Preventing Risk Before It Becomes Costly Rework

Parley Burnett: We’ll get started. I'm going to turn it over here to Josh. He's going to take us through the quick agenda here. Then we'll the majority of the call will be spent in a demo, but we wanted to go through a few things first.

Josh Kennedy: Yeah, thanks, Parley. If you don't mind going to the next slide here.

As far as the agenda for today, like Parley mentioned, we're gonna walk through just a couple slides. I think we have about five or six after we get through these first one or two, just kind of set the stage, tell you a little bit about who we are as a company.

And then we'll move into kind of the majority of this call will be very much like in Revit, telling some stories about how firms we work with are using the different tools and some of the data we offer.

If you don't mind going to the next slide here, Parley.

As far as what we hope that you can take away from this, really today we're focusing on giving real-world examples. We have the benefit of being on the phone with firms every single day. We work with over 300 firms at this point. We've got a lot of people coming to us expressing their problems and their pains, and we've got a robust solution that can help solve most of them, it seems that we're hearing about.

So we're excited to just kind of share these kind of practical use cases for how you can use these different parts of the tool.

And then outside of getting ahead of things, we'll talk a lot about the data towards the back half of this webinar. So how firms are getting kind of visibility into their projects and their teams and performance in Revit and using that to upscale their groups.

As far as the team that's going to be talking to you most today, that's myself, Josh. I've been here at Guardian for about three years now, going on three years here soon. Prior to my time here, I was at Unifi, the content management system for several years. So that's where I got to hear about Guardian from some kind of mutual clients and people who were familiar with Parley and the dev team here. Parley, if you want to give a quick intro about yourself here.

Parley Burnett: For sure, yeah. Parley Burnett, founder and CEO. I always am quick to lean into the industry side of my experience. I consider myself a  Revit nerd in a way. Definitely.

A passionate user of Revit for a long time since 2005 and kind of have the majority of that time been involved in like content and families and standards.

But um, more notably, um.

I was at Unifi Labs for quite a long period of time. I was there for about 8 years from their beginning. I wasn't there during their acquisition to Autodesk, but basically kind of saw that product from conception to, you know, market delivery all over the world, led product and client success teams at different times. Um, so that's a little bit about me.

Josh Kennedy: Thanks, Parley. It's been a been a while since I got to hear you tell that story.

I think I have one more slide to cover and then I'll pass it back over to you. Just as far as kind of table setting stuff, I did want everybody to know that we will be recording this session today. Your questions are more than welcome. We encourage them.

You can drop those in the chat.

You can use the Q&A section and you can see these fun emojis across the bottom of your screen here. We don't have our whole team here today, but we've got a handful of our team on the call. So if you have a question, you put it in the chat and you see, you know, one of these emojis there. That means that one of our team members is working on typing up an answer to you.

I definitely encourage the questions and collaboration as we go through today.

But with that, I'll hand it back to you, Parley, to talk a little bit about kind of more about, I guess, why you started Guardian in the first place.

Parley Burnett: Perfect. Yes, I will. Just really quick. I always like to recognize again, our team is largely comprised of former BIM managers, gurus in the industry and I think that's one of the fun things from where I sit.

It's just really fun to work together with a common goal and also, like Josh said, work with folks like yourselves all over the place and learn about the different kinds of challenges that exist out there. So it's been a lot of fun.

But yes, so a little bit behind the scenes here. This slide will help you understand kind of a high level of what Guardian exists to do, but you know, maybe a little bit of the story behind this and how Guardian got its beginning.

So like I said, I was, I already said I was a BIM manager at one point, at several different times, actually. But you know, quick question for you all would be, you know, have you ever opened up a model and just kind of wondered like what happened here?

Like who? Who did this? I'm sure the answer to that would be yes. That's maybe a a pretty soft way of putting the question that comes to your mind. By the way, I'm sure there's more colorful ways or questions that would come to your mind when you open some models.

But that's definitely been the case for me when I was working with Revit and managing teams working in Revit. And really, you know, if you think about it, so many things happen unbeknownst to us.

You know, the thought that comes to my mind is a particular experience at a company. We were about 40 people and I felt very like isolated in a way. It was, you know, just myself as the only person that was non-billable essentially.

And you know, kind of underneath leadership where they really just did not understand what I was there to do. You know, I was able to kind of get in the door and kind of sell them on the idea initially. But beyond that, they had very little patience to really even understand what the problems were.

And then the design staff were different from that, right? They understood some of the problems, but they just didn't care a lot. We had good people, but the documented standards just weren't adhered to and so.

This was all kind of part of the reasoning behind Guardian, then coming into Unifi and hearing those same challenges. Literally every firm we would talk to kind of started getting the gears turning a little bit on Guardian.

Then we'll go to the next slide. So this is basically what how Guardian works.

It basically is going to constantly learn behind the scenes, so when it's installed, it does a lot right out of the gate like Josh was kind of alluding to already. It captures data and then the whole idea is to give you the easy button to act on what you see in the data and then kind of toggle different settings and then that's gonna run on autopilot for you.

So we've run on, we've run successfully on lots of different sizes of firms and different kinds of firms.

That's the really exciting thing for us is the smallest of firms and the largest all kind of using the same tool set very effectively. Anything you would add to that, Josh?

Josh Kennedy: Yeah, I think of course we're going to talk about this like in the product and show you how it all comes to life in a few minutes here. One thing we won't talk much about today most likely is just the actual implementation and onboarding. So maybe this is a good time to just mention you know.

We work really closely with each firm that uses Guardian. So there are several hundred of them at this point, but we have a client success team that we invest heavily in and we take a lot of pride and seeing ourselves as an extension of your team.

So how I see a lot of firms kind of deploy this and actually get it up and running is out-of-the-box Guardian ships in a a monitor only state, so it's really easy to get Guardian onto your users' machines and that is the extent of the like initial setup. We pull Revit IDs through the API. There's no user management. We make it really easy to start capturing data.

And a lot of firms really like that, because in just a couple of weeks, you'll start to see things maybe that you knew were happening and you wish weren't happening as much, or things that you didn't even know were happening on certain projects.

Things like, you know, exploding CAD, importing CAD, mirroring links, you know, all kinds of things that we'll show you more examples of later.

But when we work with you through onboarding, a lot of times we can sit down with you. We have a strategy session for about an hour to kick things off, and then we go through like 3 working sessions to kind of go through these settings with you and help get it tuned. And we don't expect you to use all of the tools that we'll show you today, like in the first week.

Probably not even in the first month, but we really help firms kind of dial in like what are the like 10-15 things that are really going to make an impact on your day-to-day that we can kind of start avoiding right away.

So we get those things turned on and then we'll schedule meetings to meet with you regularly every few months or so however often you'd like to kinda continue to tune the settings with you. We talk a lot about growing into Guardian.

Parley Burnett: Yeah, we have a lot of fun doing that too, by the way. It's really fun to share experiences from, you know, what we've learned working with other firms. Taking that to the table when we work with you really gives you a quick start on how to set this up right out of the gate.

Perfect. And so lastly, before we really get into the demo part of this, just wanted to highlight some of the history of Guardian.

We were founded in 2018 and were pretty quiet for those first couple of years.

We'll start the demo with kind of the mapping side of things and that's really how we were positioned for the first couple of years. And then since then we've really grown a lot both on our own team and also with our client base. We're now used by over 350 firms.

In over 20 countries and we have some of the more notable names at the bottom here, but certainly there are many more and of varying sizes as well.

I think that's really the exciting part about this is Guardian is just as applicable for a large firm as it is for a small firm.

The challenges are different, but you know for a small firm they don't always have like non billable resource who are just on hand all the time to address issues. So for them it's really, really nice to kind of have Guardian running on autopilot, reminding users, cleaning things up in the background without having somebody dedicated all the time.

And then for the larger teams, it's the same concept, but they also will have more staff there to kind of tune the settings as needed.

What I think is also exciting is that firms are starting to realize that, you know, this consistency thing isn't really optional anymore if they want to maintain a lot of relevancy into the future, you know?

Allowing AI to kind of leverage models and data within the model, that's going to be a big part of the future and so we're really excited to be positioned as a partner to you to make sure that happens.

Anything you would add here, Josh?

Josh Kennedy: I think you touched on it briefly, but I think you know, yeah, like you said, a lot of, you know, recognizable logos, you know, notable firms down there at the bottom, but I work with firms of all sizes. I just think that's important to note.

Introducing Guardian to people for the first time a lot often get a question of you know what size firms do you work with. So I think it's important to know you know we have firms that have like 5 to 10 Revit users. The like largest bucket I would say is probably about 20 to 50 Revit users. There's a lot of firms that size and my experience, there's usually not a designated person to like BIM management.

So we see a lot of those firms come to us and looking for at least kind of like automation tools, right, a digital assistant if you will.

To kind of help and then yeah, we can scale up to those firms that have several thousand Revit users, got a robust software that we'll show you here in just a moment.

Parley Burnett: Yeah. And while we're talking about other firms, there's a Grimshaw logo here. I just want to highlight that there's a really great case study and also Autodesk University talk by them about how they implemented Guardian.

I just encourage anybody who wants to kind of see from others words how they kind of viewed this, vetted it, rolled it out and saw a lot of value from it. I think that's a great case study for you.

So we'll get right into Revit. I think that should be showing up, yes.

Josh Kennedy: Yes, coming through.

Parley Burnett: OK, alright.

So just to set the stage a little bit here, get into a little bit of technical before we kind of start sharing some stories about how this is used. I think it's important to understand just quickly how easy this is to roll out to your firm.

We deliver Guardian and a MSI installer that can be easily deployed to your users, and there's an ID that you'll put into that installer, and that's going to tell Guardian what company the user belongs to when they open Revit.

So like Josh already said, there's no like login required for your end users and it's just going to start, it's going to start capturing information right out of the gate essentially allowing you to tune the system beyond that. I think that's really just kind of a really key part to Guardian.

We've really since the beginning, set out to create something that you could roll out today and not have to be burdened so much by like a lot of initial setup. It's certainly a powerful tool that can be tuned as you go, but just day one, it's really easy.

When you roll this out and users open Revit, they're going to start by seeing in the Add Ins tab only a few buttons. I'm currently seeing more than I would as an end user because I've already gone to this licensing dialogue, entered my e-mail address and password as an admin, and that expands the same install to a larger toolkit.

OK, so all of Guardian is essentially customized through Revit and the Guardian add in.

OK, the other thing to highlight here, we won't go into company settings, if at all today, but the what you can do in there that's really interesting is you can set up some registration rules. We don't need to get into the technicalities of that today, but essentially it means that a file that's registered to Guardian is going to have that influence applied to it, so it's optional.

You don't have to have files registered. But the other thing with that registration is you can change the settings of how Guardian works on that registration.

So when we go to register projects, I'm just going to open this really quickly. We have an interface here where you can see, like in the All Models tab, everything that's registered. You can see your own projects or maybe even just all the files that are currently opened across your whole company.

And change those settings that are applied to the file. This is obviously our own environment, so we're not running at scale here, but it's really fun to see firms that we talk with every day using this heavily. They open this up, currently open. It's got pages and pages of currently open files, you can see the status and who's in them, how long they've been in there, and as you make changes to these settings, that gets pushed out dynamically to those machines.

Um, anything on kind of the setup there, Josh, you might add?

Josh Kennedy: No, I think that you covered it well for the setup.

Parley Burnett: OK.

So we're gonna start with some like functional discussion about the mapping part of Guardian. I already said that's kind of how we got our beginning. You know, I basically am a sort of neat freak when it comes to Revit.

You know, as a BIM manager, I was always really frustrated by the deluge of things coming into my projects, usually things downloaded off the Internet or old naming conventions that we've moved on from years ago.

And really, it became clear that without anything else, Revit alone, that is a losing battle. You know, it's just really difficult to kind of keep all that stuff at bay and there's not enough people at a firm who care about that to really kind of keep control of that.

So this mapping area is what I'm going to start by talking about, but then we're going to move on to project configurations and workset configurations.

Josh and I are going to kind of bounce between these three and the majority of Guardian can be set up through those interfaces, so we won't really dabble in too much of these other interfaces today.

Coming into the mapping configuration, so this is really where you can enter or review rules that have been created and you'll understand what this means here more in a minute, but essentially it's a basic string comparison, so like something like Avail 15 degree filled arrow is going to be mapped to aerofill 15 degree.

So what Guardian does essentially in other areas and other interfaces is it's going to capture your decision-making as you rename things or even map things to your current standard.

And those rules then show up in this interface. So there's not a lot of time spent in here, to be honest. This is more used as a review kind of screen where you can see what rules people have created and kind of modify those.

OK, the really fun thing as we talk with firms is allowing like seeing them open up what they thought was kind of a clean file, like a template, and when they come in here to this all project properties.

You know, this actually is a dialog where we list out in these different tabs all of the different properties of the project. So I'm in materials, these are all the materials, all the fill patterns, shared parameters, view templates, everything shows up in Guardian.

And this actually shows them in one place kind of what might still be around that they haven't cleaned up yet. It also exposes things like duplicates. So if we, you know, look at object styles, we may not have a lot of object styles, but fill patterns. We can scan for duplicates here and it's going to identify things that are identical.

So that's kind of a like an eye-opening experience for a lot of people. They're able to see, OK, we have actually some more paring down to do here. And when you use Guardian to do that, it's very easy.

You can just double-click on these and choose what to map it to and then you would run those changes.

And that itself saves a lot of time, which is really exciting. But for me the more exciting part with these firms is when they get to see that when they process that, it also creates a rule in that interface I showed you that then is kind of deployed as scale across the firm.

So now anytime XL rigid installation is mapped or recognized as coming into a project, it's going to convert it to XL cross hatch. So it's a way to kind of take a singular decision and apply it at scale.

So this is really where a lot of firms kind of get their start with. So kind of talking about implementation a little bit, we do like to see kind of a clean up exercise on a template.

And then what happens is when a family is loaded into Revit, you actually get a very similar dialog to this where you can view everything that came in.

You can map it to what's in that clean template, and that also creates more rules.

There's going to be an option to save that family back to where it came from, so now your template and your family are aligned with their standard.

I'm kind of skipping that part of a demo because if there's another application of this that I think is even more exciting to see and that is this one. I have a drafting view here.

That is, you can think of this as like an old standard. Everything in here is kind of named the old way. These are old patterns. Maybe this was even a detail that came from another location.

Or an old project and we've since moved on to like kind of a cleaned up standard, our text, our dimension styles, everything like that. And so if we copy this.

That's a little Guardian dialog. I'll cancel that and I'm going to paste that into this project where we have some mapping rules already established.

And when we paste this drafting view into this project.

Guardian's gonna kind of do a little bit of scanning work. It's recognizing that some stuff is coming in here, and then as an admin, we're gonna see an interface that lets us kind of choose what to do with all of this.

And I'll bring this over here in a second, but I'll highlight that for an end user, they would not see this dialog at all. It would just go ahead and proceed with the cleanup work, so don't think that with this dialog your users are going to have to kind of go through anything themselves.

What's kind of neat is in here we're showing that some families came in and you'll see all of these have like a one at the end.

The problem we're all familiar with, right? That is Revit duplicating these families and it's a problem that's been hard to mitigate. Guardian's recognizing them and actually automatically mapping them to what's already in the project, which is your cleaned up template, cleaned up project, right?

And as soon as we click process, it's going to go ahead and merge those families. And also we've created some rules like fill patterns, detail item, object styles, etcetera, so that when we hit process on this.

Um, it's gonna take about 30 seconds.

And this is kind of an extreme case, right? And just for demo purposes, trying to show you like a pretty big transformation here. More than likely your own details would take a small fraction of this time, but it's essentially going into your like nested families.

Swapping patterns out, reloading families, changing textiles, arrowhead types, all of that. And now this detail is literally transforming in front of us to our current updated standard. So we call this a kind of car wash concept.

And so one of the firms we worked with really closely, when we talked with them, they were kind of migrating their standard because of like a content management change. They were moving to content catalog.

And part of that, they wanted to make sure what they were uploading was clean, right? So we actually went engaged with them, worked with them to kind of cycle all of their details through this kind of cleaning up process and ultimately they ended up with details that were fully consistent.

So kind of covering a lot of ground here, but it is an easy tool to work with and has a lot of a lot of power at scale.

Anything you'd add here, Josh?

Josh Kennedy: I think that's awesome. I'm glad that you showed that coming in. It's cool to see it like transform, as you said, in real time, like right in front of us.

Yeah, I think I often say that like the beauty of the mapping tool is that it remembers your decisions. You tell it once and you don't have to worry about seeing those relics from the past in your next project.

I often also refer to it as like an immune system, right? We usually take people through like a process of cleaning their template, their container files that they have, maybe like previous projects that people go to often for content, right? We can mine a lot of that knowledge, build up this immune system.

So a little bit of a lift up front working with our team to do that efficiently, but going forward it saves, you know, just immense amounts of time and clean up and keeping menus clean. That's it's a really cool part of the toolkit.

Parley Burnett: Yes. And this is all captured in the data as well. We won't get into that side of it as much the data on this, but fully transparent. It's going to report back to you what it's been converting, how often.

So it's really cool at the end of like a month or a year to be able to come back to leadership and say, yeah, it's actually cleaned up this many like millions of properties literally, and this many duplicated families and all this stuff that is easily tied to it like a work effort, like to clean that stuff up manually would have taken a ton of time.

Cool. I'm gonna pass it over to you, Josh, for project configurations. Stop sharing.

Josh Kennedy: I'll steal the screen, I will say.

Yeah, to just kind of talking about mappings for us a second more. Two kind of common use cases I see firms come to us with is like they're changing text types, right? And sometimes it's like forced because they're moving to ACC and doesn't allow these certain text types. I've heard that multiple times.

Another one would be that all that mapping and being able to scan for duplication, map one to another that works for like shared parameters as well. It's like just yesterday I was on the phone with the firm and we were talking about it with them for the first time and I kind of walked through this example and we looked into their container file, and sure enough.

A dozen different length parameters, all there with just different capitalizations and some even spelled exactly the same, but obviously a different GUID's and create these rules and make sure that things are scheduling correctly going forward.

Parley Burnett:Mhm.

Josh Kennedy: Yeah, thanks for walking through mapping configurations. I'll talk about project configurations.

I'll start with some examples of how I've seen firms use this in a moment, but I will say that this part of the tool is it's also really expansive. You know the mappings and the work sets, which Parley will talk about in a few minutes.

Are really admin tools like automations that you build in. The users don't really interact with the mappings or the work set tools all that much. Project configurations is where you can control things that your users might interact with.

I often describe this part of the tool is really about like risk mitigation, reducing the amount of risk in your projects, wrong things from getting deleted, moved, things like that. I'll get some more examples in a minute and just avoiding those setbacks altogether.

So a couple examples that I've heard more recently would be one that was on the phone with the firm a couple of weeks ago and they're in a trial. They're kind of trying to get approval for this. So they like see the vision of having Guardian, but they unfortunately don't have it quite yet today, so maybe a little bit of a venting session for them.

And they were talking about how somebody had just deleted a bunch of match lines in one of their projects and how they the person I was talking to, one of their like BIM leads, had to spend, you know, their time doing a bunch of rework because someone had deleted something, right? The work was already done, it shouldn’t have happened in the 1st place.

And then I think a lot of their frustration came from like, of course they shouldn't have to be doing that, but they also had to take the time to figure out who did it and then go and have a conversation with that person. And then they kind of ended our conversation or that part of it by saying like, well, it could happen again tomorrow, so we'll see.

So kind of felt their pain type. Things like that are the type of things that we help cover here.

Another example would be, you know, I've multiple times unfortunately been on the phone with a firm where somebody had moved like a link or a shell, something in the background that that shouldn't have been moved.

And of course, it's worse when it's like a few inches that it's off rather than like several feet, right? It kind of it's easier to notice when it's moved kind of more drastically. But yeah, by having something moved, you know, just nudged a couple inches and this firm I was talking to, you know, they didn't realize for two days.

So they had their whole project team and their modelling on top of kind of the wrong location for two days. And so they had a big kind of dilemma of like, do we actually just use all this work from these two days or do we just erase these two days of work and go back to an older version of the file?

So those are the things we get ahead of here. In a nutshell, project configurations is really managed through these two tabs here. You'll notice you can on the left side build out different configurations for different project needs.

So maybe another example like a client that we work with, one of their clients is an airport authority and that airport authority doesn't allow for any modelling in place or any hiding of elements and views.

And so what they did is they created a client standard that prevents the ability for their users to do those things so they can guarantee the client that it's not going to happen and they can kind of sleep easy knowing that those things are happening in their models when they're not there.

But this is all really managed from these first two tabs, the majority of it at least. User Commands is a long list of kind of curated commands that a lot of firms like to get ahead of. And it's not just commands like Explode CAD and Import CAD we pick on often.

But you'll find things on there like location settings, you know, rotate a project, the manage tab. Really the idea here is that with Guardian out-of-the-box we monitor how often these things are happening. We'll showcase that in the data in a few minutes here.

But for those things that you want to start getting ahead of, you can kind of promote that to a guide or even a prevent. So guide means the user would see a message, but they  would be offered some best practices and we have starter messages in here that you can use.

You can use them out-of-the-box. You can make them your own, but we've tried to make it really easy to get this up and running. We have our mascot Peanut in here that you can start with too, but we've seen firms like the Grimshaw case study I put in the chat a few minutes ago, right?

They had some their  own AI caricatures. We see firms use memes, right? All different ways to like break the ice and make this kind of a fun learning experience, not just like a slap on the hand or an annoying reminder.

But really, the two main types of data that I've seen or information that I see in here would be the right way to do something. In this case, here's how to link CAD instead of import.

And then the other piece would be why it matters. That's really what seems to be lacking for us new hires, people coming from a different firm, right? Here's why we need to do it this way, whether it's just best practice for Revit or it's this client specific need.

But links you can throw in here. I have quick links to videos or training resources.

The user commands list tends to be a little bit more black and white.

The custom interactions list is where you can get really granular and you'll see a lot of unique kind of protections. So that pin protection that I kind of gave an example of a while ago. If I came in here and wanted to pin this grid right, Guardian's going to ask me because I'm an admin, do I want to allow or warn users when they attempt to unpin?

And so I can customize the protection specific to this grid. I can customize the message as well and just say something like.

Please don't move.

I can hit OK and now I can rest assured that grid is not going to move again on accident because if somebody stumbles across it, they would actually need a password because I've set this to prevent in order to continue.

So really all about like promoting a conversation right for certain critical things like moving a base point, mirroring links, right? Doors, specialty equipment, right?

Whatever it is that's going to be specific to your firm and your projects, there's going to be some critical things that you just can't afford to have happen. And so we see firms kind of promoting like you should be reaching out to a project lead if you're going to do these critical things.

But jumping back into project configurations for just a moment, there's a long list here. I of course won't have time to go through all of these today, but some of the common ones that we see would be the pin protection. These with the gear icon like type properties and modifying view templates tends to be popular.

Other things like mirroring, grouping, copying, right? We understand like some things are OK, you know, if they're grouped, but some firms don't want model groups being grouped, right? We don't want in place families being copied around a project. So we ship this with a lot of these defaults built in.

All set to monitor. We try and get you some quality data to understand how often these things that a lot of firms care about are happening already at your firm. But then you can come in here and completely customize these rules as you'd like. As you can see, this is kind of where you can work with us. If you're familiar with, of course, working in Revit, this probably looks familiar to you already.

You can use different conditions to have these triggers hit and get very tailored training or guidance in the moment.

Parley, anything you'd add on project configurations?

Parley Burnett: I'm glad you highlighted some of those, Josh, especially how customizable the rules are. One of my favorites is the loading family rules.

And then at the bottom, the sync traffic control, of course. But we talk with a lot of firms who really have invested a lot in their libraries and getting their users to kind of be mindful of that as a primary resource.

And Internet being secondary, it's a challenge for them to kind of build those habits in. So you can have rules here that look at where the families are being loaded from, their file size, their categories, and kind of customize a message system based on different things.

It can go a long way towards better content in your models.

Josh Kennedy: Yeah, those are some popular ones.

Parley Burnett: Yeah.

We're going to talk about the sync traffic control? Quickly, I guess.

Josh Kennedy: Sure, yeah, I can. It is a really popular feature. Some, some definitely few firms, I'd say probably every month that come to us for this feature alone.

Yeah, Sync traffic control in a nutshell is really a smart queuing system. It works with local files. It also works on cloud based files and the idea here is that you know if whether it's just me and Parley in the model working or we work with teams that have 30 engineers in the same model and they're all trying to sync all throughout the day to get a deadline accomplished so.

If I run into Parley, Parley's already syncing and I hit sync, it's just gonna tell me Parley's already syncing. Josh, go ahead and continue working. We've added you to the queue. We'll notify you when it's your turn and it's that simple.

People can sync when they want, but Guardian's there to protect the conflicts from happening, which allows not only, you know, in that hypothetical would then now me and Parley are both sitting there not working waiting for Revit to figure it out, but there's opportunities for corruption and crashing, and it's taking Parley longer to sync because Revit's trying to sort it out.

So Guardian just avoids all that. And if me and Parley and our other colleague Jake all wanted to go to lunch together too. You know, this all operates based on like we could all hit sync at the same exact time and just walk away from our desks and Guardian will sync us one after another without us even having to be at our desk.

So yeah, really robust tool. If you have large projects with large teams working on the files all at one time, you know anything from 3, 4, 5 or more. This tends to be a really popular and easy win. People turn it on right away.

Parley Burnett: Thank you, Josh. Maybe just one more thing, if you don't mind. So looking at that list, it's pretty extensive. It's pretty obvious there's a lot of power here in Guardian. Would you, would you share kind of like how firms typically grow into this?

Josh Kennedy: Yeah, yeah. I saw Jake's comment here. He's getting on a plane coming from North Carolina to get lunch with us it looks like.

Yeah, as far as how firms grow into this, you know, I kinda talked a little bit about this, I think in the initial slide portion.

What I see often is, you know, usually when I'm working with firms, a lot of my conversations are happening kind of as they're evaluating the tool and they come with ideas, right? They're seeing these things and we're able to quickly identify 10, maybe 15 things like things everyone can agree on, right?

Yeah, we can't be copying links around the project, right? I've seen that as well. Like some firm I was working with a couple months ago, it's taken 45 minutes to open a file because somebody has copied a bunch of links around. So it's like, OK, well, let's make sure that doesn't happen ever again.

So there's usually like 10-15 things that firms will start with. A lot of those might be on the custom interactions list. You might be able to leverage our defaults to kind of get some of those ideas flowing, but the user commands list is also a great place.

You know, I pick on Explode CAD and Import CAD because they're very commonly turned on right away. OK, let's  eliminate those. Let's get those off our plate going forward.

So yeah, short answer is usually I see firms in the project configurations start with kind of a short list. Hey, this is great. If we can get ahead of these things and never see them again or not have to worry about them, that's awesome.

And then usually we revisit, you know, throughout onboarding and as we continue to meet, you know, new features get added to this list a couple times a year too, so.

Keep growing into Guardian.

I'll pass it back to you to talk through worksets Parley and just a quick time check. I think we're trying to keep this to an hour. We've got about 15 minutes to talk about worksets and data.

Parley Burnett: Yes.

I'll probably go quick on this one, but I'm glad you mentioned that because you know I, one more point on the rolling out and implementation side.

You know I think a common thing we see firms do is start with those features that are pretty like relatable to the users, things that they appreciate, things that they see being addressed, that they've struggled with in the past.

And you know, there's things that we've talked about with the mappings, right? No longer seeing the duplicated families is a big one that a number of firms I've talked with really their users appreciate that. It's actually kind of a good segway to the workset configuration, workset manager part of Guardian, so I'll just jump right into that because it is something that users really appreciate.

Admins  and users both really appreciate this because what it does is allows you to essentially manage the workset system of the project in a more automated way. And when I say that there's really 2 kind of situations we find ourselves in when we talk with other firms that are looking at Guardian.

We often hear Josh and I will hear like, well, we just kind of gave up on worksets, right? Too hard, too hard to manage, right?

And when you kind of get into those stories, you, you hear about people who had kind of almost had to be a dedicated resource, opening up files at certain milestones and making sure everything is on the right workset and people just kind of wear out on that, right.

So that's really kind of the big one we people will like kind of go back and forth between like these strategies and it's just really hard to manage.

So what Guardian allows you to do is kind of create again different configurations. You might have different project needs, you might have that airport authority who's kind of actually prescribing specific workset names. We've seen that.

And so you can build out those lists for each configuration. And what that does is allows you to build out rules for those worksets that then automatically assign those elements as drawn to the right workset.

But it also even can go further than that when you have that list built out and you enable worksharing. This file is basically a blank copy from our template and you go to collaborate.

It's actually going to prompt the user to choose that workset set and then write the worksets at that time so we can add from here. I don't have any created yet, so I'll just choose one from example.

Now it's just writing very quickly that list of worksets into the model, and you'll also notice that I do not have a shared levels and grids workset in here. Guardian actually took care of the renaming of that for us.

Um, if I come back to this.

And look at levels and grids. We have two rules here that are very basic. Grids and levels, and with these boxes checked, it's gonna automatically put levels and grids on the on that workset.

And I'll show you that here in a second. The other common use for this is like Revit links, right? And you know that this is a big one because if you have a Revit link/workset strategy you can really unlock a lot of like great performance gains, especially on larger models because you can open with only specified worksets chosen right?

So you don't have to load all of the links at once when opening. It's a huge win. A lot of firms still have a hard time with it because those links get put on the wrong worksets very often.

So if you do nothing more than just have a couple of rules for levels and grids and Revit links, like that's a big, big part of your challenge, right?

So click OK there and then just go ahead and draw a grid. Turns out we have a little bit of guidance on creating grid etiquette.

We'll do that and now this is on levels and grids, even though my active work set is set to default.

So I hope that kind of unlocks some ideas for how you could use this. We work with a lot of like fabricators and we support the fabrication content and different things like that already. So very robust set of tools that you can use.

Just looking at the time, I think we'll go back to you, Josh to cover the data, unless you have something else to add there.

Josh Kennedy: Sure.

No, I just, I would just add that I know because I get to share this and tell firms about it for the first time every single day. And I know that I see a lot of smiles when I get to tell people about this particular tool.

I get a lot of people say like asking me to repeat it like it's kind of in disbelief like wait it can do what? So yeah, automatically place some things on the right workset regardless of the active workset. It's awesome.

So it's definitely a crowd favorite and it tends to be a crowd favorite against the general users as well, right?

From what I hear from firms, it's not just new users, it's BIM leads, it's project leads that forget to change their workset and get frustrated after working for an hour. So it's yeah, like I said, it's a crowd pleaser.

I often have firms tell me they're going to lead with it when it comes to implementation. Right. We might wanna prevent, you know, things from being unpinned and deleted and things, but we also wanna kind of give our team some automations and worksets tends to be a really popular one.

But with that, I'll steal the screen from you one last time here, Parley. I'll talk a little bit about the data.

Yeah, the last, uh, kind of few minutes here. I wanted to highlight a different side of what we do.

This whole time of course we've been talking about the in Revit tools, which really our mission is to help you be proactive and get ahead of things before they show up in the data or so that you have clean, you know, data and healthy models to report on.

But a nice companion to that of course is having the insights to be able to know which need to get ahead of and which models might warrant some attention? Which users could use some additional training? What you might training session next training session might be on?

So I won't have time to go through every single page in this dashboard, but just a little bit about it. We provide you a template. It's just a Power BI file. You don't need a paid version of Power BI to leverage it. Just download our template and then within the add in we provide you with credentials to your data.

So we host a SQL database for you. You don't have to do any type of infrastructure to set up any of your own databases or anything like that. We give you the credentials, you just plug them into the template. And so you know, day one or within a few days you'd have a report that looks just like this.

That being said, you can customize it. And we've worked with a lot of firms to customize the pages that are here, the tables, and the types of data that are included. So if you have ideas on other things that you'd like to use in the future or see in the future, we're all ears.

But to cover a couple of the pages, this projects page tends to be a really popular kind of starting point. It's a great place to see like where people are working on projects from, what year version all your active projects are in, and down below what people are working on today.

So you can sort by things like last saved date, but I commonly see firms coming in here and looking for files that are getting too large, right? Sorting by file size or commonly, very commonly sorting by warnings. Starting to get ahead of you know which projects are having too many warnings.

And then as far as kind of some other performance data goes, we track like time to open and time to sync. That's across all users working in the project.

Now if you see something that jumps out on this page, a next kind of step might be to jump into the project overview depending on what caught your eye.

Up at the top we've got filters here that they do stick from page to page. That makes it really easy to jump around, but you can filter down to a project group or a specific model.

Two of the most popular data points I see firms looking at are Revit version and Desktop Connector, right? Seems that there's a lack of visibility, generally speaking, in the industry in terms of making sure people are on the right versions. It's really hard, right? You ask IT. IT says they deployed something. They think they did it successfully a lot of times.

But sometimes things get lost in translation, so having the ability to see what versions people are working on, especially if they're on the same project, tends to be really popular.

Down below you've got the users at a glance, so you can see the individual users who are working in a specific project, for example.

I've seen firms use this for training purposes, right? Maybe why is someone generating 10 times more warnings than the rest of the team?

If someone reaches out to you saying it's taking 15-16 minutes to open the project, right? I've seen firms come here and first thing, I just want to make sure it's not taking everyone that long, right? Let's try and isolate this problem, see if it's maybe a Wi-Fi, a hardware issue, which might be the case here.

Or similarly, if someone's saying it's taking me 7 minutes to sync the file a lot longer than it did last week, right? First thing you might want to check to see if it's taking everyone else that long.

And actually right next to that, you might have a good kind of clue right there. Well, you're only syncing the file every six hours, so maybe that's the reason why it's taking you a few extra minutes compared to everybody else.

So we track a lot of this type of information. We track other session data and crash data that firms tend to use kind of out of the gate, being able to see, you know, who's leaving the model open for several days or over the weekend.

Working with a firm a couple of weeks ago, they use the token system, so they're spending, their a large firm, and they're spending a couple $1,000,000 a year on tokens and we were able to find with them that there's a lot of people that have sessions lasting longer than 8 hours. And for those sessions lasting longer than 8 hours, only 10% of the total time is active time. That's something we track here as well.

So trying to help them save some money on their tokens, but quite a bit of kind of wiggle room there in order to in terms of saving a few dollars and just having people close the files before they head out for the weekend.

But crash reporting is also here, so you can see how often people are crashing.

People are crashing more often than they're telling you about. Also be really helpful in getting to the bottom of kind of what happened right before there was a crash and finding some commonalities there.

The sync data also has crash information. This will show you if crashes are happening during the sync process specifically. Also some fun heat maps showing you when people are working most and syncing the files.

And maybe one of the last things that I'll wrap up with here in terms of data would be the highlights page is kind of a select few of the overall protections that we capture out-of-the-box and we see a lot of firms wanting to get ahead of right away.

So I see firms look at this early on, start to see how often people are importing CAD modeling in place and how often sync conflicts are happening and when you start using Guardian just in a monitor mode, those are all identified by these red numbers here.

And then when you start to turn on protections, these larger black numbers would start to populate. So this sync with central conflicts is telling the story that there's actually been no conflicts in the past five months because this firm has had the sync conflict prevention turned on, so they've actually avoided about 4200 conflicts in the past five months.

And then that kind of naturally jumps to the user commands, sorry, commands all page. So just kind of expanding the view. So from those kind of 12 or so, just overall one of the most popularly used commands, who's executing on these commands?

Hide elements in view is a common example. It's often top five most used command and every single time without a doubt there are like 3 users who are doing 90% of all of the hiding and it's usually like 2D categories, annotations, it's again, out-of-the-box, we're just capturing things that most firms try to avoid hiding.

So it becomes really clear that you can have a quick conversation with a few people. You don't need to host your next training on hiding elements in view, because that would probably be a waste of, you know, 95% of the team's time.

But you can find what else you know is on here that maybe the larger team is struggling with or could use some guidance on.

How about Parley? Curious if you'd add anything as we kinda shift to maybe some Q&A and close out.

Parley Burnett: I think we should do that. Just want to share that at the bottom there's those warning pages too. So there's a lot of warning data here as well that you can drill into, just like the hiding.

That's same thing, you know, inevitably it's 10% of the users creating most of the warnings, right? So I think that's something unique about Guardian is we associate not only just what the warnings are, but we associate that with who and when to help you do your training better.

Josh Kennedy: Yeah, it's a good point. The warnings pages do tend to be popular. We could talk for a while about the different ways we track and how we can prevent certain warnings, which is a really cool new feature we rolled out.

Parley Burnett: We can prevent warnings, yeah.

Josh Kennedy: I did wanna show one last page and I'll drop it in the chat before we close here. We do have a really fun ROI calculator on our website. So if you know whether you're using Guardian today or you're testing it out today or you wanna trial it at some point in the future.

This calculator is where we've taken some averages across our client base. How often are people importing CAD sync conflicts? How often are those occurring? But this is all customizable, so if your firm is larger or smaller, you can come in here and customize this and input your own data.

Uh, using annual numbers to see how much you know Guardian can save you and what the return on investment really would be for your firm.

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