Hello listeners. This is the risky planner podcast. Thanks for tuning in. Hey, Albert, how you doing? Hey, Nate, doing all right. How are you? As always, it's been a minute, yeah, like we've both been really busy on stuff we have to connect. It is always, always very good. Yeah, it's fun to build this, I know, jumping ahead a little bit, but it's fun to build this outline. It's really interesting. And I'm gonna nerd out and, you know, just read in some of the background material getting prepped. It's really interesting. Yeah, it is. If you like data, if you like, like, cool technology, like, this is the episode for you, not that the other ones weren't also that. But you know, hey, yes, this one, especially this one, especially so when I was preparing for this, knowing that we were going to talk about twins, sure, there's this thing like, every Nate I have ever met, every time they introduce themselves as Nate, people say Dave, to clarify, every Nate I have ever met has confirmed that this happens to them. I have never met a Nate that did not get Dave as well. How do you get from Nate today? I have no idea, but it's like a conspiracy theory. You're blowing my mind here, like this can't be true, like you're saying. And I am asking today, when you Yeah, when you introduce yourselves, introduce yourself, and the person responds to clarify your name. Do they say Dave? And every Nate I've ever met says, yes, that's absurd. That's insanity. It is absurd. It makes me question reality, that that is the matrix. Hickman, do you think that Nate's and Dave's are frequently twin names, like, how many Nates who have a twin? You know, is there twin named Dave? I don't know if I've ever met a Nate that has a twin, but you have met Nate who are ostensibly named Dave, just that I have, that I have, and it's my version of Alfred for Albert. People really want to call me Alfred, really, which was, Oh, yeah. So that problem go, that's Alberto. People who actually know me well might call me Alberto, and also people who don't know me very well, but are Italian or Spanish. That also happens. But no. The the Alfred thing was, it really took off when the Christopher Nolan Batman movies became a thing, because, like, Alfred was on the tip of everyone's tongue again, thanks to Michael Caine and I guess Christopher Nolan, but yeah, so I got to be Alfred for a few years there, but I look like a Dave. Let's jump into it, because I think we've kept people waiting long enough we're going to talk about digital twins. We're going to talk about BIM, digital twins, right? We are. I think, can you before we get into it? I just want you to a lot of our audience has heard the term. I think can you just sort of level set with us? What is it? You know, what's what is it, BIM, and what is a digital twin? Yeah. Like, just, define some key terms before we get Yeah, you bet. I mean, it's worth mentioning also that we're going to put both of those terms in the episode title, and they do mean different things, but it's kind of a it's at a certain point, it's a distinction without a difference. And we're also going to talk about convergent technologies, and that's part of the reason why it's like all this stuff is kind of coming together. But anyway, so what is, what is BIM? But we've talked about BIM a little bit on previous episodes, and I've defined it there. But you know, for the benefit of this episode, building information modeling or Building Information Management, depending on who you talk to, that can mean, and does mean a very wide swath of different technologies that all kind of serve a related function of storing information about a built asset. The traditional use case for Building Information Modeling is for operating and maintaining an existing building. So you might you're building information management system might have a stack of as built drawings from the project that are all like tied to say, for example, like the equipment list for the project. And by the way, when I say project, I'm using project to mean the built asset itself, like the thing that was constructed. The upshot is that you can take a lot of different kinds of information about a building and sort of jam together in a way that makes all that information more usable. So I get digital or Yeah, are we talking about digital? Are we talking about, like, something these days? Definitely. I mean, there's, there's no efficient way to maintain, especially for a new building, all that information in, you know, traditional dead leaves format. But of course, that's how it was done. That's how it was sometimes built. That could literally mean. Anything Building Information Management could mean that you're managing any kind of information about a building that often includes, usually includes a set of drawings, usually includes some information about what's in those drawings, like the equipment list, the major valves and pipes and that sort of thing where people are meant to go, where people are not meant to go, like, yeah, exactly like cabling, traceways and that sort of thing in BIM speak, you can have different levels or maturity levels of BIM that are described in dimensions. And for two dimensions and three dimensions, they mean just what you think they do. Like those drawings that I mentioned are in two dimensions for a 2d BIM model, three dimensions for a 3d BIM model. But where it gets really interesting is that you get four, five and 60 BIM as well. I mean, we talked about Christopher Nolan, right, like, back before in the opening. I mean, here we are talking about 40 5d 60. Yeah. We're 40, yeah, 40 Inception BIM, yeah, that's what I was. Yeah. I'm three dreams deep. I don't know anyway, that's not the point. The point is that with a 4d BIM model, you're taking all that 3d information, like that 3d model of of, say, of a building, and attaching it to a schedule. So then you can start to see the building come together. So like, you tie particular milestones or even or even schedule activities to the elements in the design package, the 3d design package that are coming up as part of that activity. So that's, that's your 40 model. So we're not, we don't call that a tesseract. How does the digital twin? So you've talked about BIM. How does the digital twin differ from BIM? BIM sounds like a catch all. Sounds like a lot of things. What is the digital twin? Know? So if you are building a 4d BID model, all that means is that you have a 3d model that now progresses through time. So that that could mean that your 3d model is very complete, or it could mean that it is just enough to get you the result that you're looking for, like, say, for example, if you're if you're responsible for building the core and shell of a new apartment complex. You may not model the interiors of the building. You may only model the structural, mechanical, electrical, plumbing, curtain wall, facade, like Groundworks, like the stuff that would matter to the general building contractor. They might mate all those to their construction schedule in order to achieve some savings. And there are savings to be achieved there, but that's just BIM. So the the BIM model might get handed over to an Operations and Maintenance Group that chooses to flesh out all that 3d you know, construction data, right with the full blown interiors package, like placing chairs in places and even you might go as detailed as putting, like, the bone stock spec decorations in place. Okay, to show like that there's a painting here. Or we're going to have, like, there's a heating register over there, so we can't put a sofa, you know, that kind of thing. So they'll, they'll build the 3d model out to a degree of detail and precision that you actually have created a literal digital twin of the physical object in a virtual environment, so you can play with stuff. So ad BIM model that has a lot of detail, that's basically what a digital twin is. So it's all very interesting. Why are you interested in it? Well, where did that? Two reasons. I mean, one, you mentioned at the top that this is just a fun topic for geeking out on, because it's really kind of nuts to conceptualize. Like, it's really cool, it's really heady, and like, we live in an era where everything is as US President Donald Trump would say it's all computers. Exactly what's going on the podcast. Quote board, it's all computer. It's all computer. I love it, and it is all computer. It truly is every day. It's like, you know, we talked about AI in another episode, and its impact on just project management, capital projects, the it's moving at light speed, right? Like every day, every week. I mean, it's changing. That's it constant. That's it right. So that's reason one right? As a Project Professional, I need to keep abreast of the developments in this kind of, you know, technological space, and make sure that when I'm bringing advice to my clients, which is, you know, what I'm paid for, ostensibly, is to provide good advice. It needs to be not just good, but also timely. So we live in an era where, you know, this kind of technology, the digital twin and BIM technology, is very much on the upswing. And this is the second reason why. Is like I recently ran across some some research that indicates that the digital twin market is growing significantly faster, like almost twice as fast, when compared to the architectural engineering and construction market generally, really why is so? Why is that market? What's driving faster growth? Means adoption. Yeah. Albert, why are these technologies getting. Adopt it. Well, there's two big reasons. One is pressure from well, pressure is the wrong word, but incentives from governments and other kinds of pseudo governmental agencies that try to push for new technology adoption, either through tax credits or direct subsidy or that kind of thing. That's one reason. But the real reason is number two, which is that there are, there are actual benefits to doing this. I mean, it's been, it's long been true that if you could do a 3d model for your thing, then you probably should, because it's helpful for design development and clash detection and change control and things like that. So layering on more stuff to that 3d model is a logical progression that seems to have some pretty real benefits. So we'll get into some of the details about the benefits, I think, a little later. But the that's why the you know, they're starting to really take off. And it wouldn't surprise me too much if you know, well, the report I was referencing earlier has us spending, as a as a species, $155 billion on building digital twins in the year 2030 that's based on their projection from 2025 so it's pretty recent research, and that's a big number. I mean, considering that, you know, design probably costs, it certainly cost less than 10% on your average project, generally around five. So you split that up imagining that it's 5% of a whole bunch of different projects that's a lot of projects being covered by BIM documentation. Docaneishing company is all about optimizing, integrating, you know, connecting the front lines with what's happening with reporting, you know, scheduling all the data right, like we're optimizing. You know, people process technology and data. So my question is, you know, on a building, on a project like the carpenter and the superintendent, still need to get work done right, like they still need to do what they need to do every day. How do you make sure that an advanced system like you're talking about is actually useful for these frontline workers that are making the project happen? It's a really excellent question, because you can, I mean, if you've ever been on a construction site, then you've then you've found, either by accident or on purpose, their big book of drawings. These have a big flat pack, you know, extremely crudely bound set of large size drawings. You know, they'll be the size of your entire upper body, sitting on a on a podium somewhere, so that the construction superintendents and the trades people can go take a look at it and drive the work. And let me tell you, when you're printing on a piece of paper, it's hard to do that in 3d so the the answers to your question are two things like one, the new models and the new systems need to service existing means of work, right? Like, there are going to be places where the big book of drawings is still what they expect to see when they walk onto a job site. They're going to still want to have the big book of 2d because, like the plans, especially for, say, an interior construction build, and like commercial residential space, the plan view, the 2d view, is really useful. I mean, it's what you need, right? Like you're placing things at elevation, you get the elevation view. You're raising things within a rectangular space, you get the big rectangular plan view. It's not difficult to understand why that would be the primary tool for doing field design and construction management work. So in addition to being able to service those existing demands, you need to give new tools to the people so they can access those enhanced features. Because, you know, it's the reason why I say there's such a good question, is because the rubber meets the road on a construction project where the stuff is actually getting built. So if you want to realize cost savings, and especially if you want to realize schedule savings. You really have to start there. You have to think about how it's going to benefit, you know, those people doing the work and like the the the obvious answer to that, that has nothing to do with the people actually in the field, is that the information that you give them, regardless of the format you're giving them in, will theoretically be of a higher quality because it has been more battle tested, and that's really the purpose of building a digital twin in the first place. Is because if you build an actual twin of your building, then you've done the entire construction project. And if you did it for the purpose of figuring out in what ways the structure might fail or how it might be difficult to construct, then you have to do the whole thing in order to validate that the whole thing was doable. Do you know what I mean? Yep, if you do it digitally, you can do it at a fraction of the cost, and you can build incredibly complex versions of projects that have lots of levers you can pull and buttons you can press to change features about it, like test it for things like structural loading, you know, failure analyzes earthquake. But even for something as simple as like, what? Like, be able to get a couch up the stairs when it's built like that kind of stuff, it goes from the mega scale, like, will it survive a fire and the building next door all the way down to the is this going to be a pleasant place for tenants to move into and out of? Like, it's it covers the gamut at a fraction of the cost. And if you do all that work up front, then you will have completed a plan that is significantly more robust and thorough than if you were just doing it, you know, with with a 2d set of drawings. So even if all you ever provide to the people in the field is the traditional paper printouts of their construction schedule and paper printouts of their drawings, those two things will both be so much better again, in principle that the work they do will be, you know, consummately better as well. So, yeah, I get it. It's the really, it's about enabling everyone that's involved with the project on down. So when you are getting it done, I don't know, I'm saying that's the best version, no. I mean, you're saying the right, yeah. Like, because when you when it comes down to brass tacks, like, yeah, you can provide them with this power same old toys. Or, yeah, you can empower them with some of the new toys too. So like, even if the 2d drawings would be better, like, imagine if they had some way of accessing the full 3d model so they could look at things. Because, like, ceiling space gets very, very crowded. Like, anything overhead, if you look up any place, you're either going to see a flat surface, which is just covering up all the nonsense that's going on above it, or you're actually going to see the nonsense. And if you've seen the nonsense, you know, if you've been to like a trendy pizza restaurant with an open ceiling or whatever, there's all kinds of pipes and electrical and crap and lighting and whatnot that's all sharing the same vertical, yep. And let me tell you, a bunch of that stuff in that trendy pizza restaurant was probably somebody's nightmare for a few weeks, because they likely had drawings that showed wire running straight through HVAC equipment. I hope they got some of that pizza the data integration. So when you talk about this, and we talked about empowering frontline workers, empowering the team, powering superintendents. You answered my question about carpenter and superintendents? Sure. So now let's talk about put ourselves back in the shoes of the project manager. You know, the data integration for the digital twin is complex, you know? And one of the specialties that one of our specialties, is organizational change management, so ensuring that new tools don't gather dust, but they are applied and your maximizing value. How do you prevent a digital twin, the technology, from lying Valium, inexpensive, yeah, digital paperweight, so to speak. Yeah? No, the answer is exactly what you said, right? That needs to be a comprehensive cultural change that, you know, redefines how projects get planned, and that's the easiest place to start, because it's, it's something that can be done by Fiat. In other words, if you are a project director or project executive, and you want to allocate budget on your project to building a digital twin and five or 60 BIM models, which you didn't talk about, by the way, we should probably talk about what those are, if you want to allocate that money, and if you think you can justify it to your betters and get the funds appropriated thusly, then you then you get to decide that you're doing planning this way. So that's the easiest change to make, is just deciding that you're going to fund it, and like, you know, declaring from your ivory tower that you're that it's going to happen, but actually building workflows and processes around it that aren't saddled by the cruft of the old way of doing things is a real challenge, and probably requires a little bit of learning from mistakes to do right? So if your design organization, your design contractor, is accustomed to working in 2d space or in a more simplified 3d space, or that there's this is the other thing too. If you want to build a true digital twin, you have to model everything like a lot of stuff in in your average construction project doesn't actually get drawn or model. It gets field run. And that doesn't make sense, that mean field running is or, like, you know, it's basically doing the engine. It's building the plane while you fly it. So if you're out there on a construction site and you have detailed, comprehensive drawings for all, say the duct work goes, because duct work is big. So especially, like the ring main duct for a floor of an office building, it's going to be a pretty beefy piece of sheet metal, so it's going to take up a lot of space. It's cheap, it's easy to install, but it's large, so that means it has to be modeled. So when you model it, you're going to model it alongside other things that are kind of, you know, quote, unquote, immovable objects, things like the sprinkler piping. But you know what can be moved pretty much as much as it needs to be the electrical conduit, because electricity doesn't really care how many twistsy, bendy turns and things it has. So you would model things that absolutely must be straight or take up a lot of space, like your sprinkler piping and your ductwork, and then you wouldn't model things that you can just kind of. Spaghetti around it, right, right? Well, to do a digital twin properly, you do have to model those things. So here's the thing that's that sprinkler pipe I talked about. It needs to be long and straight as it can be for sprinkler pipe reasons, right? It needs to maintain a constant pressure, like when the sprinklers turn on. It actually needs to be the water should come out, you know, just spit ball in here. But it turns out that when you build pipes that are predominantly quite long and quite straight, you're cutting down on labor. You don't have to cut the pipe as frequently. You're cutting down on material cost, because elbows and T junctions and 40 fives and that sort of thing, they're more expensive than the pipe is. It cuts down on the headache associated to the next person who has to come in and field run something because, let's say you've got, you know, a new electrical conduit that goes in with 1590s to get around all of the duct work and stuff that's already in the way there. And then the next person comes and they have to install control wire for the, you know, the HVAC terminal units. Well, okay, so now, now, not only is there a duct and a sprinkler pipe in the way, there's also this spaghetti pipe, conduit that's carrying electrical and by the way, you as the the control systems person, you might have to then run your own conduit, because you didn't get to use the same conduit run as the electrician did, because none of it was planned in advance. So, you know, on the one hand, it feels cheaper, and it often is cheaper to just let people in the field just go do whatever works and not you think about it too hard. On the other hand, if you do do the planning in advance, you do it properly, you can actually save a lot of time and money. Yeah, and you know, it's death by 1000 cuts if you don't do that, right? Yeah, all those little, tiny decisions add up. So I do want to plug we just did a webinar about organizational change, management, cultural change, with regard to new technologies, with our colleague Omar code and I will, we will make sure that that link is in the show notes, but it's all about how to sort of start that process. So I just want to plug that real quick. The he talks a bit about managing change resistance in that webinar. He does, yeah, and I think that's also planned for a future webinar, because we're going to dive into a little bit more. There's a white paper that he published on change resistance that we'll also include in the show notes as well. So thanks for bringing that up. No, for sure, because, honestly, if there's, if there's one thing that could, that could sink a BIM implementation, you know, if it includes the full blown digital twin stuff and the creation of 3d models for electrical conduit and control system wiring and that sort of thing, a lot of people are going to push back against that because it feels inefficient to them, you know, naturally, like intuitively, they're inclined to believe that it's going to be less efficient, even if it isn't. So that's change resistance in a nutshell, and you're going to get a lot of that when you're building your first digital twin. Yeah, absolutely. Go back to what BIM like. We talked about 3d 2d and but you mentioned 5d right? Let's go back to that. Let's talk about what that is. Tell me what that is and why it's important. So by way of reminder, 2d traditional, you know, flat drawings, 3d is obviously adding that third dimension, 4d is meeting that up with your schedule. So four dimension, and it's changes over time. 5d is when you add in your cost information. So if you have your WBS set up properly, and which is also a service we provide, and you have your systems set up to consume that WBS like say, you've got your design documentation, your work packages are using the same WBS as your schedule and your cost breakdown, then you can take all those information and kind of smush them together into a consolidated view that doesn't just show your model changing over time, but how much it's going to cost over time. So you can predict spikes and effort, spikes in cost potential, gaps in funding, times when you'll need to do a little bit more to economize, like if your workforce isn't available. So basically, anything that would go into your cost estimate becomes surfaced as part of your schedule and alongside the design. So you can watch the whole thing evolve in accelerated time. That's cool. Really do it's very cool. Yeah? Like I've seen, if you look on LinkedIn, you're gonna see, like, animated GIFs of 5d bid models, you know, from time. I love those. I will simply stare at those for like, you know, longer than is warranted. I do appreciate that you pronounce GIF correctly, right? Yeah? Man, I don't the guy who invented gifs says their names GIFs, and he's wrong. Yeah, he's wrong. You heard it here first. He's absolutely, you definitely didn't hear it here first, but you did hear it here. Tell me about convergent technologies, like, what are they? With regard to the topic of this episode, convergent technology is a general term that. Means that a lot of different technologies are sort of pointing in the same direction we're trying to solve the same problems. So in the case of digital twins, an obvious example of a convergent technology would be virtual reality. So if you put on a virtual reality headset and you've got a digital twin model that can be read by whatever headset, you know, program you're using. You know, those maybe sound like the world's oldest man, but you get the idea. Then you can walk around your planned physical asset in virtual space and play with stuff. It's when you're taking me back to 2023 right? This is, this is all Metaverse, is? I mean, it is truly an application for this. So VR and digital, it totally is, makes sense. And like, I was in Dubai not too long ago for a mega project that includes an ultra luxury real estate development. And you bet they were going to use VR and a digital twin just to sell those, those those spaces to their, you know, ultra high end customers. They were going to use the the apple vision Pro, by the way. So, you know, Apple VR stuff is very cool, and it works extremely well. But it's hardly the only game in town like this. There's VR applications that are for desktop, you know, desktop application, yeah, yep. You know how to use Windows better with AR like Microsoft had a whole feature offering around that for a while. There's some that are specific for video gaming. There's some that are specific for architecture and engineering, where it's just for finding class detection and doing efficient routing and things like that. But they're all pointed in the same direction of put thing on face, walk around virtual environment. So that's a good simple example of what's meant by a convergent technology. But there's there's more, right? Yeah. Like, how do you build the digital twin? Well, you could pay jillions of people to sit in front of computers with mice on 2d screens attempting to interact with 3d models, and that's always going to be a less efficient exercise than having 2d screens to build 2d models. Or you can start on third base by capturing the space in real 3d using scanning technology like third base first. So what are you using? You gotta have capture. Well, I mean, this is we talk a little bit about design, one build, many as a as a concept. If you have a thing that you're trying to reproduce, or if you have something that you know, you know is a known good configuration, you can scan it and treat that as like a first draft of your design. There are other things that's useful for too. So even if you designed the whole thing on desktop or and you didn't have the advent of a 3d scan to start from. Once the thing starts to get built, you can still run a robot through there with a 3d scanning room on it, a robot. Yes, yeah, exactly. So some kind of it doesn't even have to be automated, like you can remote pilot a drone through there and just have it, you know, hang out and take 3d scans of an environment that's under construction to see how the In Progress version compares to the designed version. If there are any deviations, it can flag them automatically and let people know. And there are whole systems being built like software, systems to contain and compare all of this like all of these data, like the in progress, because used to be that when you're dealing with an asset that's under construction, you get some field markups during construction, but mostly what you get is the design documentation and then the as built. So here's what you gave us, and then here's what we did, being able to generate without hugely impacting the labor you know, that's actually on site, being able to generate that in real time as the project progresses, is hugely valuable, because you can detect changes early. You can detect deviations early. Like, oh no, you guys put that wall in the wrong place, right? We're going to have issues with fitting the material into this space, because that wall is a centimeter away from where it should be. And like, if you walk in by eye with a clipboard, you're likely not going to notice if the wall is off by a centimeter. So the choice is, do an expensive solution later, or do a cheap solution now. So that scanning stuff is a really powerful value add to, like, an in construction, an in flight asset. It's being, you know, that's good. Like, how do you it sounds great. All of this technology cool. How do you prevent, you know, all of these, you know, different pieces of technology and inputs and, you know, analyzes and whatnot from, you know, just kind of becoming a circus of cool shiny objects versus solving real problems, right? Like it's easy for us to talk about it, it should be, it should be tight and well controlled and well integrated. If you're doing digital twinning, and you're trying to make that up with like a four or five or even 6060, by the way, when you're doing 60 BIM, that brings in the operations and maintenance information. So in addition to. The project cost and schedule, you're now also seeing the like the maintenance schedules of things and planned replacements. You can use it to plan out like Capital Work for the next, you know, 10, 2050, years. So that adds a whole extra layer of power to but also adds a layer of complexity, because, like, the operational systems are probably going to be different from the project systems that were put in to build the thing in the first place. So it could very easily become a technology circus. You could wind up with things just kind of happening because they're cool, or because somebody got a pitch from a software company on the right day. So as with building things in general, the answer to this problem is that it has to be planned thoroughly. Yeah, it has to be thought through in its totality. Like you have to, you know, to quote, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, you have to begin with the end in mind, like, if you know that you want to do full blown 6d maintenance, scheduling, capital planning for the next 50 years. BIM with, you know, that's anchored on a digital twin. Then you then you really are starting on third base, because you know what kinds of systems you're going to have to select. You know that they're going to have to play nice in the sandbox with each other. That means looking after, say, an integrated solutions package like one from one of the larger companies in this space, like hexagon or Bentley, and they they can those reps can help guide you through what the what their packages might look like, but they're always going to be guiding you towards their own software. So it's helpful to have third party consultants who have experience and relationships with all of those contractors to help you build a composite system that's going to work well together satisfy all your needs and not bring a lot of extra, you know, capability that you don't plan to use along for the ride. Yeah? So the short, the short answer, which I know people will be grateful for eventually, is planning. You have to plan it right. Short answer and the easy answer, but short Yeah, it's the answer. It's an easy answer to say. It's a much less easy answer to to implement. That's right, how do you measure success with these implementations? Well, ultimately, the it's all about dollars and cents. Man, like, stuff's got to get cheaper, not more expensive. So if you take a construction project that was done the traditional way, the cheapest way, you know, for example, like the planning was done the cheapest way, and it, you know, hits its targets on time, on budget, it's difficult to make a case that it could have gone better. You know, if you had done the digital twin and done 5d BIM or whatever like, it would be difficult to make that case. Even if it were true, it would be difficult to make the case because the organization got what it wants. So success has to boil down to proving in advance, at least making a convincing case that you can really save some money by doing it this way, because the planning will be more expensive. That's the, you know, the dirty little secret here, like, yeah, it's, it's complicated and difficult, time consuming, challenging and expensive to do change control with 2d drawings. For example, if you're trying to do change control in a 3d space using 2d drawings, like you're, you've, you know, it's two totally dissimilar languages trying to speak to each other. It's difficult to get that right. And change control is traditionally one of the biggest drains on, you know, constructions when they're in execution. So the number one thing you can say is, like success for me, looks like cutting change in half or less. Yep, right, just doing way, way fewer changes. Yeah, that's so good. Albert, what separates companies that succeed with digital twins from those who fail? I think it boils down to the planning element I was talking about before. You really have to be devoted to doing a fulsome plan. So I've seen projects that were supposed to have 4d BIM, like a full blown 4d BIM implementation get scaled back to doing, okay, well, we'll do a 3d BIM, and then take the BIM part out of it. We're just gonna do 3d drawings and then take it out more because, okay, we're gonna do 3d models for certain things, you know. So the scaling it back, like basically handicapping your own success, is how you can fail. Why? Because it looks cheaper, like your average, your average decision maker on your average project, remember, remembering, by the way, that your average project fails, okay, like, over half of projects fail in some way. They don't meet their targets for cost or schedule, or they don't meet their objectives. They're not the change isn't accepted by the organization. Something will cause it to fail over half the time. That's being generous. It's probably closer to 70 or 80% projects fail in some way. So that means that your average project leader, like, meaning, like an executive or a director or something, is probably going to make a bad decision or two. Bad decision or two somewhere along the lines. Otherwise, why are the projects failing all the time? One of the classic Hallmark bad decisions that project executives love to make is they would rather save $1 today than $2 tomorrow. So if you're building 3d models, that takes more effort than building 2d models. Is today, yep, saves you effort down the road when it comes time to do change control, or better yet, avoid change control. But avoidance is also hard to measure. So if you go through a whole project and there was no change, how can you prove why there was no change? Right? So there's, there's some degree of buy in that has to happen, and that's why I was describing this earlier as like, being done by Fiat from the ivory tower. Yeah, you need the bottom up change control piece, like you need the OCM, the culture change. You need all that stuff to be driven through to the but if the folks that are actually doing the work are all the way bought in, and management isn't, then you're going to wind up with, you know, death by 1000 cuts, right? So the companies that are succeeding with digital twins like tell us about a couple projects that we found. When I was doing research for this, I found there was a, there's pretty sharp divide between people who who specifically hang their success on a digital twin, versus versus those who are hanging their success on a BIM implementation. Okay, so like the digital twin part is often about predictability and maintainability and things like that. So some pretty good examples of that. I also found some pretty wild examples, which we'll get into. But some pretty good examples of that are things like, Volvo has a plant in a town I can't pronounce, umea, I think is what it's called. So the the Volvo group cab plant and umea has a full blown digital twin that they use to optimize production processes and shorten lead times. So they've got a whole page of really neat information about that plant and what they're using it for. Rolls. Royce uses digital twins of their jet engines to predict failure points, improve predictive maintenance programs, and, again, shorten lead times for constructing the things in the first place. There's a whole digital twin industry report put together by the Hexagon Group. So hexagon is the one of the software companies I mentioned earlier. They're big in digital twins. They own like a geo systems. So like a geo systems does GIS and mapping stuff. They also make those fancy cameras from the 60s that everybody was in love with for a while there. Same like they're now mounting LIDAR pods on, you know, Boston dogs. Yeah, that's another episode. It's pretty cool. Yeah, crazy robot dogs call the episode. But yeah, there's that. There's, there's lots of anecdotal evidence that shifting over to BIM, lots of anecdotal evidence that BIM is saving money on projects. Like I said before, it's difficult to measure, like, it's difficult to do a root cause analysis on something that didn't happen, right, right? So avoiding change is often an anecdotal story. Like, Well, we did a BIM implementation and we saved 30% on cost versus our nearest neighbor project. You get a lot of that. There's a lot of anecdotal evidence that you're saving 30 to 50% on cost. I found a research paper that said the most tangible benefits that it was a survey paper. So it went out and looked at a whole bunch of different projects. The most tangible benefits were around communication, of design decisions, evaluating change, right? So I can see how that would be a good way of actually accessing that? Well, it's hard to measure the intangible of what didn't happen. You can measure the quality of communication that goes around the design decisions, and it's much, much higher in projects that have implemented at least a 4d BIM model. So rolls, Royce, Volvo, they're doing stuff with digital twins, like what's some pretty wild, you know, adoption stories, case studies that you found? Yeah. I mean, you can imagine this kind of growing down the rabbit hole. Yeah, there's definitely a rabbit hole. Let me take it down, for sure. There is so the, the most fun one I found when I was, when I was looking into this is there is a digital twin of Singapore, of Singapore, as in the country Singapore? Yes, it's called virtual Singapore. It was completed in 2022 it is a full blown 3d model with a lot of information for like city planners and also its surface to tourists in some limited capacity. It's a model of their city, and they keep it updated. They treat it as a true digital twin for, yeah, like, and is this publicly accessible? Is this like, I imagine? No, I bet if you went looking for it, you could get because there is, there are, like, little interfaces you can find where, where you can get at parts of it. And there's lots of videos and things of it functioning, but it wasn't able to find, like, a download the files here, kind of links? Yes, that would 33 petabytes later. Yeah, exactly. I can't imagine how big it must be. It's little you get on BitTorrent a couple weeks later, you've got virtual Singapore and a ton of viruses, yep, and a ton of viruses. Yeah, for sure, Australia is working on a very similar project. They're going to do a digital twin of the City of Victoria. So really, they're $37 million deep on that one at this point. So I do have big chunks of it built. Well, that's the thing. Like it kind of isn't because you're a whole city planning department, exactly. In you? No, no. And this is what I was saying earlier, like, it's really hard to hang a specific benefit on something like this. So you were kind of all, you know, nobody wants to be first to market for anything, right, right? It's dangerous to be first to market. You're taking all the risk and hoping that you realize all the benefits of being like a market leader. But when public entities like the government of Singapore or the government of Victoria put their neck out there basically, and say, we're going to try this, the rest of us need to be paying attention to see how it goes. Right? You know, there's going to be a little bit of advertising going on here, a little bit of marketing, right about, like, oh, yeah, of course, it's going well, it's been an amazing boon. It's doing this, it's doing that. But you really need to see it shake out in the numbers, like, if, in 20 years time, the cost of, I don't know, doing, developing a new neighborhood, yeah, exactly. My new road did that in terms of, like, how, what, is the livability, you know, like, there's some average. What is the how has it changed? Average commute times? How is the community happy? Are they not happy? Like, you can measure these things that are loosely correlated to, you know, projects that drew their data from those digital twins. Yeah, you can. And there's, there's a lot of opportunity for further research in those, those big, publicly funded projects along these lines. It's just, it's, it's very cool. But it's also really hard to like, point out and say, oh, yeah, that one was successful. Yeah, was virtual Singapore a success. Like, I don't know, I hope so. It's really cool. Like it, you know, but it'll be, it's, a long term question with a short term answer. What advice would you give to a project manager who's considering digital twins for the first time with their project? Well, I would say the digital twin conversation is probably a hard one to have with somebody who's looking to fund a project, because trying to convince them that they should model everything, it might be something you have to work up to. And there's also a lot more and better case study examples about the benefits of BIM versus the benefits of digital twinning. So you start them with the 3d BIM Concept, all right, that we can do clash detection. We can do a more efficient routing for spaghetti, pipe and conduit. We can do a better job of controlling change down the road by making sure that we've actually thought through the sequencing. So when you start layering the sequencing into that conversation, that gets you to 4d so and from there, a lot of large construction projects will integrate their cost and schedule anyway in some way, which means that if you're already integrating your 3d design package with the schedule, you may as well bring cost in for the ride, and that's 5d and there's nothing stopping you once you've got a 5d model setup from tacking on those 6d maintenance elements later. So have the conversation. You know, throw your research on the table. Say, like, what planning you $1 spent in planning is worth $1.50 in construction. All right. So you got to stick to your guns on this being a planning tool that has real, tangible benefits to change control, that change control is the most expensive thing that happens, especially if it's during execution. So we can do less of that and make more money at the end of it. You know, point to all the case studies say BIM is the way to go, and once you've got a BIM package approved, you can start talking about, well, if we build our BIM package out into a full blown digital twin and layer on some of the maintenance and upkeep elements to it, not only are we saving money for the two or three years while the thing's being built, this whole organization can save money for the next 50 years while the thing's being operated. And that's a powerful statement, if you can make it convincingly. So I would say, lean on the data. Start with the BIM conversation. Stair Step it up to as many D's as you can get, and then start talking about digital twin. Yeah, that's for projects. I think that's the way to go. Great. Well, I'm going to say one more time. Albert, thank you. Yeah, yeah. It's been a fascinating conversation. I It has said before we got on and recorded this, how much I love nerding out on this stuff. It's so interesting to, yeah, to talk about, to unpack. And they're like, there's so much more of a rabbit hole that we can go down there is really just scratched the surface on this like I'm looking at all the research that we didn't use for this episode, like there's a whole other episode in here somewhere. So, yeah, I agree. All right. Well, thanks everybody for listening. I'll see you next time. Albert, see you. Nate, thanks again, and we'll chat soon. Bye, everybody. You. Hey everybody, it's Albert here. Thanks for tuning in to the risky planner podcast. 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