From Plan, Design, to Build: Optimizing the Digital Factory with Data-Driven Strategies

STEPHEN HOOPER: OK. Welcome back, everyone. For those of you that just joined us, I want to welcome you to our first ever digital factory symposium at Autodesk University. So my name is Steve Hooper. I'm Vice President for Design and Manufacturing here at Autodesk. And today, I will be your emcee. And in this second session, we'll explore how unlocking a digital factory's potential demands innovation, collaboration, data driven decisions, and the right software to get the job done.

So I'd like to welcome our panelists for this afternoon, Layla Salehi, Technical Solutions Executive here at Autodesk, Dustin Bowen, Design and BIM Manager at Tesla, Andy Warren, Senior Manager Engineering Services at Bridgestone, and Axel Save, Senior Manager for Factory Design at Northvolt. And lastly, Clint Allen, Senior Director of Design and Reliability Engineering at Sherwin Williams. So with that, Layla, please take it away.

LAYLA SALEHI: Perfect.

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Thank you, Steve. Now, on a more personal note, I actually grew up in a family of engineers, which really translated to being a kid that was less concerned about what was happening at this level and more concerned about identifying grilles and registers in the space. And I know I can see it in your faces now, this did not win me any popularity points in school. OK. What it did do, though, is it opened me up to factory owner conversations at a young age. And the common theme that I would hear was, where you want to do something that has never been done before, and then the inevitable, but there's nowhere to start.

As I've continued to grow and evolve in my career, that perception has only continued to solidify. As industry leaders, your processes, needs, and outputs will vary from that of your neighbors, and it may feel like there's no path towards achieving your unique vision. So our aim here today is to really peel back on those layers of perception and reveal that there are solutions available today that can build the foundation to take your unique vision into successful projects. So without further ado, let's dive in.

Now, touching on vision, Dustin, you and I have talked about Tesla's perfect projects. Could you walk us through how Tesla formulated that vision and how it continues to evolve today?

DUSTIN BOWEN: Yeah, absolutely. So the perfect project. It's a moniker that was coined by one of our former leads, and it's basically a thought experiment of if we had this hypothetical perfect project, what would that look like? What are we doing now or what could we be doing? What functions do we need to add? So we worked with all of our different stakeholders from across the teams project controls, estimating construction facilities, and just understood what their needs are.

And we worked with the Autodesk team to basically create a storyboard of all of those pieces together and what would that perfect project look like. Give us a good visualization of how we can plug all those pieces in together and basically get to that end goal, and from there, create a roadmap into where do we want to put our efforts and develop that out?

LAYLA SALEHI: Perfect. And I know Andy, you've talked about something similar at Bridgestone, right?

ANDY WARREN: Yeah. So we have what we call Bridgestone asset maintenance management. We call it BAM knowing that it's an umbrella of all the products that we use together. So we have CMMS system, that we also have ACC for the building side, and then we have Fusion Manage to control the process, and then Vault to store everything. And then underlying the foundation is all the CAD, Inventor, Revit, AutoCAD Electrical. And so we put all that together and created our perfect solution. So to speak, to Dustin's point is how do we get all that into BAM.

LAYLA SALEHI: I like the names for both of them. I mean, from what I'm hearing, it's like a great first step is to formulate a strong vision, make sure it's adaptable, as you mentioned, to really promote that continuous innovation necessary for your organization, which is great to hear. So, Dustin, you mentioned teams.

Now, I know in conversations, it really depends on who you ask, you get a different definition for what a factory really is. Before Autodesk, I would have said personally that it was just the envelope of the building. If you talk to someone who operates machinery, perhaps they'd say it's everything on the factory floor. So I want to know from each of you. Maybe Axel you could start. What is a digital factory to you? But more importantly, which tools and strategies do you use to align all your stakeholders to that concept throughout a project?

AXEL SAVE: So I have a dream, where every day when Northvolt comes to work, they should open up their teams, they should open up their inbox, and they should open up their 3D model of our reality, which is the manufacturing of batteries, which is what we are there for. Everything that anyone at this company should do is to help getting green batteries out of the door.

And to do that need to create this common hub, this common place where everyone can connect to it. Now, obviously not everyone will need all of the different information at all times. That's not the point. The point is to connect the reality of production with the different enablers of production.

So this requires a data structure that allows search sets, filtering, visualization, all of these connections that helps no matter if you are on the business side, or on the HR side, or in logistics, or-- and this central hub is everything, and that is what digital factory is. It's a representation of why we are here. It's just way more convenient to have it access from your desk instead of literally on the floor, which is a scalable approach, which helps associate the reality with the daily work.

LAYLA SALEHI: I love that. I love that you said scalable. I couldn't agree more. Clint, how about for you?

CLINT ALLEN: So for Sherwin, the digital factory started with just the models of our facilities, and at first glance, it was kind of an ambiguous concept. Even sitting through many sessions today you hear about data. There's data here, data here. It's always used in some generic ambiguous form. But when you look at your factory, it starts with the models, but then you have equipment data, you have-- you look at variable frequency drives on motors. You have agitators, you have pumps, you have valves, you have filling and packaging equipment, rotating equipment.

There are batching systems within our factories that load batches for architectural coatings or batches to produce latex in a reactive unit operation. But there are countless sources of data that are tangible. And the digital factory for us is bringing those in, bringing those data together to ultimately allow us to build a digital twin that we use to help level load some of our supply chain modeling across North America.

LAYLA SALEHI: Perfect. So for those in the audience here that are just beginning to go through this journey themselves, do you have any words of advice for a successful integration? Dustin, do you want to kick us off?

DUSTIN BOWEN: Yeah, I'm really fortunate to work for a company that embraces technology in doing things a little differently and being adaptable. So for me, I have a lot of freedom in that to use whatever tools are available and that buy off is almost ingrained. But we obviously have to work with our different stakeholders and make sure that they're aligned with the vision with that as well. And it's really just formulating that plan. Going back to the perfect project, have that baseline and get their buy off early, and whenever you go to execute all the work's done up to that point.

LAYLA SALEHI: Excellent. Andy, do you have any words of advice?

ANDY WARREN: Yeah, I think kind of like Dustin said, it's really about the people. The technology is the easy part. Autodesk makes everything easy. It's getting people to change how they work. So getting a good buy in from a cross-functional team and giving people the chance to give that feedback or input to the system and actually help develop it that you're working on, that's what's key.

And then there's a guy I met at Autodesk many years ago. He always said, think big, start small, and scale fast. So being able to get something out there and get working on it and then always continuously improve on it. Letting people have that feedback and touch it, feel it, kind of thing.

LAYLA SALEHI: Yeah. No, that makes sense. I mean, from what I'm hearing from both of you, it's just really about figuring out the best first place for your respective teams and just starting from there. And you mentioned people quite a few times, and that's a big topic for me. The pandemic to me was somehow both yesterday and 10 years ago. Don't ask me for the math on that one. It just feels like that.

But it was a really great lesson that when you have conversations about tech adoption, you also need to discuss people because it's really those people that are driving that. I'm really curious to understand a little bit about how the adoption of digital tools have actually impacted your team's culture, and maybe even the culture of your company.

AXEL SAVE: So as Dustin, I am blessed with a digital first company that's really encouraged. And we don't have this transition to digital because we have always been digital, and that's that lack of legacy is really a superpower. But fundamentally, the people is everything. And you need-- when we hire, when I hire, we have the cultural fit before the technical fit in the interview process. Because anyway, we do things a bit unconventional. It's a fairly new industry in the Western hemisphere, it's things need to be taught anyway.

So the technical parts, it can be taught and it needs to be taught. But the mindset, that is not teachable. So I was used to working at an old automotive company. And one of the first questions was also like, OK, how do you have recommendations to try to bring to Northvolt? And I think that the vast, vast majority of the people there would not thrive at Northvolt because the mindsets, or the companies and organizations are so different. They're good at different things. But this mindset requires from the very beginning, it needs to be enforced at all levels, at all stages and all disciplines.

And it comes from the vision of the founders, but it's enforced, and it's thriving in the daily environment and the work that you're doing as a team. And then you have tools, and systems, and procedures, and that helps you with that. But that's just tools. It is the people who does the work and that sets this tone of conversation, and that's everything.

LAYLA SALEHI: You come from the benefit of a fairly young company or organization. Clint, Sherwin Williams is about over 150 years old. How does that impact your team?

CLINT ALLEN: So a few years ago, Sherman started to embrace innovation on a technology side. Prior to that, we had only been focused on innovation from a product deliverable to our customer. But a few years ago, we started to tip our toe into innovation. And this happened to be right before the pandemic, where we had acquired our own laser scanner. And then the pandemic hits. And without us embracing this new technology, specifically this laser scanner, we were in the middle of a detailed engineering phase of an expansion at our plant in Orlando.

And we had loaded people up, our equipment on the corporate jet, flew them to Orlando. They scanned the facility, developed a point cloud, and from there, we were able to execute all of our detail engineering with only traveling to site a couple times because it was so restrictive during the pandemic. But since then, and the use of the Autodesk Construction Cloud specifically, I have seen a significant shift in cultures within my team, where I see more accountability.

During the design review phase for our team members, we're tracking open issues. It was very commonplace for us prior to this issue that when something is brought up during the design review, issues fall through the cracks. They don't make their way all the way through the final design. Then you're correcting something in the field.

But more importantly, through this, I've seen a development of the agency of our team members. They're just more autonomy, there's more independence, and it really drives ownership down to the individual level, where they feel they're contributing in a real meaningful way, and they have control over the design process as we move through detailed engineering.

LAYLA SALEHI: And we've seen so many benefits to that as well. Andy and Dustin.

ANDY WARREN: Yeah, I think to build on what Clint was saying. Everybody's travel is much more restricted than pre-COVID just from a cost savings as well. People realized you didn't have to travel as much. So getting out there and scanning, we do the same thing. Using virtual reality to do your walkthroughs really kind of gives you that first step into the digital world, where you dip your toe in there, where you can use that as your model to get started whenever you're trying to get going. I think that's really a great use case whenever you say, hey, we go scan it first and that saves so much money from travel, let alone everything else.

LAYLA SALEHI: It's very true.

DUSTIN BOWEN: Yeah, I mean, the guys have summed it up really well. I agree on all points. Just embracing whatever technology you have available to you to help the team stay engaged and be able to be flexible in that regardless of the situation.

LAYLA SALEHI: Great. So Clint, you mentioned working with teams abroad. So Axel, you are based out of Europe, which thank you for traveling all this way, and everyone else from North America. So, as global and regional organizations, you work with a number of teams with varying levels of digital maturity around the world. How do you effectively balance the unique demands of your factory projects with these teams?

DUSTIN BOWEN: I think it's establishing the expectation up front. There are going to be levels of maturity, but then also having stopgaps internally to fill those gaps, where somebody else may not be able to hand over a mature product or a digital product, and to be able to take that on internally as well, combination.

LAYLA SALEHI: So just to dig in a little deeper, I know you've had some projects in California and Texas and have experienced the differences just working stateside. But can you elaborate a little bit on that?

DUSTIN BOWEN: Yeah, we do have different teams that are doing a lot of the same things. But we do collaborate across all of our different sites and just make sure we're not duplicating efforts and that we're actively on the same path together on that. But yeah, it's works well.

LAYLA SALEHI: That's excellent. I know you mentioned a Costa Rica project once.

ANDY WARREN: Yeah, I think, language is always a little bit of a speed bump on projects. But really and truly we see more things for different requirements. The example of Costa Rica, it's not so much that there's something different in that country than what we do. It's a mile down the road from an airport, so buildings five or six stories tall, but it has a 13 meter height restriction because it's right down the road from the airport. So we see things like that as being an issue.

And then kind of like Dustin said, what we do is I have a team that will kind of model for those vendors that necessarily don't do it. And we'll actually train some of our vendors that maybe aren't really savvy with Revit. They're not really savvy with Inventor. And we'll get them to help them build that model so that we get the model that we need to do whatever we're trying to do at that point. And then the next project that we're working on or the next phase, then they can take it over and we don't have to hold their hand as much kind of thing.

So it's not so much a location thing. It's more of what the site restrictions are, or what team you're working with. You can have a great team, here in San Diego and a less experienced team in Costa Rica, or vice versa. You may have a really great team in Brazil, and then in Austin, Texas, you may have an unexperienced team that you got to train how to use Revit or something crazy, I know.

AXEL SAVE: And I would argue obviously, there are differences of different countries, or regions, and so on, but all projects are different, either from a product perspective or from a cost, or from a regional, or whatever. So the point is not really that there are differences, they will always be differences. The point is of how you deal with it and how you account for it in your processes. And then it's way more with this common cultural acceptance of that.

There's like I'm a production engineer and obviously you hear-- on the production floor, you heard people talking shit about construction, people who are so conservative, but that's not true. Of course, there are some conservative people in construction, but there are also super innovative. That is not the point of where you belong, it's who you are. And when you're building up a project, if you find this like minded people who is willing to work with you, and you need to have these partners, either internal or external, then it doesn't matter where you are, or how you're doing it. It's what you're doing and who you are. And that is a very strong mindset, and it's challenging.

Sometimes you're not-- you cannot pick your dancing partner always. But like you can help each other, building this together, especially in the terms of factors that are this massive projects for many, many years, and all of these disciplines, there is always an opportunity to work together. And then you use the tools and platforms and structures to enable that. But this is common cause that is at the heart of everything, and there is an enormous potential in that.

LAYLA SALEHI: It really goes back to the hub comment that you mentioned earlier about aligning all your stakeholders. Clint, how about you? Could you expand on it a little bit more? Well, I use this topic specifically. I think if your organization decides to go down this path of say, a digital factory or trying to use these data that are available to you, it is no trivial matter to specify the platform that when you're partnering with an architect, or engineering firm, what products they're using. You want to ensure that they're using Revit, or Plant 3D, Navisworks, because you want this to be a usable work product that then you can bring into your systems.

We've obviously with countries, and states, and regions have different regulatory requirements, and there's nothing you can really do about that. But on the engineering side, when you're picking your partner, you have to specify these requirements. And we've recently done that with an expansion in North America, specifically with Autodesk Build, where my idea is trying to keep our engineering team in the office more or less time in the field addressing RFIs.

And when we went through bidding, everybody had agreed that, oh, yeah, we'll do this. But as soon as we awarded the contract, they're like, oh, can we use this product instead? And I refused to budge on the matter. But what was great is we were able to partner with Autodesk in this particular example, to train this company, to help us push this vision forward where we have more-- we have better line of sight on RFIs. We have line of sight on safety. That was a class that I went to before this, was a safety and Autodesk build. So there are a lot of tools that are available to us. But again, it's not a trivial matter to start specifying those in your scope of work documents.

LAYLA SALEHI: Yeah, agreed. And you bring up a great point in that it's just as important when you are looking at new technology to adopt, to continue training and supporting your team as well. It goes hand in hand. I actually just had to let everyone in here know. We had an opportunity to talk before, and Andy was telling me a great story about collaborating with Clint here. Well, not specifically, but with Sherwin Williams, and it really highlighted just working globally, how you really have to rely on the data, even when it comes to paint sample colors.

So you had mentioned-- a little bit earlier, you mentioned the word unconventional. How have you-- in our previous conversation, you mentioned that you used our tools in an unconventional way. How have you used our tools in an unconventional way?

AXEL SAVE: So the factory is an inorganic organism where you can have a building with no machines in it, and then it's just a fancy barn. Or you can just have machines on a field and that will never produce anything. But we have these bubbles where you have construction tools and design, which are awesome at what they're doing. And you have-- you can optimize and optimize the design in terms of that. And then you have product and production tools that are amazing at those fields, because that is how the business models of those companies and the fields have been evolving.

As a factory designer, I need both. I don't need all the bells and whistles of all the tools, but I need them to talk together. And this is where our partnership with Autodesk really has been breaking systems and really trying to force this to work, because if it must work.

The only thing that when the climate change has not made time our ally, so speed is everything. Which means that the traditional way of designing your product, and then you design your production, and then you design your facility. It's too slow. The only way you can gain on that time axle is parallelization. That means you need to design your product in parallel with your production, in parallel with your facility. And the only way to do that is to make them the tools, and the disciplines, and the people freaking talk in a way that they conventionally and traditionally haven't been doing.

And it was like, without going into technical perspectives, just like we are having a session tomorrow on the very like how you move metadata between a production, or product specific file format and a construction specific file format just because they don't talk and we need to find a semi-janky way to move it because it's needed for the project.

And I think that mentality of using conventional tools in an unconventional way, it means that you don't need to reinvent the wheel all the time. Yeah, you might need to reconfigure your cart, but the wheel itself is the same, it's just a matter of how you use it. And I think that is having that mindset of having colleagues in the fields that have the same mindset, and having partners that allow you to have that vision is absolutely critical if we are going to save this world, or in any way just evolve our field into relevance, otherwise we are dead.

LAYLA SALEHI: Yeah. No, I agree. Andy, how about for you?

ANDY WARREN: I think it makes me think back to the days, early days I learned AutoCAD. And I know I don't look this old, but I started on AutoCAD release nine. I was in middle school, but everything was based on a coordinate system, 000 everybody knows where that is. The only people that really care about that anymore are surveyors. We still might have some surveyors out here. They still know where 000 is. But Revit doesn't care and Inventor doesn't care.

But when you start bringing in Revit and scans and all that together, 000 kind of matters. So we found that we have to create a coordinate system with the scan, with the Revit model, with the Inventor model. So that when you bring that stuff together and you're moving stuff around, that they can kind of all reference back. And thanks to factory design utilities, you can do some of that.

That was one of the really big ones we found is creating that coordinate system in there that isn't necessary, but it is necessary. So that was a huge kind of figuring that out as we went, and then just using the tools is for ACC. I know we talked about that Mark. And owning the data as an owner is so important. So that we have that data after the fact. A lot of people talk about the project that last months, maybe years, but our machines have to run 50, 60 years. So I need to own that data for the next 50 or 60 years. I don't need to get PDFs that somebody worked really hard to create a model. So getting that ownership of that data is somewhat unconventional for the industry.

LAYLA SALEHI: Agreed. Would you like to share as well?

CLINT ALLEN: Sure. I guess, for me, I've always used the Autodesk products as a way to accelerate design phase of projects and used it as an engineering tool because I don't quite remember a lot of the mathematics to calculate volume and the calculus anymore, since I'm so far removed from it. But there are so many times with us where we use a lot of tanks or reactors, a very large equipment. And then during the design phase, we don't know some of the weights of the equipment, some of the weights of say, a shaft when we're designing an agitator assembly.

But what you can do to help accelerate your design phase and help your other disciplines is using CAD to-- with us, we're all in 3D. You can generate the volume of say, a steel of a tank assembly, and from there, you can just go and multiply it by the density of the materials and construction. And very quickly you can use it to allow, say, your civil structural team to start designing their steel without waiting on that equipment specification from a manufacturer.

So just using it as a really fast engineering tool is just something that I've seen a lot of people not use it as. They're like, oh, I can't calculate the volume of this. And I'm like, you don't have to, just draw it. AutoCAD will tell you what it is and it just can go so much faster.

ANDY WARREN: If you're getting young kids at home. It works great for helping with geometry homework, trig homework. I totally cheat and-- yeah, this should be your answer, son.

LAYLA SALEHI: Dustin, how about for you and your teams?

DUSTIN BOWEN: So using tools unconventionally. So for us, there's been multiple conversations I've had with Autodesk when we're walking them through a workflow and they're like, oh, you're using it like that? We never intended it like that. Just kind of bending the rules a little bit and forcing it into our workflows and what makes sense for us. And then if there's tools that just don't exist, we've developed things internally, in-house to help customize things in a way that we don't have available to us out of the box as well.

AXEL SAVE: It comes back to people to have that. It requires a certain connections in the brain to have a tool. And I don't care of what it was designed to do, I care about what it can do. And we had a session here with Performa, and then a Norfolk colleague here immediately thought of like, cool, but can I use this civil engineering tool and try to see what can I use it for otherwise?

And you see the format person got a bit uncomfortable just by the thought of using it. But that's how you need to really break open new doors. And like, yeah, you will hit a lot of walls in a way, but 1, 2, 3, you find this new door that is the right way forward. And that's how innovation is. It's R&D. I think a lot of times we talk about R&D as product R&D, which is, of course, it's own super important. But here we're talking about factory design R&D.

It's a field that requires investments, and passion, and care of how we do things, and what we do. And always have that in mind, and allow from it, from a budget perspective, and from a timeline perspective, and a resource perspective and a mindset perspective. It is needed because it's a fairly unusual field that needs evolution. And I think we have a lot of potential here in this expo and in this field to have that conversation.

LAYLA SALEHI: Yeah, I agree. I agree. And it's so interesting hearing from each one of you about that because it really highlights that the solutions that are available today, it's really for you to use in a way that best fits for your team. There is no right or wrong way, despite what the people at former may have told you, but it's really here for you to use for what makes sense for you. Now, Andy, you talked about data ownership and that's a very hot topic. So as these projects start to become more and more integrated, how do you address data ownership and control?

ANDY WARREN: Yeah, I think it kind of goes back to what Clint was saying earlier. You got to build in your contracts up front. As an owner, we're paying to have this thing designed. We're paying to have it built. Why would we not pay to have the data? Why would we not just say, hey, you got to give this to us? The one trick I always tell people is never put it on as a line item on a bed sheet, though, because the sales guy will add dollar signs to that. They love that. You just put it in there as a spec that says, hey, you got to give me this data.

And then finding out the right tool for the right job, where does that data go? If a building, does it go into ACC? Does it go into Vault? Does it go into Fusion Manage? Wherever your data goes, you kind of have to build your path there, but build your standard around that and build your documentation and your contracts around that, and it's so important. I think he explained it to your vendors. A lot of times they understand why you want to do that. I don't want to reverse engineer what you're selling me. I need to be able to maintain it. So owning that data is just really key to that.

LAYLA SALEHI: Agreed. How about you at Tesla?

DUSTIN BOWEN: Yeah. Similarly, building that expectation we tend to do a lot of things internally and take a lot of those processes on internally. And so we create our own future with that, our own ownership. And so combination between that and setting that expectation through vendors.

LAYLA SALEHI: Yeah. That makes sense. And Clint, I mean again 150-year-old company, so how does that work?

CLINT ALLEN: Yeah, we've seen a massive step change. For the longest time when we would partner, say we're going to build a factory, we don't have the ability to execute architectural, large scale civil structural where we would partner with the firm. And then old school, they would send you a hard drive with all the drawings on it. You would find out that the external reference paths were all broken. You'd have to either make them fix it, or you would have to spend time recreating all of those paths.

But since the advent of the ACC, where we're actually forcing our engineering partners when we use them to use the ACC, where we have access to these drawings, they will live in the ACC, they will stay there the entire time. And what that allows, especially when it comes to some large scale civil structural, my process mechanical team, who's actually sitting over there in the back, they're working off the correct model as well. They're working off current models of building design, where in the past, we were working off old models. You have obstructions in the field.

And we've tried to eliminate that by just saying, this is where these files will live and breathe. And you can-- we set up the permissions so not everyone can see them, because that becomes a sticking point with engineering firms, where they don't want anyone to see until it's the final product. And your administrator of the ACC can set up those permissions to give them some anonymity during the design phase, but then allows for the simple, seamless transition of that work product, which you own as a customer.

ANDY WARREN: With the new Bridge tool, or let's say new ACC Bridge, where the GC, or the AD can own their version of the model and just synchronize to yours. So then you end up both owning it, but it's synchronized. It's up to date. So you get your model when you're done. They get to do whatever they want to do with it on their side, on their ACC tenant. But you can both share that same data model, is great when you can connect those together.

AXEL SAVE: I think data ownership from my perspective, from my designer seat is way more on the input, like battery process technologies move so fast. So in a lot of cases, people-- we barely know how the machine is going to look when we start doing the design of the factory. So how do you design a factory if you don't know what you're going to put into it?

And what this comes into is that the stakeholder-- the requirements owners for the design needs to take accountability for it. The process engineer, who asks for a machine, they will over dimension their utility consumptions, and they will tell it's massive, and they will just because they don't know. And that is the nature of people to then add a buffer for it.

And that might be fine. I'm not the expert to tell if that is right or wrong, but I have all of these requirements that I need to juggle in the design. So the only thing that can happen, and to avoid conflicts down the line is a clear cultural acceptance of accountability where it is. If you ask for something, put your name in blood on it and we will know it.

And if you stand behind your engineering profession of it, I don't care if you have added 15% buffer on it. If you think that is a reasonable security, cool. That's your professional opinion that I will not care about. But I will ask for your data. And we need to have information systems, and structures, and change management, and all of this that gives this transparency. Transparency builds trust, both between people, but also to the design because then everyone knows how-- which judgment calls have been made.

We make hundreds of decisions in the design process. And they might be right, they might be wrong. Someone might think differently, but transparency and system support for transparency is everything. So data ownership to me is more of what data do I own, and can I stand behind that data when investors comes, or the CEO comes, or whoever is going to whip me. Yes, it is important to be able to stand behind your product.

And then obviously that helps your internal management and support systems. It's a cultural thing that enables this transparency and therefore trust. And that if you have that, everything else will be way more efficient and the type of low key, behind the scenes shenanigans will go away. And that's why the central factory design, the model is the key, because then there's one single source of truth. If you look at the model, and if it's there, it's there. And if it is tall, it's tall. If it's fat, it's fat. But it's one single source of truth that allows this transparency.

ANDY WARREN: That's great too, because if everybody adds a buffer on there, a 15% buffer, and there's six, or seven disciplines, then all of a sudden you got way more buffer. Or does everybody assume everybody else is going to, so they don't add any buffer? But you make a transparency know, OK, here's how much total contingency we have in this design and how much confidence we have in it across all the different disciplines that all have to play nice together.

AXEL SAVE: And then speaking of data, data-driven decisions. Because then if you have that, you can make a decision that is true. And then you might change your mind later down the line. That's not the point. The point is that you make a decision based on data and that everyone agrees that it is the same data that is the truth. Because if you're doing it in the old way, when you have all disciplines doing their own things all the way, they will have different realities.

As people, as humans, we have our own realities that is my truth. But as an engineering collaboration, we need to have agreement on what is the truth today. It will change tomorrow and it will change the day after that, but today we need to agree on it. And the systems, and the platforms, and the procedures, and the culture, and the organization, all that needs to allow for that. And it's cool. When it works, it's really, really cool.

LAYLA SALEHI: So data really is that bridge that brings together just all the stakeholders. I mean, from everything everyone mentioned, it really helps make sure that you are producing efficient workflows and successful projects at the end of the day, which is excellent to hear. And speaking about that 15% tolerance, I may or may not have been guilty of that myself.

But now, I want to backtrack a little bit to Brownfield and Greenfield projects that you had mentioned. So data is one of the both an opportunity and a challenge in those types of projects. Now, those two types have historically been approached as separate and distinct processes. But with the technology continuing to advance more and more, we've actually started to see a convergence between the two. Could you walk us through, especially with the data that you discussed, what are some of those challenges and opportunities that you're seeing still between those two different types of projects?

AXEL SAVE: I think now as a young company, who like the number of Brownfield problems that we have had, is fairly few because we've just been building new stuff for most of the time. But now, we see that the first factor that is signed up in Northern Sweden four years ago, we now start having the first Brownfield projects of it. And we suffer from the old sins, just four years ago.

But I do think that the main difference often is design is just about your parameters. Which toggles can you play with? And what is your framework and your order sheet? What do the customer want? But fundamentally, a Brownfield and Greenfield, yeah, it's the same procedures. It should have the same procedures. Yeah, your constraints and how this framework is set up is fundamentally different. But the principles and structures are the same in my book.

Now, obviously if you're good with tools, if you are having a well-established 3D scanning procedures, and if you have good documentation tracking, and all this, it helps. But the procedure is the same. It's just about how easy and how easy your systems allow for that journey rather than the journey itself. It's the same-- it's a factory that needs to be built, and designed, and commissioned. It's just a matter of how tricky it is and how much you need to bend to make it work.

LAYLA SALEHI: That makes sense.

DUSTIN BOWEN: You mentioned laser scanning, and that's definitely the easiest way that we've found so far with Brownfield projects. Similarly, we have a factory that's four years old and already dealing with some of those same problems. So it's using the tools that you have available to you, laser scanning to create as builts. Everybody knows construction is going to install it exactly like the model. But we need to obviously go back, verify accuracy on that.

And then on the installation side, be able to reference, take that same reality capture team, deploy them out to actually do like progress tracking, installation, verification, things like that. So same team across multiple stages of the project as well.

LAYLA SALEHI: Perfect. Now, Clint and Andy you have some older projects. Correct? Slightly older than four years, perhaps.

CLINT ALLEN: Yeah. Brownfield was almost an exclusive thing for Sherwin Williams. We only focused on Brownfield expansions. Unlike a lot of companies, when you go to one of our factories, especially in architectural coatings plant, we make thousands of formulas and have tens of thousands of raw materials. So the idea of building a new factory becomes very expensive, very fast. So we have had to rely on existing infrastructure through existing facilities to allow us to expand our factories at a reasonable price point in terms of CapEx.

But like everyone else, we've had problems with management of change, and I think that's going to be an issue with any large company. And we've used laser scanning to help develop as built models of an existing facility. So gone are the days of weeks on end in a facility with a tape measure, drawing something out on paper, going back to the office, and recreating that in CAD.

But in terms of building the factory and the Greenfield versus Brownfield, I mean, having the laser scanning that pretty much levels the playing field in my eyes. Even if there's a partner here, Leica, we have a Leica scanner. We partnered with Matterport over there in terms of having entire layouts of our facilities for operators or anyone who has access to it within our system, but it's using all of these new technologies to help, like I said, level that playing field.

But then, again, you can use something like the ACC to help your management of change process as well, because that's the part that I think a lot of companies will fall short on. And if you're a company that has the Osha requirement, or process safety management, management of change is required. It's a very rigid process where we have to maintain these documents.

And I know I've said this earlier, but when I think of data, I'm thinking of specifically of process safety information, piping and instrumentation drawings, emergency relief, vent calculations. We could have piping, isometric drawings for mechanical integrity. These all become compliance issues, and that's where the ACC can be used to help, again, manage some of that management of change long-term.