By Randall S. Newton
When AECnews.com broke the news about the now-famous “NIST study,” back in August 2004, it was greeted with stunned silence in the AEC software industry. The report was the first independent assessment of the true cost of business as usual—and it was a scathing indictment. NIST claims $15.8 billion is lost annually due to various forms of inefficiency that can be lumped together as interoperability. Many of these costly inefficiencies were induced by the very software that was supposed to make the industry more efficient. As I quoted from the report in 2004:
“Interoperability problems in the capital facilities industry stem from the highly fragmented nature of the industry, the industry’s continued paper-based business practices, a lack of standardization, and inconsistent technology adoption among stakeholders,” the report states in the introductory abstract. The authors examined design, engineering, facilities management and business processes software systems, and redundant paper records management across all facility life cycle phases.
Since the NIST report, every AEC software vendor has found a way to describe their products and services in NISTian terms. For some, it has been little more than marketing-speak, while others have taken the message of interoperability to heart and moved beyond business as usual.
Two distinct approaches to AEC interoperability have emerged, each with its champions. The External Standards approach is led by the International Alliance for Interoperability (IAI), which pushes its Industry Foundation Classes (IFC's) as well as the aecXML data exchange standard. IAI explains on its website why it promotes two data exchange technologies:
Currently two complementary means for exchanging information exist: Industry Foundation Classes (IFC's), and aecXML schemas. IFC's and aecXML are serving two distinct but complementary purposes. IFC provides a means to encode and store information for the entire project in a model that can be shared among diverse project participants; aecXML is intended to support specific business-to-business transactions over the Internet. Both aecXML and IFC support aspects of the business processes of industry members and they must be coordinated to achieve the intended overall interoperability.
Among AEC CAD vendors, Graphisoft has been the clear leader in adopting IFC's for interoperability, and has embraced the External Standards approach. As we reported recently, Autodesk showed it may be moving beyond a we-give-lip-service approach to the use of IFC's. In a demonstration of new technology at Autodesk University 2005, IFC's did the heavy lifting in moving data from Autodesk Architectural Desktop to Revit Building. The data arrived as intelligent building data that could be edited as if it had been created inside Revit.
The second approach to AEC interoperability is what I call the Ad Hoc Connection, led by industry consortium FIATECH. Instead of creating committees to write lengthy, complex data models, FIATECH takes a pragmatic approach. It identifies a specific interoperability issue, then works directly with technology providers and key users to develop a solution. Many of the leading names in both capital facility construction and IT for AEC are FIATECH members.
Among the industry’s largest players, Bentley seems to be doing the most to align its interests with that of its users to improve interoperability using the Ad Hoc Connection approach. At its annual conference in May, Bentley COO Malcolm Walter described Bentley mission as providing a new ROI for its users, a return on interoperability. “The need to unify distributed work in AEC drives Bentley,” Walter told me in a recent interview.
Bentley has positioned itself in recent years to be the firm of choice for the largest AEC firms. Its two foundational products, MicroStation for design and ProjectWise for management, are the basis for a growing series of enterprise-class vertical software suites. “MicroStation is to Bentley what Windows is to Microsoft,” says Walter. With the exception of senior management, corporate operations, and foundational product development, every employee at Bentley has become identified with one of its four vertical divisions for plant, building, civil, and geospatial. To support being the enterprise-class AEC solution, Bentley has gone on a buying spree, snapping up a variety of smaller companies as well as two of divisions of Intergraph.
Despite the acquisitions, Bentley recognizes its users work in mixed environments. “We don't pretend that all software used by our clients comes from Bentley,” says Walter. “We have to play friendly in engineering environments.” Bentley's commitment to interoperability plays out in several ways; the first is in direct native file compatibility with rivals. In 2002 Bentley made a change to MicroStation's internal file format, DGN, for only the second time in the product's history. One big reason for the change was to introduce an internal structure of schemas that allow data to be stored in more than one format, yet function in MicroStation as native data. The first format to be supported by schemas was DWG, the internal file format for AutoCAD. “We know there is more DWG than DGN out there,” Walter says. “We support DWG better than Autodesk.” Company co-founder Keith Bentley often tells users that he considers any compatibility issues involving MicroStation V8 and DWG files as bugs that will receive high-priority attention if reported.
The next edition of MicroStation, V8 XM Edition, will add support for ESRI Shape files as another schema. Bentley announced MicroStation V8 XM Edition in May, but has not yet shipped the product. It is typical Bentley policy to never announce a shipping date in advance, although the new release was widely expected by users to ship in October.
Bentley's support for popular proprietary file formats extends beyond CAD and GIS. Bentley was the first CAD firm to support Adobe's new ability to place 3D data inside Adobe PDF files. It works closely with Microsoft on the integration of SharePoint and .NET technology inside ProjectWise and its various server products. With its acquisition of NextWave, Bentley is adding support for SAP to its arsenal. “A huge percentage of our owner-operator users are SAP users, too,” says Bentley's Walter. “They want to take their rich engineering data [created in Bentley products] and put it into SAP maintenance modules.”
“Our mission from here to forever is to create not only strong multi-disciplinary engineering software but also to create strong interoperability,” says Walter. “We intend to interoperate well with the typical applications in our users' environments.” To prove his point, Walter shared with me user case studies, citing significant savings in time and money by improving interoperability. “So often in the IT world, it is hard to put a price tag on stuff like this.”
One successful example comes from the Alaskan North Slope operations of oil firm ConocoPhillips. “ConocoPhillips had already read the NIST study and were starting to use the nomenclature,” when they turned to Bentley for help, Walter explains. “They wanted to put dollars into areas they thought would save money.” The first problem they tackled was the variety of IT products in use. CP has three primary contractors in Alaska, and each uses a different line of design tools. Each contractor would turn data over to CP in a different format, resulting in a significant volume of data re-entry for CP. Much of the data re-entry was for use in SAP maintenance software. CP wanted to combine subcontractors onto a single project, but the varying platforms made such cooperation a nightmare.
CP began by demanding standardization on a single design platform, and included itself in the standardization, selecting Bentley Plant. All downstream users of design data adopted the same tool set, creating the environment for seamless data transfer. “That one change alone saved them $8.6 million a year” by avoiding manual re-entry of data. “They were pretty pleased with that change.”
Next CP consolidated purchasing functions across projects, ending separate purchasing operations for each project. CP adopted Bentley's ProjectWise and eWarehouse for storing and re-using engineering data and for integrating the data with SAP. Walter says the initial implementation saved CP $5 million dollars. In a third phase, CP is now expanding its use of Bentley Plant, including the data-management modules. Walter says CP expects to save an additional $4.5 million annually on capital projects, not including the operations and maintenance (O/M) of plant assets already in use. Adding it up, Bentley claims ConocoPhillips has achieved more than $18 million dollars in annual savings by implementing Bentley Plant solutions, and will achieve additional annual savings of between 4% and 6% in ongoing O/M. Such savings make the original outlay for software, installation, and user training a near-trivial expense.
Walter says Bentley bought SAP integrator NextWave “not so much to facilitate construction as to facilitate operations and maintenance, where SAP is huge.”
Bentley sees the integration of analysis with design as a new frontier for improving interoperability. Last month Bentley finalized its purchase of the STAAD line of structural engineering products from netGuru, Inc.; on December 9 Bentley announced the acquisition of RAM International, another key provider of structural engineering software. “We are eager to advance RAM’s entire product line, providing users with increasing capabilities,” says Bentley's Buddy Cleveland, general manager of Bentley Software. “But most exciting is the common vision that Bentley, RAM, and STAAD developers share—leveraging the power of analysis throughout the workflows of building, civil, and plant lifecycles. We are convinced that our results will be game-changing.” Bentley says it intends to “leverage the power of analysis” by embedding interactive, front-end analysis into design decisions. AEC is not the only design environment where such merging of design and engineering is happening. New products and methods for bringing computation fluid dynamics and digital signal processing of physical assets are becoming hot in manufacturing design.