Trimble’s Constructible Revolutionizes Building Construction Data

In an interview with Jon Fingland, general manager of collaboration solutions at Trimble, we talked about the need for digitization and transformation in the construction industry.

Trimble’s answer to the challenges and transition to digitization is Constructible, a purpose-driven approach to building construction – a process that coordinates and optimizes the entire design, build, operate lifecycle. Constructible links the work of each construction stage and helps to implement that work within businesses.

“There’s a lot of opportunity for improvement in this market,” says Fingland. “80 percent of projects are behind schedule; 95 percent of managers are dealing with shortages of skilled labor in our space. Combine that with the digitization and transformation going on, and we’re capitalizing on that opportunity. We’re seeing customers hire new virtual design and construction professionals and chief data scientists. Customers are organizationally getting ready for this digitization. And they’re seeing that in the uptake of mobile devices on jobsites.”

Opportunity is at a tipping point where people are embracing digitalization, Fingland says. “Constructible is our response for best practices for the market on how to drive that digital transformation in their company.”

On the Constructibile side are best practices for the industry, and these are going to drive transformation. Tenets for best practices include:

1. Accurate data – so accurate you can procure, fabricate and install from it.
2. Construction quantities – getting all the way down to bill of materials, and knowing their location is really important to driving the digital processes.
3. Make it a repeatable process, using manufacturable content, is really important so we can reuse that information in the process.
4. Use data to drive predictable costs and schedule so using Trimble’s historical data and Constructible level of data to drive predictability in the process that has not been that predictable historically.
5. Open data – we must be able to share that data and understand, and use that data throughout the process.

These three key enablers include:

• Constructible data at a level of detail we can plan from it, and fabricate from it, and drive factory and jobsite from it.
• Content –drive this process we need to make it repeatable, so content to drive that repeatability. There is no room for error when we’re using manufactured and factory certified content in the process.
• Components – Trimble has over 31 million construction components of which a big portion are manufactured and factory certified. When using that data in the process it offers three advantages:

1. Creates Constructible data faster. People who can model at the same speed and faster than traditional processes by leveraging these components of content. They are not only modeling faster they are actually getting all the attributes they need. They know how the component is going to perform, what the cost is, weight is, etc. and then there’s no discrepancy in the process.
2. Connected – Information has to be open, sharable and understandable. Connectedness has to happen from stakeholder to stakeholder like owner to architect. Launches coming out this month show how Trimble takes their project management systems like e-Builder and integrates it with their general contractor project management systems project site so the owner and contractor can be in their systems as well as integration from office to field which is really a big part of Trimble heritage. This is where the data is created in the office but it is shared out to the field to automate the production and installation and bring production back.
3. With the recent addition of e-Builder Trimble has over $3 billion in construction being run through their systems in e-Builder. One-half million machines and robotics are connected. In the office they have over 3 million software users, so are well positioned with the purpose built Constructible portfolio to drive integration.

An example of the use of Constructible is a company creating Constructible models up front in the process and moving faster through design intent, getting to the Constructible level of detail. “They’re doing that through use of content, working with Trimble,” Fingland says. “They have their model in SketchUp and they leverage our 3D Warehouse of manufactured and supplier certified information, and they’re using our Trimble Connect to share that Constructible data out with the various stakeholders so they understand all current aspects of the projects and understand communicating changes immediately. So, they are changing the deliverable they provide to their customers to a richer more deliverable model up front.  That’s an architect example.”

Barton Malow Construction, a company that does both general contractor as well as concrete pours, want to double the productivity of their company by the year 2024, specifically in their concrete pour division. “They detail Constructible models of concrete up front with Trimble Tekla, then they send that information to the factory because they shear and bend their own rebar,” explains Fingland.  “They are able to take the Tekla models and put them into the machine to automate the prep for that rebar, like LEGOs. They describe it as LEGO process, where they bundle the rebar into packages like you would have packages of LEGOs when you open the box.  They put in installation instructions, and then they ship it out to the jobsite so they drive efficiency – and installers can scan a barcode on their device and install it. They have gotten 15% productivity in their concrete pour business.”

Jacob Engineering creates automated field installation work packages. “When they’re building out their Constructible data and model, they’re then creating work packages for how that will get installed,” Fingland says. “They then send that out to each of the stakeholders and trades who are going to install. When they create these very detailed work packages that help them communicate with their staff, ultimately they get progress back on that. It reduces planning time, it does automated planning checking for them. They saved over 10,000 work hours in that process in productivity efficiency of using these packages. Their example is a chemical plant.”

A lot of people are hiring virtual design and construction people (VDCs).  “We’re already a very fragmented and siloed industry and we bring in this new talent and we put it in a new department creating yet another silo,” Fingland says. “We’ve worked with a lot of our customers with best practices, we want to make sure are you really building an organization that can evolve and to drive that transformation versus creating a swat team that comes in and does things but hasn’t actually evolved the organization as a whole.”

There’s more to the best practices that technical aspects, such as getting organization ready for the change.

Fingland started Trimble Connect, a product that is not just focused on Trimble technology but on the suite of what products the customer would have in their portfolio. “That connected pillar is going to be all important to us and not always going to be Trimble so Trimble Connect makes sure we’re interoperable and open,” Fingland says.  “We have interoperable agreements through Trimble Connect with Bentley, Esri and Autodesk. We also have Trimble Connect as our cloud collaboration interoperability portal that allows us to get more efficient at those integrations. We don’t have to do point-to-point integrations once we’ve integrated Connect with Autodesk and all the 60+ Trimble products that now can push and pull data with Autodesk.

In terms of whether an organization needs to customize or not, or to what level, Fingland says: “When we talk to people about the Constructible processes we look at the organization in three components:

• Look at constructible design and detail up front.
• How are you doing your coordination?
• At what level of detail are you modeling? How are you using content early on in the process? The more you can get up front the more detailed you can get later on.

Secondly we talk to customers about project delivery. Using Constructible data, they are more empowered, can get quantities at the BOM level historical data up front. At project delivery we can drive more efficient schedules, create it more predictable, better cost plans, more management of work.

The third area is the supply chain. How are they communicating to various trades and the stakeholders? What needs to be purchased, what needs to be installed, and how are they roundtripping that information out to the factory or jobsite?

Maybe there needs to be integration of their project delivery tools with their ERP? That’s a mix of processes depending upon what sophistication of customer we’re dealing with.”

Tags: AEC, architects, architecture, Autodesk, Bentley Systems, building, building design, Cloud, collaboration, construction, e-Builder, engineering, engineers, infrastructure, mobile, Open BIM, point clouds, reality capture, SketchUp, Trimble, visualization

Categories: 2D, 3D, 3D PDF, 3D printing, AEC, AEC training, AECCafe, BIM, building information modeling, collaboration, construction, construction project management, convergence, engineering, field, field solutions, file sharing, geospatial, GIS, infrastructure, integrated project delivery, lidar, MEP, mobile, plant design, point clouds, reality capture, rendering, simulation, site planning, SketchUp, sustainable design, Tekla, Trimble, virtual reality

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