Why should owners care about digital twins? Actually lots of reasons, and Augmented Construction's Carl Ericson takes us through a number of them. From scope certainty, to future changes to really understanding what their building will look and feel like, digital twins offer a powerful set of benefits for owners. Learn more at: http://augmentedconstructioninc.com/
Hugh Seaton: [00:00:00] welcome to constructed futures, I'm Hugh Seaton. Today, I'm here with Carl Ericson, founder and CEO of Augmented Construction. Carl, welcome to the podcast.
Carl Ericson: [00:00:10] Hugh it's a pleasure to be part of your podcast today. I'm actually really excited that you know, you thought enough to include me in it.
Hugh Seaton: [00:00:17] Well, I'm excited about what you guys are doing. And one of the areas I've seen you talking and we've discussed off offline is digital twins and their relationship to BIM. And one of the areas we wanted to start is I thought a really great starting point. And that is why should an owner even care? Tell me a little bit about your thoughts on that.
Carl Ericson: [00:00:37] I mean, it's a great area. You know, as, as a design and construction consultant heavily focused on gearing our services to ownership, that didn't happen by accident. You know, over the years we've seen the large cm companies gravitate towards technology, gravitate towards the various solutions available on the market to, to solve their problems and to increase their ROI.
And the reality is They don't have the largest amount of risk in the execution process. When you take a look at who owns the risk you really get looking at the other ends of the spectrum. You're looking at the subcontractors and the owners at the end of the day, they're holding the bag for everything.
And the reality is a lot of how the construction technology market operates is geared toward the primary client, which is really, to date, the construction manager and the fundamental shift that we are kind of banging our drum and trying to get our client base to pay attention to is how should owners interact with construction technology?
You know, that that's a slippery slope for some, because it is a fundamental shift in your traditional means and methods conversation, right? Where the owner is hiring a construction manager to be professional construction manager for the most part. And they're not wrong. Digital tools are tools, right?
Therefore, or it falls into the means and methods bucket. Therefore, an owner should let a CM drive the ship. Right? You're you're hiring that expert to be that expert. That being said, Our opinion on how owners should be interacting with digital technology. And this really the conversation is nicely wrapped in a bow.
By starting and ending with digital twin, but owners need to care because it's a messy world and very fragmented. And if someone sets the stage and that someone being the person who writes the checks, generally speaking, you can get the rest of the team to pay attention. And really all we're talking about here is alignment of goals and transparency of data.
And that way the owner, and this is really the summary here. The owner can share in the upside, right? The owner, the developer can share in the return on investment of the scope certainty, or schedule certainty that was achieved through the appropriate application and consistent adoption of technology.
And I'd say one of the, to bring it back to the, the title of the podcast digital twins. So what does that mean for an owner? Right. Well, it means a lot of things to a lot of different people. That's part of the reason why a lot of folks have trouble understanding how to make it work. Because it's such a big elephant, right?
I mean, it's almost like where do you start?
Hugh Seaton: [00:03:29] I mean, you think about the, there's a bunch of what things that I want to unpack in what you said. Cause there's a lot of gold in there, but let's stick with digital twins real quick. I think some of the problem maybe is that people are only going to care about the part of that idea that relates to what they do.
So like a construction company, isn't going to care about data flows and operating data flows. They're not going to care about whether you have sensors in place to see whether the HVAC is still working after three years. Whereas that's exactly what the facilities manager is going to need.
So I wonder if. It's, it's not a problem that there's different definitions of digital twins because there's different users of the core idea, but they all center around, as I think you've mentioned in the past, at the end of the day, there's BIM is the unifying point. What you hang onto it to make it into a digital twin is what you need out of it.
Carl Ericson: [00:04:22] Sure. It's definitely in the way the industry is moving. The thing that you start with in design, the thing that you, if, if you're using a BIM solution as part of your, your project, which that's really the way the industry is going. So I'm not going to, we don't have to spend time talking about non-BIM projects.
But at the end of the day, that's that misalignment I was mentioning, right. That misalignment of interests of use cases of utilization of the tool. What really needs to happen is that as the end use, right, that what am I going to use to be my digital twin platform, right? That's where the owners should step in at the beginning of the project.
And when I say beginning of the project, I don't mean when construction commissioning is starting. I mean, When the design team is designing, right? When the program is being created, the digital twin requirements should be laid out in a specification, no different than the specification book that the architects, right.
And it actually they have a name it's called a BIM execution plan. Now, typically they're geared towards , the level of detail. But what we've been doing recently is spending a lot of time. Tying the level of detail of each step of the process. Right? When I say, what is the process? Right?
Well, our digital twin creation process gets the creation starts during the design offering phase when the architects and engineers, are are documenting the construction plans in the form of a BIM that looks smells, feels in fact, is the birth of your digital twin, right? That the thing that you're going to build, right?
That BIM model, which ultimately becomes your construction documents that's where digital twin starts for, for modern projects. Now. It's possible to create a digital twin after the fact, then that's where you start talking about reality capture and laser scanning, and you're still doing drafting. But that's that's backwards and inefficient.
And I think a lot of digital twin gets a bad rap for being expensive because the process that it takes to create a digital twin after the fact does seem like a big, painful process. Right. It's sifting through boxes of, of, of as-builts it's sifting through boxes of, of warranties and O & M manuals, and then trying to verify and actually create that BIM model of the existing building.
We do a lot of it for owners because at the end of the day, the value of having a good functional digital twin generally pays itself back in spades.
Hugh Seaton: [00:07:10] And where is that? I want to, since you mentioned it, Where is that value to an owner of having a digital twin as you're delivering it? Like there's a lot of theoretical ways that could, but what are you seeing people actually start to get value out of, from the owner's perspective?
Carl Ericson: [00:07:25] Sure. So, well, let's start at the beginning because that's where we said we would start during that design phase a perfectly acceptable and often overlooked use case by BIM practitioners is visualization. What, what does that mean? Well, An owner who wants to be able to actually look and feel and understand the space that they're getting, that they're receiving has a tremendous amount of value in terms of mitigating rework, that isn't an error so much as an owner, not understanding what it is they were getting. I read a really fabulous, a use case article. I wish I could claim that it was my own work product, but it was a fabulous use case about hospital that would traditionally have done full scale mock-ups of their hospital rooms.
Because of the level of coordination and details and different experts that need to have an opinion on the medical equipment and the medical gas and the, the layout of the outlets. And then to the extent that the doctors have a say, right, the actual practitioners that, that, that operate within these spaces.
Both actually physically operate sometimes, right? It was commonplace or is, I should say is commonplace. I was talking to a friend of mine who runs capital projects for a large hospital down in Texas. And he had, they're building a new hospital. They literally just did a physical mock-up, but the article I read talked about using a high level of detailed BIM model that included photorealistic effects to give those non-technical reviewers a sense of realism that allowed them to mentally engage and review and have legitimate comments.
Related to the coordination of the space, the location of the lights and the outlets and the down to the shades and the location of they even went so far as to model the sun which is in some ways more relevant than you'd think, because it really reflects a true in that case, you know Beyond a normal construction level, digital twin, right?
This, this included the environment. But it's a fabulous use case. And the white paper that I read about it points out that the users felt as though that was, that was a perfectly acceptable tool for them to perform that, that detailed review and the hospital was jumping up and down that they'd saved like hundreds of thousands of dollars in not having to build a physical full-scale mockup.
Hugh Seaton: [00:10:02] And it's not wasted because the thing that they've built remains an asset.
Carl Ericson: [00:10:06] That's right. It never goes away. So it's easy to reference in perpetuity. It's easy to hand that digital asset, because that is now a good terminology, I think will resonate people. No, not with non fungible tokens, but you know what I mean? The digital twin in fact is a digital asset that can be transferred to design teams, transferred to potentially other hospitals.
Right. You know, used again. It was a, it's a fabulous use case. Now to dial it back, cause we're not all building hospitals, the other phenomenal use case where ROI is orders of magnitude above the actual cost of creating the thing is during the design coordination. Wildly overlooked. Again, that's my own personal viewpoint and experience.
Where, why should owners care? Well, If the coordination process which does still need to happen with the cm and the subcontractors, creating those shop, drawing level MEP coordination models. There's a lot of relevance in there, but what winds up happening is to the extent that scope was missed or, or misrepresented in the original construction documents, now we have to add the layer of change order, RFIs, the process of solving design during construction is, is much more painful monetarily and schedule wise because we've already set that ship in motion, right. And that ship has a lot of momentum.
And what is that ship? The ship is the construction project itself, right? The, the team of builders, vendors, subcontractors. Once that information has been disseminated, that this is what we're doing, any change that ship is fraught with problems.
So the scope certainty you can achieve or an any owner can achieve by using the concept of digital twin, which really effectively is what the design team is doing already, if they're offering the design in in BIM, right. And has a tremendous ROI and something that we've done for owners is basically use the BIM model during the design process as an extremely powerful QA QC tool. Look, sometimes it looks like peer review, but it isn't really peer review.
Right. It also smells a little bit like clash detection, but it isn't really clash detection. It's really using the BIM model to review complex constructability conditions. Stairs is a great one. Stairs are really hard. Kudos to architects who do stairs well, because stairs are hard. We, as a company have never looked at a project where we didn't find problems with the stairs because of the three-dimensional nature of the stairs.
A lot of the problems with stairs don't get captured or coordinated or are, or solved for in a, in a 2d construction.
Hugh Seaton: [00:13:00] That's a really interesting, just aside that stairs are one of the only things that, I mean, obviously pipes and conduits going through floors are too, but they're so narrow and specific, but that's an interesting stairs are basically rooms that cross in a 3d way instead of a 2d way.
I hadn't thought of that, but I can imagine that that that's harder for people to hold in their minds.
Carl Ericson: [00:13:23] Absolutely. And, and, you know, like I said, we've worked with a lot of A-team developers, a lot of A-team designers on high profile, large large-scale projects. And, you know, first things we ever did, one of the first things, my team will look at what we get a new project are the stairs because they are hard. And again, why is this a digital twin? Well, the BIM model is where the construction documents come from. It is the thing that you're trying to build. You just haven't built it yet. So again, any changes we make during the design phase, I tell everybody all the time it's cheaper to move pixels than it is bricks.
So even if we have to take a pause For a week, two weeks, whatever that the, the, you know, the scale of the project will drive how long that that process takes. But again, it's not a peer review from an overall design perspective, although it very easily could be, in that same digital tool can be used for that same purpose.
But really it's about achieving scope certainty by understanding the thing we're building in a, in a three-dimensional viewpoint, which is really how we interact with the built world on our daily lives. So that's the way our, we are hardwired to work. So it just, it makes the, that review that much more simple look without getting into any of the other details we could talk, we could touch on them.
Right? Why should owners care? Again, in terms of scope certain construction documents. I don't think I really need to define that greatly. I think everybody who, who might ever listen to this podcast has experienced the pain of change orders, the pain of scheduled delays that were caused by change orders, and scope uncertainty and ultimately bringing it back to that owner discussion.
Any owner who's ever negotiated a GMP agreement, a guaranteed maximum price understands the pain of not knowing what they're actually building. And I don't mean that they don't know the square footage. Right. I don't know that they don't mean like where it is or how big it is, but your average owner of a building, doesn't actually know how many square feet of drywall they're buying.
How many cubic yards of concrete they're installing, how many linear feet of three quarter inch copper pipe. And while, it's not important for them to know all of these facts. The reality is that's how the price tag is derived, right? It's the sum of the parts is how you get to your, your contract price.
So one of the things, again, we've seen a tremendous value in terms of utilizing the BIM, utilizing digital twin on the owner's behalf is to peel back that that veil of secrecy related to the quantity survey of what it is, they are actually building what it is they're actually buying. So it. Really short circuits, a lot of unnecessary time and discussion and negotiation when it comes to negotiating the contract with their construction manager.
And there's a whole subset of fabulous tools out there to help construction managers unpack scope, packages, and quantity surveys. That's all baked within the BIM model if, this is a big if, if it's been created properly. And that brings us back once again to why should owners care. Owners need to drive the bus in terms of what they think they're going to use the digital twin for.
And it's a, it's a tall order and that's why consultants like Augmented Construction exist to be able to say, Hey owner, we know this is new for you. Let me tell you what we did for, for Joe around the corner here. And this is why that was relevant. And this is why the default set of things that you should care about is this list.
Hugh Seaton: [00:17:14] So I assume that that you know, a fair amount of what you find it's certainly at the beginning of engagements is in education. Right. I mean, I inherent in, in this discussion so far, is that the owner knows what to even ask for and, and knows the importance of these things. And I would assume that with the exception of people that build a lot of things, especially build a lot of the same things.
You're constantly making them aware of the importance of these things and the downstream value of it. Is that right?
Carl Ericson: [00:17:41] I couldn't agree more. I'd say 90% of any, we'll call it a sales pitch we've ever given was actually education. And then there was 10% of, well, this is what that costs and why you should hire us, you know?
And, and the 90% is not driven by me trying to convince somebody that, that they want bIM. I think that we've reached that critical mass. We've already reached that inflection point. There are enough folks out there using BIM effectively. There are enough use cases. We have our own, which we love to share with clients, where we can approve with a real hard dollar value and white papers on use cases, that yes we have in fact saved orders of magnitude multiples of our fee because of a well driven augmented process. Right.
And, and the center of that process starts with good. Good design that happens to be using the BIM as a concept, right?
Hugh Seaton: [00:18:44] What you're educating them on isn't isn't the need for BIM itself, but the need to think of BIM, not as just a means and method, but as a communication tool and as a risk mitigation tool, the things that are in their purview, not just in the construction companies, purview.
Carl Ericson: [00:19:00] That's right. The other, the other thing that requires a lot of education is we all have our architects. They have a huge burden on their shoulders, as it relates to you know, creating the design, a good design that it's code compliant and, you know, fits all of the other requirements within our built world.
The problem occurs though that not all design teams are created equally. Not all design teams, processes are created equally and where one of the places we've seen BIM fall off the tracks is in the design teams misalignment of the tools and processes. So who's going to manage the design team. Well, the hope is generally that the architect will, but if you, as an owner, just say, I want BIM and then close the book and walk away.
There's a hundred percent chance you're going to be disappointed. And the I, the estimating example is a great example from a project that we worked on, where we've fairly educated client read a lot about BIM had, had done previous projects, but had always been one or two levels removed from, from the details, knew because when you go on the internet or you go, you go to a Autodesk show, you can't not be barraged with like the wonderful things you can do with BIM. Right. 4D, 5D, 6D, right? Like all these amazing things and these, these amazing visuals. So we were working on a 400,000 square foot project. 60% CD phase construction document phase.
Right? The BIM model is, is very highly developed. We had written a BIM execution plan. We were very happy with the quality of the model, the quality of the information in the model. We had done a very thorough BIM execution plan at the beginning with the entire design team and one key concept that was brought up during the BIM execution plan was that the construction manager was a little old fashioned don't hold that against some great builders. They had no desire whatsoever to use the BIM model for their quantity surveying and their takeoffs. And we said, okay guys, that's fair. We're not here to tell you how to do your jobs.
Right. We're going to focus on BIM for scope certainty, and for coordination. Well, at the 60% mark, there was a major design change that was driven by some code, right. Which was unfortunate to the project. And the owner came back to us and said, Hey, can you help ratify that this major design change post, you know, once the redesign has happened, that we're being treated fairly with our With our cm and being treated fairly with the budget change.
Right. And they look in their eye was well, right, because doesn't BIM, let you do that. And I said, it does it's, nothing's automatic. I don't care they tell you at Autodesk. But I said, the reality is we didn't ask the design team to, to make this model, to put the "I" in the model to ensure ease of data extraction.
Right. And, and it was a very like aha moment for the owner to understand like, Okay. So what you're saying is I can have what I want, but it's not, there's no easy button here because we didn't design them the database, which is the model to have those appropriate data fields from the get-go. And, and, and ultimately, why am I pointing that out?
I'm pointing that out because that was an instance where the use case exists. But we didn't define it on the front end. So, later in the project, when we decided we want to use something that we didn't build the model for that tool wasn't shaped for that output readily. And it, again, that's why the owner needs to get involved in the front end to think like, well, what am I going to care about at the end of the day?
It's a, it's a tall order. I'll give you another use case example of why, what owners might care about will be different. We've been talking about digital twin, right? I've been very focused on this call or this podcast rather on the very front end, the design, the construction. Well, There's a whole, whole life cycle of the building once it's done.
Right. And, and that's where we start talking about like work order management systems and, and warranty and predictive analytics and the health and the operation and all this dynamic data input that can be applied to this digital model, phenomenal world as a whole world of solutions out there. If as a developer, you're developing condominiums, you probably don't care about any of that stuff because your entire business model is to build the building and sell it right. And then walk away and do it again right now.
It doesn't mean that you should ignore it completely. It just means that you will, you might not even have the experience to answer the questions as to what the operators actually pay attention to.
Hugh Seaton: [00:24:06] And it's hard to, it's hard to argue for investing in something when it's not going to you're, you're probably not going to see value in it
Carl Ericson: [00:24:12] right. Now, I will though go out on a limb and say, I agree, a thousand percent. Except for the fact that it's not that big a lift. If you're using BIM as your design authoring tool, if you're using BIM during the construction, whether it be for quantity of surveying for MEP coordination. And, you know, at the end of the day, it's a, it's a little bit of a dirty word, but something that we're excited about because of, of different reality capture technologies that are out there.
Using BIM during construction for QA QC and then commissioning. If you're using, leveraging that existing data set throughout the rest of the construction process, it's not a big lift to give the owner that quote unquote we'll, I'll call it an as-built model, but we don't have to go into it because the little raise a lot of eyebrows because there's, there's a lot of different levels of detail.
And I'll give you a wonderful example we recently did. Created the basis of a digital twin for a 350,000 square foot portfolio. And we did it in a couple of weeks and some people might say, well, how did you do such a large portfolio of buildings in a couple of weeks? Well, by scoping, what is important?
And in this particular was this was a out affordable housing complex. There was no need to document most of the building, right? Like the shell? Yes. The outlines of the apartments. Yes. The boiler rooms, mechanical rooms were very simple in these buildings. So again, it didn't have to be this like big, scary this is going to cost millions of dollars and it's going to take years to create, right.
Because we were able to hone in on this is the scope that matters. Whether it be because of future renovation projects or because of of a management process or protocol or a ticket management system, you know, generally speaking, there aren't that many moving parts in the building that owners care about.
Especially in the residential side, you know, the hospitals are a little different. Power plants are way different, right. But on the residential side, you know, they get some love too, right. They're allowed to have shiny toys as well. And it's not beyond their reach. And that's a wonderful just status of the industry that, you know, the tools really are available for every project type Someone just, and again, the owner just needs to with little help say, Hey, I can have this thing.
This narrow slice is the piece that applies to me. Right. You know, let me figure out how to make that, get that affordable version of digital twin on my project. But you know, it really starts from the top, which is what are the use cases.
Hugh Seaton: [00:26:47] And let me summarize what I think is a really nice tour through this.
Most of the phases of a project is, you know, the owner cares in the beginning to make sure that what they're getting is what they, what they need. And I've heard, you know, hospitals are an extreme example in that there are so many people where the, the way they operate is no pun intended is kind of prescribed and they want to make sure that they've got things within arms reach and so on and so forth, but I've heard the same thing for entertainment complexes and for other, you know, other, other types of buildings.
So that's kind of point one and then point two is, is understanding the scope. The second example you gave is, is really knowing what's being built at a deeper level so that you have a better sense of it. And the third one I thought was really interesting and, you know, you made the point of the I and BIM is the information, is that by insisting that it'd be built properly and that the information is put in as a database, as opposed to just geometry. It protects them against changes that very often happen. And if you're in a city like New York, you're going to see that. Cause it's, you know, it's loaded with codes and stuff you didn't know about and historical this or whatever.
And the final piece that we started talking about a little bit is for a lot of owners, it provides the basis for, you know, a model that you can use to run your buildings. Which is an exciting kind of re you know, golden thread throughout the life cycle of why an owner should care at different phases.
Very, very cool.
Carl Ericson: [00:28:16] I love the term you use, golden thread. You know, that that's another, I guess, a corollary to that one is the the single source of truth. Right. But yeah, it's even, and you know, something, I just like to reiterate, even in existing assets, right. Existing buildings that don't have any technology associated with them. One of the things that there there's a larger movement out there in terms of green energy, right? How do we, how do we reduce our carbon footprint? How do we make buildings more energy efficient?
I was speaking with an engineer working on an interesting project just a few weeks ago and, the advent and availability of IOT sensors and where it got interesting was how do we, how do we take the data from those IOT sensors apply them to a digital twin of a building because energy modeling is significantly more accurate when applied in a 3d three dimensional model, as opposed to old fashioned let's make 4,000 assumptions and it gives you, and it was just an interesting, like nuanced use case of an owner of a large portfolio of existing assets might want to have a digital twin if for nothing else than to make their energy modeling more efficient, because maybe they're undergoing an energy efficiency audit to try and figure out how to save money on their energy bill or be greener or whatever, or,
Hugh Seaton: [00:29:42] or, the risk that, that is underlying some of what you just said is you don't know where regulations are going. What you do know is they're unlikely to be less restrictive when it comes to energy use and use of certain kinds of fuels. I mean, in New York city where I know you are based, I I've been hearing stories about how co-op after co-op is, is switching to gas heat, and these are, you know, century old buildings that aren't great at that.
So you're, you're really, you know, spending a lot of time, money and, and anxiety figuring out how to do this. And I think that's an, you know, that's, that's an opportune moment to say, while we're doing this, why don't we model our building so that when later on, when people are asking about the glass we use or asking about how we are, you know, other, other areas of, of either energy and or air cause the other thing that comes up is where's the air coming from.
Carl Ericson: [00:30:35] Sure. Sure. Yeah. In the way that's traditionally been handled is that dusty box of as-builts that, that is rotting away in the super's office, right? Yeah. And anytime you go to do a project, it becomes a let's start from scratch activity, generally speaking for the design team to have to, you know, reverse engineer the building and it's fraught with issues.
And, and, you know, it's a great use case Hugh, right, for wanting to start with a digital twin. Right. And, and because it allows you to have scope certainty of what your asset actually is without even knowing what you're going to use it for. Right. Because to your point, there could be a, an interesting use case, you know, one year later, five years later, Could be a normal capital project or it could be a code change.
Again, there's no reason that a board couldn't own their own digital twin and then be able to hand that off to fill in the blank specialty consultant that can then analyze that for whatever change is required, whether again, by desire or code, it's certainly a an appropriate use case looking at the residential side you know, on the commercial side, you know, that that's similar in nature, that buildings change because tenants change equipment changes. And you know, that that digital twin is really a three-dimensional as-built that you can plug other dynamic building information into to help the management of that asset be more efficient by bringing transparency to the data that's never before been available.
Right? The idea that, again, you don't have that dusty set of, of as-builts in the super's building that maybe they're right. Maybe they've never been updated. In fact, the latter is probably
Hugh Seaton: [00:32:29] totally, and they're off-putting who wants to go look at that because nobody knows how to read that stuff anyway.
Carl Ericson: [00:32:36] Yeah. There's some folks that know how to read it, but it's the process of using the information is much more difficult.
Hugh Seaton: [00:32:42] Well, listen, Carl, this has been a fantastic conversation. I've learned a lot about how an owner might think about the value of digital twins and, and the kind of BIM that underlies them.
Where can people find you and learn more?
Carl Ericson: [00:32:56] Well, we are primarily based in New York city, although operating virtually like everybody else. I think the easiest way to get ahold of me is just to call or email. I mean, is this a good time to do, am I supposed to plug my contact information on your body?
Hugh Seaton: [00:33:10] I'll put it, I'll put it in the in the transcript.
Carl Ericson: [00:33:14] Well, that sounds fabulous.
Hugh Seaton: [00:33:16] Thanks for being on the podcast.
Carl Ericson: [00:33:17] Thank you so much, Hugh.