In today’s world, people have an abundance of technology at their fingertips. They have the ability to respond to e-mails at the office, at home, or even on the road via their smartphones. And while this may enable professionals to be more productive, it can also have the opposite effect if all of this information isn’t being managed properly — or at all.

After Newforma’s first user conference (Nuggett 2011), Stephanie Hildebrandt, associate editor for Structural Engineer magazine, sat down with the CEO of Newforma, Ian Howell, to discuss how the company’s project information management (PIM) software is helping the AEC industry to streamline its project delivery processes.

SH: How and when did the idea for project information management first come about?
IH: Well, in 2003, original investor Jesse Devitte, who is now with Borealis Ventures, a venture capital firm, was looking back at the AEC industry that he had left five years before. Jesse used to be involved in a company called Softdesk, and they built solutions on top of AutoCAD as an Autodesk development partner. They had created vertical application software for architects, engineers, and construction firms and Softdesk was subsequently acquired by Autodesk. He saw they were using the same software that he’d sold them five years before. It was like the industry hadn’t changed, but you can imagine in that same time technology had changed a tremendous amount. So, he asked the question, “What could we do to leverage new technology to see if we could build a new set of tools? Technology has changed, but the industry’s still using the old stuff. What could we do to help that would be different?” Together with some of the original members of the Softdesk team, they set about interviewing over 100 of their old customers to learn what’s working and what’s not. [They asked:] Do you need a better CAD system? [The answer was:] No, we’ve already got that. [Then they asked:] Do you need better engineering analysis tools? [The answer was:] No, we’re happy with the ones we’re using. [A better question was:] What part of your business is really stressful? Where are the points of pain in your business today and what could we do to help there? One overwhelming response was managing e-mail. Because e-mail has become the tool by which we’re collaborating on all our projects, our inboxes are out of control; we’ve got no real way of managing our e-mail properly. A second common response was difficulty in finding information saved somewhere on the company network. It is often too hard to find what we are looking for and then we invest (waste) time recreating the same information again. A third was the challenge of logging everything from transmittals to RFIs, submittals and action items. Some firms hired project admin staff to do this, others assumed that project managers were keeping track of all these items in spreadsheets and had time to keep them up to date manually. So as the Newforma founding team, they started getting some ideas around how could they go after these what we later called ‘project information management’ problems, which had nothing to do with geometry and design and coordination which was being handled by CAD applications and BIM systems, and nothing to do with the engineering or environmental analysis. It had to do with all this other extraneous information, which isn’t pretty. It’s not nice pictures of visualized buildings, but it’s a huge problem for them to be able to deliver their projects.

SH: Did Newforma coin the term project information management?
IH: Yes. We did coin the term project information management or PIM as it is now being referred to. We actually asked our customers. After we met with them and talked with them about some of our ideas, we said, “When you go back to your desk and you explain to the people you work with what you have been doing in the meeting room for the last couple of hours, who are those guys you’ve been talking with, and what have you been talking about, what will you tell them?” The term “project information management” really came from listening to the answers they gave to the question “How you would describe us and the conversation we’ve been having to your colleagues”. Our customers have also played a big role in guiding us to include a lot of the functionality that makes up our Newforma “project information management solution.”

SH: How does PIM help structural engineers collaborate better with architects and other engineers?
IH: Several of our customers are structural engineering firms including Thornton Tomasetti, Pruitt Eberly Stone, and PCS Structural Solutions. Obviously, they all work with various design firms. PCS for example are using Newforma Project Center to evolve from what used to be sharing of CAD documents, 2D plans essentially, to digital design review using mark ups of BIM (building information model) models created by the architect. They have also published a case study around how they are doing model-based design workflow by taking views of the model which you markup as a series of comments on the design as what we call a markup session which can then be sent back to the architect. Imagine a cartoon animation strip where you have an image and certain notes associated to it and next to it another image with captions. Sort of a film strip where you’re taking captures of various views of the model and you’re asking a question. You might be saying, “How do I resolve this design problem? There’s a coordination issue here. I haven’t got room for my steel in this space. Can you give me more ceiling height in this particular location? Can you lower the ceiling?” So that’s a conversation that happens between the structural engineer and the design architect all of the time, but they are not having that conversation using traditional tools like 2D drawings or physical models. They were now suddenly using 3D coordinated geometry inside BIM models supported by PIM to communicate and resolve design conflicts. Sometimes you may well have a structural model, and you may have done that in Revit Structure if it was a Revit model, or you may have done it in Tekla, which is another, and you can’t just necessarily give that model to the person and expect them to know exactly how to use it or navigate it. They may not be proficient in Revit; they may not be proficient in Tekla. So it’s not just sharing a model, it’s to people who when they receive them can’t view them and can’t navigate them. This idea of capturing the model views using Newforma Project Center and creating these markup sessions was a great way to create a closed loop for that design workflow. They could comment and communicate the answers back.

SH: Has there been an increase in the need for project information management?
IH: There has for two reasons. Projects are getting increasingly complex. For example, many owners are now seeking LEED certification, i.e. energy efficiency credits. That’s a whole new set of information to track and submit for LEED credits as part of the project delivery process. This introduces a whole other new dimension to delivering a job on time as when you’ve got to consider sustainability coefficients and undertake energy performance analyses, etc. You don’t suddenly get more time to deliver the project even though you might be going for a silver or a gold or a platinum LEED certification. So the sheer volume and increased complexity of the information about a project has certainly gotten more challenging. The old design/bid/build methods, where plans are done and they get thrown out for tender and they come back, lowest price wins, and then you argue about all the extras along the way is being questioned by more and more owners. That model really hasn’t worked for the industry and owners don’t like the fact that it most often ends with late delivery, cost over-runs and adversarial litigation. The idea now is that the contractor is really part of the design team. You’re actually working out as you’re creating the design how you’re going to build it. This means that you’re addressing constructability issues during the design process, which in turn is also increasing the volume of information that needs to be managed. The builder who used to get the information downstream is suddenly getting all of this “design” information earlier. So everyone’s got this huge problem of out-of-control inboxes where everything keeps coming at them, all of these e-mails, all of these attachments. So more volume, higher complexity, and a lot of it was all coming through e-mail is a recurring point of pain for everyone in the industry where the opportunity really created itself for Newforma.

Because architecture, engineering and construction firms are always trying to do more with less in terms of fewer staff, and with so much information being juggled, things will often fall through the cracks. Team members rushing to meet deadlines will accidently file a critical piece of project information into the wrong project folders and then it would land in the wrong place on the network never to be found again. They knew it was somewhere, but they couldn’t lay their hands on it. So, one of the earliest capabilities in our software solution was born based on this feedback from our customers. What if we could “index” every file and folder and email about all of your different projects across your entire company network so as to allow you to search for any piece of project information as well and as easily as you could search the Internet? Now, that includes very specific file types which are CAD files (including embedded XREF files), model views, detailed spreadsheets for estimates, in fact over 200 file formats being used every day to design, document and manage projects.

Critical project information is no longer “lost’ in personal email inboxes. Project emails and supporting attachments are “filed” on the central file server alongside drawings, specifications, details, estimates etc, where the whole team has visibility and can act to help resolve that particular question. Arguably it’s the back and forth on e-mail that is what we call the “project decision trail”. So capturing that conversation as part of the official record for the project makes a huge difference both in streamlining project delivery and for future discovery.

SH: How does PIM help contractors?
IH: Contractors have traditionally used a different class of software, but that is starting to change with the advent of PIM. They’ve tended to use heavy duty (complex) project management software. Contractors have typically asked their architects and engineers to use those tools and the designers absolutely hate them. They’re complex; they’re overkill. The information is not structured in the way that the designers would do their workflow. What’s been interesting for Newforma is as we’ve solved work-flow for architects and engineers (structural, civil, mechanical, electrical, plumbing, fire protection, and environmental engineers) first, we’ve really focused on the design process right through until about the 6th edition of our software. Then, with 7th edition last year and now 8th editions in 2011, we’ve really said, “Is there any reason why this workflow shouldn’t include the contractor?” I’ll give you an example. The contractor would typically create a request for information (RFI) and the architect or engineer would respond to that request. So we had already built the response piece in, and then we asked ourselves, “Why couldn’t we really build in the initiation of that RFI and make it easy for the contractor to send it to the architect and the engineer via the Newforma software that they’re already using?” Interestingly, we’ve had a lot of contractors who are working with design firms who are using our software actually start to contact us and say, “What else can Newforma do for us?” We say, “Well, do you have project information management problems?” And they say, “Define that for us.” E-mail, search, view, markup, sharing information, tracking submittals and logging transmittals, so they’ve got all the same problems. Suddenly what we’re doing is we’re seeing construction firms actually start to want to use the same light weight easy-to-use work-flow. That’s our new frontier, to sell the Newforma PIM solution to a lot more construction firms. The construction firms already using Newforma today are showing us how we can add even more value in future releases of our software. From an AEC industry perspective, it is far more productive when everyone is using the same platform for information sharing and best practice work-flow as a “connected” project team.

SH: What about owners?
IH: Owners have very much more of a requirement for progress monitoring. They’re paying all the bills at the end of the day. They want to keep an eye on what’s happening. They want to be informed in terms of updates, which can be done by sending them reports or increasingly giving them visibility online. We’ve always provided Internet browser access to project information, so if any of our customers want to give the owner an invitation to login and view, they can be looking at current versions of documents, they can be looking at a submittal log, or RFI log. So we’ve really set it up so if the owner wants to monitor progress on the job and wants to check on how their money’s being spent and see if the project is progressing properly, they can be invited by any Newforma customer to have access to all the information about the project that they publish to the rest of the project team. Importantly, this is selective. It’s just what you want the owner to see if you’re the architect or engineer, but it’s an invitation where they can be an observer through the browser on their laptop or on their iPad or from their smartphone where they can be checking and looking at what action items are open or what RFIs are open or what submittals are still expected, for example. That’s the way we’ve designed our solution to meet the needs of owners to help them monitor all of the project information they are paying for.

Breaking down the silos between A, E and C firms and giving everyone, including owners, a common view of the information about a project is a core philosophy for our PIM solution. We’ll continue do more in future releases of the software to connect the people and processes for a project so that everyone is on the same side of the equation. Not adversaries, but actually working together to deliver the project on time and on budget.

For more information about Newforma’s PIM software, visit www.newforma.com.