project team consumes design data. 
• Visualize design changes. Easily visualize and contextualize design changes by team, project phase, or building level. Explore shared design data before accepting the data in order to understand how new design information will impact work-in-progress. 
• Supercharge collaboration. Remove the friction of managing model updates and tracking changes manually to empower designers to focus on what matters: collaboration, creativity, and producing high quality designs.

Model Coordination 

Autodesk Construction Cloud’s Model Coordination solution  enables general contractors to manage the entire coordination workflow between designers and subcontractors, including clash detection and issue management. Advanced capabilities like automated clash detection and clash grouping help eliminate manual processes and empower more stakeholders to contribute to the coordination process. At the same time, inherent collaboration functionality and connections with Navisworks and Revit ensure the entire project team is working from a single source of truth on shared issues.  

With Model Coordination, BIM/VDC teams can:  

• Instantly view constructability issues. Catching errors early can save construction teams both time and money. That is why automated clash detection is so important; it improves the quality of a model so that BIM leaders can spend less time on small errors and more time on the most important constructability issues. 

• Easily create and manage issues. Project teams can easily create and assign issues and then track issues to resolution. Collaboration can take place at any time during the coordination process, accelerating delivery of quality designs to site.

• Always work from the latest model. Working off the latest model should be automatic. As design and trade teams upload new models to the coordination space, the most recent model and its previous versions are instantly available to anyone viewing or running clash detection. 

• Collaborate with Revit and Navisworks users. Managers can ensure their design and trade teams can collaborate all the way to issue resolution. Because issues identified during coordination are shared between Navisworks and Revit, teams can quickly resolve these issues and get to constructible designs faster.

Meet Our New Autodesk Construction Cloud Products 

Built on a unified platform and common data environment, our three new products – Autodesk® Build, Autodesk® Takeoff, and Autodesk BIM Collaborate – empower general contractors, specialty trades, designers and owners to drive better business outcomes. Construction teams will have a comprehensive construction management platform with all data in one central location to simplify collaboration, proactively anticipate project changes and provide data-driven guidance for organizational improvement.

Autodesk BIM Collaborate is now available, click here to learn more. To learn more about all the exciting product announcements this month, take a look at our release.