New Autodesk Construction Cloud features help teams make early, more sustainable decisions

In construction, about 70% of rework can be traced back to the disconnect between design and what’s actually constructible. The further along a construction project is, the more difficult and costly changes become. By focusing on constructability in the design phase, teams can aim to avoid expensive rework down the line. And when most of a project’s value is created in the beginning stages when mistakes are easier to fix, the importance of getting it right early is greater than ever—making consistent communication crucial.

To that end, today, we’re announcing multiple solutions to support project teams in making everyday decisions earlier without the need for technical expertise or specialist applications. These new capabilities will provide holistic and tactical support to help teams prioritize tasks, assess tradeoffs, build on intuition, and validate assumptions so choices made are more informed.

Let’s take a look at how these new releases will strengthen the connection between design and make.

Gain access to relevant information with early and often communication

It’s critical for project teams to be able to trust that their documents are construction-ready, recent, and accurate, as irrelevant and hard-to-access information leads to confusion, disputes, and mistakes.

To help with this, we’re releasing Correspondence, which centralizes all project communication created or collected in a single source of truth. Correspondence provides project leaders with open-ended, searchable, and manageable communications stored within Autodesk Construction Cloud (ACC) to make it easier to communicate and uncover key decisions. Project teams can create and organize all correspondence from ACC and import threads directly from Outlook or Gmail. All communication is now easily retrievable to ensure project quality and minimize disputes.

“The Correspondence tool is incredibly positive,” said Chris Rossetto, VDC Manager at Hansen Yuncken. “It is potentially a massive game changer for us and the industry. We currently feel stuck in the way we manage correspondence and store project information on rudimentary platforms that are considered to be the industry standard for clients. I am excited for what’s coming up—this could eventually bring us a step closer to running a single-platform common data environment (CDE).”

Next, because design models can be overwhelming for field teams, we’re launching Model Quality Workflows, a collection of releases that supports the translation of design models into construction-ready models. This month’s release enables anyone on the project team, from the BIM manager to the project engineer, to curate custom views for teams onsite that are hyper-relevant and easy to digest. By providing teams with access to well-defined models early and often, onsite teams have what they need to improve installation productivity.

Advanced filters allow you to customize models for the office or out onsite.

We’re also releasing the Sheets Collection, which helps teams more clearly organize sheets and quickly access relevant drawings. Those who oversee construction projects with multiple buildings will be able to store and manage drawings with identical names, streamlining the document management workflow, and centralizing important construction data in a single location. This feature removes the cumbersome need to create and own multiple projects or prefix sheet names to get the job done. Sheets are accessible to teams in the office and field for larger multi-building projects.

Reduce technology management and streamline systems of record

In the AEC industry, time is often wasted switching between different applications to perform specific actions. Many firms keep information siloed in disconnected systems, inadvertently causing delays and negatively impacting decision-making. With ACC, we aim to help our customers maintain workflows within a single application and a shared system of record.

That’s why we’ll also soon be releasing Bridge for Closed RFIs, allowing users to share closed RFIs across projects or accounts using Bridge, providing all stakeholders with the answers they need to make confident decisions. This capability broadens the types of information that can be shared across organizations and allows teams to retain critical information throughout the project lifecycle and after the job ends.

Another recent example of how we’re dedicated to giving construction professionals the tools they need to make smarter decisions is this summer’s release of the Embodied Carbon in Construction Calculator (EC3) integration for ACC. The EC3 integration enables users to stay in their system of record to perform carbon emission calculations and empowers teams to make more sustainable choices when selecting materials for a project.

This reduced technology management across the board improves both productivity and the ability to make informed decisions quickly with access to the right information.

Discover how the Embodied Carbon in Construction Calculator now integrates with Autodesk Construction Cloud.

Support individual productivity and maintain project transparency

Manual systems and a disconnect between 2D and 3D workflows often lead to poor decision-making, which can impact schedule and budget. With today’s releases, a major focus is increasing project transparency and cutting through the noise to bring construction teams only the most relevant information they need for the task at hand. Expanding individual capacity by providing simplified and relevant information at every point of the project leads to greater productivity overall.

With ACC’s latest announcements, we’re striving to empower more informed decision-making, bringing accurate and up-to-date project data directly to construction teams’ fingertips when they need it and where they need it so our customers can continue to deliver high quality projects on-time and on-budget.

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