Autodesk hopes to have complete BIM in 5 years

Five-year plan

 

Autodesk ceo Andrew Anagnost describes where he hopes the company will arrive in five years, BIM-wise.

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Our cloud products have become an integral selling point for our EBA [enterprise] customers and usage within our EBA customer base has really taken off. For example, in Q1 [Feb-Apr, 2018], just over half of the monthly active users for BIM 360 were in EBA accounts. This really validates our relevancy at the top of the general contractor market, which is where we focused initially.

From High-end to Mid-market

That success is a strong foundation to build on and we’re now leveraging it in the mid-market contractors.

For example, Miron Construction, an U.S.-based construction company, is deploying some of the most advanced technology available in the construction industry. They use the new BIM 360 project delivery platform to process a change to their building project that [used to add] up to 70 design documents and the potential to add almost $1 million in project costs.

The 70 documents needed review by everyone in the project, which would have taken hundreds of hours to resolve to manual processes with their old digital document management software. But Miron resolve the issue in just a fraction of that time with BIM 360. The project manager also found several additional issues, which never would have been caught with their old document management tool. Now that’s real value delivered on real projects.

The Five-year Plan

...we expect in five years, Autodesk will have moved the building information model across the entire construction process from start to finish.

BIM will become the record of everything it is happening from design to pre-fabrication, to on-site assembly into the final handover of the building to its owner. BIM will become the single source of truth across the full spectrum of design and make processes.

...we intend to go deep on the entire process, just like what’s happened in manufacturing where the model has become the record of the entire process. That’s what’s going to happen in the construction space as well. So we intend to touch every piece of that process.

We’ll do some of that organically with internal development; we’ll do some of that inorganically. But we intend to touch just about every part of that process. We’ll probably stay clear of the ERP [enterprise resource planning] side of the business. But every other part of it -- from pre-construction all the way to field operations -- we’re going to be involved.

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Source: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4177021-autodesk-inc-adsk-ceo-andrew-anagnost-q1-2019-results-earnings-call-transcript

Comments

[Eric]

I hope that as Autodesk invests to help BIM become the record of everything they find a way to hold the BIM data in an file format that will be relevant for more than just a few years. I feel that the promise of Complete BIM in the future is dependent upon the file systems being viable for more than the year or two that the software that created it is available from the vendor.

[Dave Ault]

And that assumes Autodesk will still be there and assumes they will not kill parts of the software you needed. With 13 down income quarters in a row now and Anagnost firing 23% of the work force in the last year or so who is going to make this brave new world happen?

There is not one single promise made by Anagnost that you can safely plan your future around.

[Stefan Boeykens]

As long as open data formats and open access to your own design/production/management information are not at the core of their approach, you have to "trust" them to play nice with the data you create.

I hope that their renewed interest in supporting IFC is at least hinting to being more open to play nice with everybody else. No project is made in one software in one format by one team.

So far, it seems that the current crop of Autodesk solutions involves paying the monthly fee for the tools (e.g. AEC Collection or whatever it gets called this year) and paying additional fees per project to have everything running in the cloud - with fees per user per month per project adding to the running costs.