Sean O’Dwyer
It worked for the Pyramids, Stonehenge, The Parthenon, and The Great Wall of China… but that was then, and this is now.
The Autodesk Construction Cloud (ACC) connects workflows, teams, and data at every stage of construction. Basically, it enables everybody involved everywhere to never lose track, focus, or momentum. It’s included in the Autodesk Architecture, Engineering & Construction (AEC) Collection. Autodesk describes the ACC as ‘Connected Construction’. There’s an interesting flip-side to that, perhaps justifiably described as unconnected construction. Put ‘un’ in front of most words and it implies a negative; uninformed, unsuccessful, unsatisfied, unprofitable and so on and so on.
The deduction from this is that if participants in a construction project are to be informed – from clients to architects, planners to engineers, contractors to sub-contractors, surveyors to building services providers, and everyone in between –at every stage of a project, they need to be linked together.
Using digital technologies without binding them together, goes a certain way to driving efficiencies, but is like hanging around at the doors of Construction 4.0, not going through them.
Barriers to collaboration most commonly appear when old, or diverse, or multiple, or even no systems (just paper documents/drawings) are used to pass information from one party to the next, or from one to all. Keeping track of document versions or model changes becomes difficult. Confusion ensues, time is wasted on unnecessary chasing and verification, and one inefficiency leads to another.
Success is driven by transparency, confidence, interdependence, and – above all – by one single version of the truth.
All the above leads not only to frustration and time wasting; it can erode client confidence. When clients are kept closely in the loop, themselves linked in to the same system being used by all specialist parties across the project, everybody relaxes. If they have a change to suggest, or a question to ask, or if their approval is urgently sought, by being within the shared cloud environment they can act promptly.
Clients see progress, understand issues as they crop up, and feel far more involved in the forward momentum of the project.
In short, clients gain peace of mind, and that’s the sort of environment in which client satisfaction flourishes.
Smooth and seamless workflows ensure uninterrupted forward movement. The essential functions that surround and facilitate this movement consolidate the core strength that digital transformation brings.
Storage, for example, has to expand as business and projects expand. Once your servers fill up you have a problem. You have to clean them up, re-configure firewalls perhaps, and pay heavily for the subsequent downtime. In fact, any time not progressing can be time wasted and there’s a direct-line correlation between that and reduced profitability. Any cloud solution offers scalable storage. ACC offers it too, but with a difference – it sits within a tailored environment uniquely designed for the construction sector.
You see discussions and articles everywhere about the ever-gathering pace of digital transformation in construction; the move to paperless workflows, the irrefutable value of collaboration, the consolidating connection between site and office and between every specialist participant in the construction value chain, right the way through to clients themselves and the ongoing life of the asset post-handover.
Binding it all together, the pivotal role and value of data are continuously emphasised with a particular focus on its pertinence in the provision of ‘one single version of the truth’ and its BIM-driven significance in the Common Data Environment.
With everyone and every action so closely intertwined, this all makes for a revolution, Construction 4.0. But as with all revolutions, not everything happens overnight.
Some companies believe that if the way they do things is not broken then there’s no need to fix it. I’d recommend thinking again on that one. It may not be broken now, or ever, but it will lapse into irrelevance, probably sooner than some think.
We’re in a digital world. Clients increasingly expect architects to be in that same place. Architects expect engineers to be there too, and contractors and every other project participant.
There arises also the question of talent coming into the industry. People expect employers to be technologically aware and equipped. They are less attracted to companies where old ways have yet to die.
Putting ‘un’ in front of words brings along negative connotations for sure. But choose your ‘uns’ carefully. ACC enables you to unleash your true potential, discover unlimited scope for innovation, and drive unrestrained progress and successful project outcomes.
There are certain other benefits highly worthy of a mention when looking at the streamlining the ACC can bring to how you do things. Three in particular to bring to your attention are:
• ISO 19650 Certification: The ACC is already ISO 19650 certified which means that activities you undertake through the ACC are automatically aligned to the standard and are ready to be audited; reassuring both for you and for your clients.
• Unlimited data storage: I alluded to the storage benefit above, inherent with any cloud solution but of inestimable value when dealing with extremely large data files such as data-rich point cloud scans. These are the sorts of files that take up a lot of space on hard drives and servers for any single project; multiply that by the number of projects within your business – both current and archived – and the scale of your storage requirements can quickly mount up (often without you even knowing that such proliferation of data is quietly building up in the background every day).
• AI: The benefits that Artificial Intelligence is bringing to every walk of life and area of business really are game-changing; accelerating how we see and understand data far more quickly. Data insights revealed by the ‘conversations’ you can have with the data lead to simple and clear explanations of what the data is actually telling us. The ACC makes it possible via ChatGPT to provide live data streaming translated into dashboard-easy snapshots for project owners to gain intelligible views of what’s happening.
In terms of getting the connection, if you are not yet using ACC you may not have to look too far. The Autodesk Construction Cloud sits within the AEC Collection, so it’s possibly already waiting in your software portfolio for you to exploit it.
If you need any guidance on this, or want to know more about the cloud advantage of the AEC Collection, please get in touch.
