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  • AEC: How to Save Time and Money from Operation Managment?

    Reducing 31200 hours of work annul= $1,872,000 CAD Saving

    Remember when the architect sent over a change last week, what was the dimension we had to move that door by? You search through your notes and emails for several minutes before finding the conversation from last week that she’s referring to.

    How much of an effect does this drag on productivity have on your day?   In a 15-person office, each person can spend up to two hours a day searching for data-that’s $200,000 per year wasted!

    Let us do a rough calculation here:

    120 minutes X 300 employees =36,000 minutes

    2400 minutes / 60 mins = 600 hours wasted each week

    600 hours X 52 weeks = 31200 hours

    31200 hours per year X $60 employment hourly rate =$1,872,000 CAD

    $1,872,000 CAD/ a year of operation is wasted with unproductive work process.

    SolidCAD has many successful cases in thriving BIM implementation in various cases. We have a great team of experts supporting individuals and organizations in terms of BIM training and helping them to set up a strong foundation project to reach independence.

    Please feel free to reach out to me at shirley.sio@solidcad.ca for more information.

    #BIMadoption #SolidCAD #AECindustry #Digitaltwin #digitaltransformation #BIMmandate  #AECoperationcost #AECmanagement

    The Challenges in the MEP Industries

    Pain Point:

    Disconnected Workflows: separate tolls being used by project stakeholders and disconnected workflows internally with firms result in the costly duplication of effort and increase work time.

    The inability to engage in influence early: This adds risk to securing procurement paths and is made even more difficult with those disconnected workflows and disparate solutions.

    Fast-tracked project schedule: Meeting tight deadlines are tough enough with managing and coordinating materials and labour, but it is even more difficult if there is miscommunication and design intent.

    A small talent pool: Difficult to hire and retain talent. It is also a problem that older specialists are retiring from the industry and taking their experience with them

    SolidCAD has many successful cases in thriving BIM implementation in various cases. We have a great team of experts supporting individuals and organizations in terms of BIM training and helping them to set up a strong foundation project to reach independence.

    Feel free to contact us for more information.

    #SolidCAD #Digital Collaboration # Increasing BIM Mandates, #Technology Proliferation #Industrialization of Construction #Digital Transformation

    Why BIM in MEP?

    Why BIM in MEP?

    75% of a project’s operational costs in the first 10 years are MEP related. Implementing BIM solution can demonstrate a savings of just 8 minutes per employee each week, and a reduction in change order on every projects – Autodesk

    Let us do a rough calculation at the operational cost that is wasted:

    8 minutes X 300 employees =2400 minutes

    2400 minutes / 60 mins = 40 hours wasted each week

    40 hours X 52 weeks = 2080 hours

    2080 hours per year X $100 employment hourly rate =$208,000 CAD

    Therefore, $208,000 CAD is wasted a year with unproductive operation cost.

    To have the ability to utilize the best from BIM helps you to save cost and to improve your productivity.

    If you want to understand and learn more about BIM Implementation and approach, we have a great team of experts supporting individuals and organizations in terms of BIM training and helping them to set up a strong foundation project to reach independence. SolidCAD has many successful cases in thriving BIM implementation in various cases.

    Please feel free to reach out to me at shirley.sio@solidcad.ca for more information.

    # WhatisBIM #BIMadoption #SolidCAD #AECindustry #Digitaltwin #digitaltransformation #BIMmandate

    What is BIM? Why BIM Adoption?

    In 2020, the research finding from the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industries in Canada state that:

    • 94% acknowledge that BIM is the future of project information and design practices
    • 90% of participant organizations already experienced a certain level of BIM implementation in their current operation
    • 80% of participants shared their BIM files with at least one external organization
    • Near half of these participants encountered interoperability obstacles in their projects    – AECO Lab Innovation
    • 55% of participants identified BIM helps to reduce their production costs by up to 50%  National Research Council Canada
    • 58% of expert users agree BIM reduce their production time to 50%
    • 87% of participants experienced positive ROI
    • 93% of users believe there is potential gain and increase value from it in the future  -National Research Council Canada

    A number of government projects in Canada are requiring BIM data for the last 5 years. It is a new trend for the Land developers and AEC industries to adapt the BIM technology to different stakeholders’ aspects.

    If you want to understand and learn more about BIM Implementation and approach, we have a great team of experts supporting individuals and organizations in terms of BIM training and helping them to set up a strong foundation project to reach independence. SolidCAD has many successful cases in thriving BIM implementation in various cases.

    Please feel free to reach out to me at shirley.sio@solidcad.ca for more information.

    # WhatisBIM #BIMadoption #SolidCAD #AECindustry #Digitaltwin #digitaltransformation #BIMmandate #

    Why BIM in AEC Firms?

    What is BIM? Why BIM Adoption?

    Is your existing workflow process seamless?

    Is there repetition or duplication of effort?

    Is data being re-enter from time to time?

    How do you handle changes?

    How many tools do you have to use to resolve that change order?

    Here are the sources of over-budgeting in operations and late project deliverables:

    • Poor collaboration
    • Low productivity
    • Low quality result
    • Overtime
    • Rework loads

    Building Information Modelling (BIM) is a powerful technology implemented by many leading countries over the last 20 years. Canada remains the only G7 country without a national BIM mandate.    –Government, Technology, Daily Commerical News

    If you want to understand and learn more about BIM Implementation and approach, we have a great team of experts supporting individuals and organizations in terms of BIM training and helping them to set up a strong foundation project to reach independence. SolidCAD has many successful cases in thriving BIM implementation in various cases.

    Please feel free to reach out to me at shirley.sio@solidcad.ca for more information.

    #WhatisBIM #BIMadoption #SolidCAD #AECindustry #Digitaltwin #digitaltransformation #BIMmandate

    Leverage Jupyter Notebook for Reporting on your BIM360/ACC Environment

    Leverage Jupyter Notebook for Reporting on your BIM360/ACC Environment

    Introduction

    Autodesk Construction Cloud (ACC) (see Figure 1) is a cloud-based application that allows design teams to manage their drawings and building models in a centralized way.  ACC has a well-defined Restful (REST) API interface that makes it easy to extract and report on all manner of operational information.  Using Python, Jupyter Notebook, and some ubiquitous Python libraries it is quite simple to create a customizable dashboard that can be leveraged on-demand by BIM Managers and IT Admins alike.

    Figure 1 – Autodesk Construction Cloud 

     

    What do you need?

    So what do we need to know in order to get started?  To prepare you will need access to Autodesk Construction Cloud, which I won’t cover here, and of course a Forge account that will allow you to setup and connect an application to your ACC hub.  You can find more information on setting up a forge application in this link.  Secondly, you will need to install Anaconda which is a powerful Python based data science platform that allows users to easily install and run a wide variety of Python libraries.  Once you install Anaconda, you will need to install a few libraries including the following:

    • requests –allows users to make HTTP calls to cloud services;
    • json – allows users to serialize the resulting Json to easily access attributes;
    • matplotlib – allows users to create rich data visualizations such as graphs (Matlab);
    • pandas – provides users with several useful data management tools; and
    • datetime plus dateutil – which allows us to easily perform date functions such as time zone conversion.

    You can find more information on installing Anaconda at this link.

    Finally, you will need to create a new Anaconda environment (see link) and install the libraries listed above along with Jupyter Notebook.  Jupyter Notebook can be installed from the Anaconda prompt with the following:

    (env) PS C:\user> conda install jupyter notebook

    Once Jupyter Notebook is installed you can simply type jupyter notebook at the command prompt and hit enter to open the console in a new browser window or tab. (see Figure 2)

    Figure 2 – Jupyter Notebook Starting Page

    The starting page provides access to all the notebooks in your development environment.

    One more thing before you get started, you will need to set up an application in Autodesk Forge.  You will then attach that application to your ACC instance so you can access the information through the REST API.  More instructions on setting this up can be found by following this link.

    Creating a Dashboard

    A dashboard is intended to be a simple graphical data-driven interface that provides a window into operational activities and events.  The dashboard must be two things

    1. simple to understand; and
    2. relevant

    Some thought should be given to what you want to report on but some examples are

    • drawing type distribution statistics which provide some insight into software usage; and
    • user role distribution statistics which provide insight into who is doing what.

    Once you have determined what you are going to report on, you can then start building your notebook.

    Building and Organizing Your Notebook

    Jupyter Notebook allows users to structure their code into cells which provides a way to step through your code.  This is very important for debugging as you can easily isolate sections of code which provides better code management.

    You can start by importing all relevant Python libraries. (see Figure 3)

    Figure 3 – Import Python libraries to extend the functionality of the core Python environment

     

    Once the correct libraries are imported to the Jupyter Notebook session you can start setting up the appropriate properties starting with the authorization call. (see Figure 4)

    Figure 4 – Parameters to be used for collecting authorization token

    These parameters are then used in an HTTP call using the request library to return the appropriate authorization token.  Note: you must set up the correct scope(s) to ensure the permissions you have when the REST API is called are adequate.  Some example scopes are as follows:

    • data:read
    • data:write
    • data:create

    However, there are many others, which you can find out more about by visiting this link.

    Collecting the Data

    Now you can collect the appropriate data for your dashboard.  To do this you will need to find the correct REST Endpoints.  Some of the endpoints used for this demonstration are:

    Using these endpoints, you can simply leverage the request Python library functions to retrieve the data

    • users = requests.get(url, data=data, headers=auth)

    The json Python library can be used to serialize the resulting “user” object for easy access to the data attributes.

    • json = json.loads(users.text)

    Now you can iterate through the json object and populate python lists to create a “data table” object.  Those data table objects can then be simply plugged into any number of data visualization objects such as a pandas dataframe or a Matlab graph.

    Visualizing the Dashboard

    So now you have the data to visualize, how do you get it into a dashboard?  Now you can leverage the final Python library of this demo, matlibplot.  This library allows users to plug the lists of data created above into several different graphical representations.  Figure 5 illustrates a set of graphic plots created with matlibplot (Matlab) as well as a data table produced from a pandas data frame.  You can see that these graphical data objects can be organized into a meaningful dashboard that can be reused and even shared with others in your organization.

    Figure 5 – Jupyter Notebook Dashboard with Data Frame Table

    Development and Sharing

    A brief word on sharing these dashboards throughout the organization and for tracking development of the notebooks.  It is very simple to publish these notebooks to a GitHub repository (see Figure 6) that will allow other users to access the notebooks as permitted.  GitHub can also track versions of the different notebooks to make it possible to go back in time to find previous code which makes it easier to do code trials.  You can also create different code branches that allow multiple developers to work on the notebooks simultaneously.

    To do this you will need to create a GitHub repository, load your notebooks to that repository and then clone the repository to your local machine.   Once you have the notebooks in a local repository, you can set the custom location for your notebooks to that repo by accessing the configuration file, typically located at C:\Users\<username>\.jupyter\jupyter_notebook_config.py and then updating the line that starts c.NotebookApp.notebook_dir = by adding the location of your notebook repo to the end.  This will ensure the start page shows your development repository.

    Figure 6 – Committing Jupyter Notebooks to GitHub

    There are a few ways that you can synchronize your notebook location to GitHub.  Of course, you can do it manually but accessing the repository from the web interface, or you can install GitBash (see Figure 7) for windows and perform the repository functions by command line or batch file.

    Figure 7 – GitBash for Windows

    Finally, you can create your own utility to do the synchronization in a more directed way.  There are a variety of Python libraries such as PyGithub or GitPython that can help create your own Jupyter Notebook to synchronize your notebooks with GitHub. (see Figure 8)

    Figure 8 – GitPython Python Library for working with GitHub

    Other Use Cases

    While the use of Jupyter Notebook and Python as tools to generate meaningful reports, there are many other uses that could be investigated.  I personally work with many clients to develop ETL (extract, transform, load) strategies to bring mission-critical data into their hosted and cloud environments.  Part of this process almost always requires some Python coding to perform tasks the OOB (out of the box) software cannot do.  I find Jupyter Notebook an extremely powerful IDE for doing code development, allowing me to perform debugging and quality control activities without a lot of software knowledge.  Additionally, Python can be used to access other cloud-based platforms with a REST API such as Fusion 360 Manage which is Autodesk’s primary PLM (product lifecycle management) platform.  Jupyter Notebook could be a way to report on content in this platform as well as extend the functionality to ensure implementations of these frameworks are successful.

    Conclusion

    BIM and IT managers are tasked with ensuring the efficient flow of data through their organizations’ design and engineering processes.  This requires easy access to any number of information products including usage, data, and role statistics.  Python can easily be accessed through the Jupyter Notebook interface and, in conjunction with the ACC REST API, provides a very useful tool for any BIM or IT manager to report on these items.

    The scripts can be created to be very flexible and easily shared, allowing users to pass their own information into the process and create rich dashboards for business and engineering analytics.  The ACC and BIM 360 APIs are very well documented so anyone with a bit of understanding of REST and Python can get started creating these products.  Together, these are very flexible and powerful frameworks for collecting data from cloud services and for reporting on current environmental conditions.

    Autodesk Desktop Connector Update

    Autodesk Desktop Connector 

    Autodesk regularly updates the Desktop Connector with fixes to defects and some basic functionality updates; this update is no different, but there is one major feature update which has been on users’ wish lists for a while.

    Users can now change the location of the Workspace to another fixed drive location. This will be very welcome to many IT departments. Formerly, the Desktop Connector would only save to the user’s local C Drive. Many users’ C Drives are not large enough to accommodate the added load of storing files locally when using the Autodesk Construction Cloud. IT can install larger file drives onto users’ computers since the Desktop Connector can now store files on a drive other than C. 

    Click here to see the documentation and to download it.

    Enjoy!

     

     

    Autodesk Docs: Public File Sharing Links

    Autodesk Docs: Public File Sharing Links

    Do you use Autodesk Docs?  Would you like to create a link for an external customer to download a file?  Does this customer NOT use Autodesk Docs?  If so, read on.

    Public link creation in Autodesk Docs is off by default.  This means that your recipient must own Autodesk Docs and be logged in to view or download a file you have shared.  You’re presented with this option when sharing a file or folder by default.  Note the disabled public link option (Anyone with this link).

    To enable public links, go to Doc and Files.  Then click on Settings.

            

    Once enabled, here is how the sharing form appears.  The public link option is enabled, and the link can be copied and sent to anyone.

    Enjoy!

    Autodesk Desktop Connector Update

    Autodesk Desktop Connector 

    Autodesk is spending many resources getting their cloud system tweaked just right.  Yet another version of the Desktop Connector has been made available.  Read on to find out more.

    We present version: v. 15.2.0.1634!

    You may download it here: downloaded.

    Discover more about it here: Release Notes.

    Notable features are:

    • Not new, but updated:  Check your files for integrity before uploading using the Reference Explorer.
    • Navigating folders in Windows Explorer and Civil 3D is much faster.

     

     

     

    Autodesk Desktop Connector Update

    We are excited to share with you the highlights of the latest Autodesk Desktop Connector update!

    Enhancements are:

    • Folders Shared using Autodesk Drive are now visible on the desktop when using Desktop Connector.
    • When using Autodesk Collaboration for Civil 3D, an XML configuration file can be used to prevent a drawing’s reference template file from being uploaded when saving or dragging and dropping the drawing to Autodesk Docs.
    • AutoCAD 2022.1 will no longer create bak, dwl, dwl2 files when the dwg was opened from the workspace. For AutoCAD releases prior to 2022.1, Desktop Connector will add dwl and dwl2 files to the ignore list so they will no longer be uploaded.
    • In Autodesk Drive web, ‘My Data’ cannot be renamed or deleted. To match that behavior, Desktop Connector has removed those commands when right clicking on ‘My Data’.
    • Unnecessary “Checking Latest Version” dialog showing up during AutoCAD dwg compare workflow.

    There have been significant changes to folder sharing.  If you have folders shared, it is recommended to educate yourself on the new behavior.

    The new behaviour is outlined here and here.

    For more information, visit this link.