Sensible guidance for adopting Autodesk Construction Cloud

New technology adoption presents some unique challenges, especially when it comes to actual implementation. In recent years, especially due to the pandemic, the construction industry has more readily embraced innovation. In many cases, business models have been quietly shifting because of it.

However, any time you change the way someone has been working for years (or even decades), overcoming related obstacles is par for the course. That’s why it’s important to understand common implementation challenges and best practices when deploying new technology or construction software. 

During a great industry talk at Autodesk University this year, Ivana Tudja, BIM and Digital Engineering Lead (Senior BIM Manager) at Mace, shared common blindspots and lessons learned for making new technology implementation a success. Ivana is a 40 Under 40 Champion of Construction (2020), and we’ve compiled some of the best tips from her session Implementing Autodesk Construction Cloud Across a £1.8billion Business. You’ll hear about the drive for change within Mace, the journey and processes her team followed to roll out Autodesk Construction Cloud, and how they improved on-site coordination and efficiency.

 

1. Start with a vision for implementation of construction software

What do you want to achieve by implementing Autodesk Construction Cloud? What pain points are you trying to solve? 

Push yourself to explore possibilities outside the status quo. Go beyond the way things have always been done. Ivana explains, “You’re not going to change the industry without thinking out of the box. So try thinking about how you want your teams to operate in the future. And please, don’t limit yourself with what’s happening just right now.” By removing self-prescribed limitations, you’ll find strategic navigation flows much more naturally in the exploratory stages of implementation.

Know that as you push for changes and challenge limitations, you’ll be driving a cultural change.

Next, do research and explore the market as much as possible. As the market is ever-changing, it’s important to understand the latest technology available. Being knowledgeable of progressive industry innovations is a great first step to building a vision. Then when you keep up with the industry, and really stay at the forefront of the future-friendly technology, you’ll give your firm a competitive edge over others. 

As you explore potential construction management software options, always test your products and get hands-on experience. “I wouldn’t just rely on what you read about the product because that can be really misleading. Nothing can replace hands-on experience, and that’s why it’s important to have it, even if you’re not someone who is using the product on a day-to-day basis yourself,” shares Ivana. 

Know that as you push for changes and challenge limitations, you’ll be driving a cultural change. That’s why Ivana emphasizes the importance of winning people over. You’ll be questioning your team and pushing them to go further. So establish connections, build relationships, and understand their needs so you can support them along the way. Do this with your team on-site as well. That way if they have any issues, they’ll know who to call. 

Finally, be a rebel. As Ivana puts it, “How else are you going to change [an] industry that hasn’t changed for so long? Sometimes, you really need to make bold decisions if you want to make a real impact.” Realize you may hear “no” over and over again. However, don’t let those “no’s” serve as permission to give up. Keep going and look for ways to build common ground.

 

2. Pinpoint top use cases for Autodesk Construction Cloud

Mace decided to implement Autodesk Construction Cloud and Assemble due to internal and external pushes toward modernization. The firm needed to meet the BIM Level 2 mandatory requirements as well as complex project requirements from advanced, highly technical, and educated clients. Ivana and her team wanted to build higher levels of consistency into Mace and be able to compare projects as well as analyze data to make better business decisions. They turned to Autodesk Construction Cloud, specifically BIM 360 Next Generation and Assemble to meet those objectives. 

Mace uses BIM 360 for a variety of purposes, including document management, effective design management, and coordination as well as managing quality assurance and quality control on-site. Using this unified platform has improved the quality of data analytics for Mace significantly. Ivana notes, “Data analytics was a big driver behind the implementation of the platform. And we are now able to get easy access to all the information via Insights, Construction IQ, and Power BI integrations.”

“One of our commercial managers [sic] recently told me that this is the best BIM tool he’s ever used. Believe me, commercial managers are normally the hardest ones to convert.” —Ivana Tudja, BIM & Digital Engineering Lead, Mace

The team recently added Assemble to their portfolio for information-sharing and to break down silos. Before Assemble, BIM managers acted as the go-between for users and project and platform. Every time a project needed data, they would have to request that it be exported by the BIM manager. 

With Assemble, the project teams now have direct access to data, which has been favorably received. “One of our commercial managers [sic] recently told me that this is the best BIM tool he’s ever used. Believe me, commercial managers are normally the hardest ones to convert,” explains Ivana.

By knowing their top uses for Autodesk Construction Cloud and Assemble, Ivana was able to score early wins and further drive adoption across the firm. 

 

3. Prioritize on-site coordination and efficiency 

Mace currently runs over 100 projects on Autodesk Construction Cloud and has over 2,500 users using the platform. Understandably, complexity is always present and the risk for inefficiency is always there. To drive greater design management and coordination, Mace has leaned on BIM 360 to simplify the clash detection process. This process takes place in the cloud and offers automatic grouping of clashes. “For those who are not aware, it’s really important to mention that model coordination now includes tolerances, which was a really long-awaited feature,” emphasizes Ivana. “We’ve established workflows which also help us to manage and analyze project risks through BIM 360 Docs and Power BI.”

As an open platform, BIM 360 can cover every single project activity through integrations. Mace regularly connects the platform to over key tools during projects. As for Assemble, the tool has been beneficial in pre-construction for progress tracking or a tagging and track system. The data fits right into Mace’s objectives to gather more insights from analytics: “The platform enables us to do asset data checks and ensure that we are meeting client requirements at the right stage. We can also provide data from models to our sustainability specialists to support them with achieving our net-zero carbon goals.”

 

4. Deliver the right training to your users

Once you’ve planned for implementation and identified your top use cases, take time to understand training requirements. You can succeed at every other phase in this journey, but won’t be able to move forward unless your end-users know how to use the software. Ivana recommends creating a company-wide survey to assess and evaluate your staff in terms of their digital skillset. This survey can serve as your starting point for customized training. 

Mace’s Digital Training Academy is a critical aspect of bringing every stakeholder into its digital construction journey. To customize the training, offerings vary for leadership, direct end-users, roles, and external consultants. However, training doesn’t end once users complete the academy. As Ivana shares, “If I had to choose one thing that’s a key for success, that would be continuous support. Don’t just assume that you can provide training and leave. There are always questions that will arise when users start using the product. It’s critical that you provide them with support when that happens.”

 

Charting a path to construction technology adoption

Adopting new technology is about more than leveraging great features. It’s about pushing a cultural change forward and helping others succeed in their roles through innovative, intuitive solutions they want to use. As Ivana has shared, implementing construction software effectively requires a strong vision, proper planning, careful research, empathy with users, and a robust training program. 

If you’re considering implementing a new construction software solution at your firm, we’d love to show you exactly how Autodesk Construction Cloud can help with a free demo.

The post Expert Tips for Rolling Out Autodesk’s Construction Software appeared first on Digital Builder.

POB is a building contractor focusing on turnkey projects where they work in collaboration with their clients to find the best possible outcomes. With a work culture which mixes professional pride and outstanding results, the team has expertise which covers the entire value chain of a construction project. POB delivers new build projects, rehabilitation projects, concrete work, smaller service projects as well as repair services to their varied client base in Norway.

The company started in 1992 with just three employees and in the nearly thirty years it has been operating, the company has grown significantly in size. They now have approximately 120 employees and offer support and services to small and large projects simultaneously. Over the years, the company has expanded quickly. With their rapid expansion, the teams still mainly relied on verbal communication as their main method for collaboration on their projects. These ways of working were not only risky but also meant that email soon became the primary way in which important project data was being shared. This was not reliable and left the company vulnerable when it came to data security.

As POB grew rapidly, some teams started using smaller digital collaboration tools and solutions. However, there was no common platform and no central storage place for all important project documents. Various levels of functionality for these platforms were being used in different ways, so POB could not establish clear and defined digital workflows for the company despite the fact they had slowly begun using digital solutions. Different projects all had different workflows and different priorities when it came to what was important to do, to document and to store. Collaboration with partners and clients was still unreliable and employees struggled to find the information they needed at any given time.

 

Standardising solutions to support a more unified company

During the annual POB Christmas party in 2019 the CEO and part owner Morten Vilhelmshaugen announced that POB was starting their journey into digitalisation with a direct challenge. Earlier that same year, Roger Feste, BIM Coordinator and IT Manager, and Hege M. Paulsen, Quality Manager, had been asked to explore how POB could improve their ways of working and improve the quality of their projects through improved and enhanced collaboration practices. “Email was our main way to share project data which brought a level of unnecessary risk to POB,” says Hege, Quality Manager at POB. “There were potential huge financial consequences when information was not shared in the right way and at the right time to our partners and clients. We wanted to use a solution that helped us distribute the responsibility and accountability on our projects to our supply chain partners too.”

For Roger, this wasn’t a simple fix that any technological solution alone could solve. “The digital solutions POB was using when we started working there didn’t meet the quality standards required by regulations in Norway on our projects,” affirms Roger, BIM Coordinator and IT Manager. Employees struggled to get an overview of the current stats of the projects due to fragmented workflows and processes. “Our server remained the same from when the company was first created in 1992. Some people stored project documents on their personal drives, some on the server, some on multiple different platforms – there was no common and standardised ways of working,” says Roger.

For the building, concrete and construction teams at POB, finding the latest and most up-to-date documents related to their projects was time consuming, complex and frustrating. “It soon became obvious to us that a more standardised approach could improve our efficiencies and give us greater results,” reflects Hege. We saw the need to renew the way we worked and to join the digitalisation wave in our industry. Due to earlier experience POB was mindful of the need to completely implement a whole solution, and not only parts. They also prioritised making ‘life easier’ for employees on their building sites. To simplify, POB decided they would adopt one solution for all of their projects moving forward. Many different solutions were researched but after a great presentation and excellent follow-up from Symetri AS, Autodesk Construction Cloud’s BIM 360 platform was chosen as the most suitable solution to meet the needs of POB.

 

Reducing time lost searching for documents

To get started, POB implemented BIM 360 with one department, the subcontracting concrete team. Roger reflects: “We used BIM 360 for the first time on smaller projects that weren’t as long in length so that we could develop some learning points to help us with our wider rollout of the solution.”

“We used BIM 360 for the first time on smaller projects that weren’t as long in length so that we could develop some learning points to help us with our wider rollout of the solution.” —Roger Feste, BIM Coordinator and IT Manager, POB

This approach helped POB realise that they would need to prioritise their folder structure conventions and permission settings throughout their rollout. “We learnt that it’s really important to take time at the start of your project defining the structures and workflows you want to use in BIM 360,” says Hege. For Hege and Roger, visualising how the solution would look and work before implanting it was difficult, so using an iterative rollout approach helped to refine the technology to suit the needs of POB and their projects on an ongoing basis.

 

Intuitive navigation resulting in requests to use the solution

Within the subcontracting department, many of the teams on site were using BIM 360 for the first time. The feedback received was around ease of use and how intuitive the solution was to learn quickly from a project site. “Before we implemented the technology, I was told that I’d really struggle to get our teams on site engaged with using it, but I found the complete opposite,” says Hege. “Once we implemented using BIM 360 on one project, I had site team members of other projects asking me when they would get to use it as they had heard how beneficial it was to project execution,” reflects Hege.

“Before we implemented [BIM 360], I was told that I’d really struggle to get our teams on site engaged with using it, but I found the complete opposite.” —Hege M. Paulsen, Quality Manager, POB

The construction teams on site liked the functionality that BIM 360 offered and many of them used the solution through the app on their mobile phone or device. “Using BIM 360 on site replaced several separate systems that our teams were previously using,” says Hege. When it came to implementing the technology further, Hege showed the benefits of each feature and functionality one at a time building iteratively so that project team members did not become overwhelmed. Hege also worked with site project team members to understand the pain points they faced when it came to executing tasks on site and showed them which features in BIM 360 would help them overcome each problem.

 

Building solid foundations

For POB, BIM 360’s document management capabilities is the foundation on which other digital workflows are built on. Having a solid and collaborative way to share documents means the project teams can remove the complete responsibility of information management on a project to a joint responsibility between all project stakeholders. “It’s now very easy for us to share documents with our subcontractors and supply chain partners in BIM 360,” says Roger. “Prior to using BIM 360, we really had no overview on the health of our projects as we lacked the information and data we needed about our projects,” continues Roger.

Spending hours trailing through various documents trying to ascertain whether it is the latest and most up-to-date version is a thing of the past for employees at POB. “BIM 360 supports our team to feel confident in the status of a project. Navigating and implementing version control is now much easier as all project collaborators know where the most accurate and up-to-date documents are and can see the versioning history,” reflects Roger.

POB’s on-site teams link documents and drawings into their checklists with BIM 360 to support with build activity. The issue handling functionality is also actively in use to track progress when it comes to resolving challenges within the project. “Automating the issues management functionality using BIM 360 has revolutionised the way in which we approach this important project activity by speeding up the managements and allocation of issues. We mark the exact location of the issue on our drawings in BIM 360 which also helps our team navigate our construction sites easily.” Says Hege

 

Better insights lead to better outcomes

Better insights captured from project data can not only improve the construction process, but it can support the health of a business and improve the way POB interacts with its partners and clients. “Complying to government regulations, simplifying everyday tasks, as well as delivering better quality for our clients is a big priority,” says Hege. “We now also have a standardised way of reporting and get better use of our data,”. Transparency on projects and better data has meant that POB’s previous manual ways of reporting that were lengthy and not wholly accurate have been replaced by dashboards in BIM 360.

Looking to the future, POB plans on ensuring all their teams across the entire company are getting the most from BIM 360 using the functionality available. They continue to actively work with digitalisation and aim to integrate Power BI with BIM 360. This will provide even more detailed analysis which will help manage and monitor project progress and proactively identify concerns. POB believe that all construction companies are responsible for driving the digital agenda. “Working with more digital workflows is not only more sustainable and timesaving, but they will also help us to create a more productive and efficient industry” says Hege. “With better project insights and a more collaborative industry we get more content and engaged employees, a more open supply chain and ultimately happier clients.”

If you’d like to see how BIM 360 connects your workflows, teams, and data so can you build better, please contact us. We’d love to show you how it works.

The post One Source of Truth Enabling Better Collaboration and Quality for POB in Norway appeared first on Digital Builder.