Transcript: Bluebeam Collaboration with Carol Hagen Part II

Hello, I'm Brittany Campbell-Turner and this is the Constructor Podcast, session number six. Hello and welcome to this episode of Constructor. My name is Brittany Campbell-Turner and this podcast is dedicated to helping property owners have certainty in their decisions about their construction projects. My goal is to help property owners foster trusting relationships with their design and construction teams, lower risk in your construction projects, be under budget and on schedule, and ensure that your end user's desires are exceeded. Hello everyone and thanks for joining me again today.

I am bringing to you the second half of my interview with Carol Hagen about an excellent approach to achieving better collaboration amongst construction teams. Without further ado, here is the rest of my interview with Carol Hagen. Let's talk a little bit more about how we can introduce a software and you're officially a trainer for Bluebeam review. Which is not- It is. Okay.

Remind me, is it specific to the construction industry? No, it's a PDF editing markup and collaboration tool and you know being PDF editing and markup it's often used by manufacturers, the legal profession, a whole host of firms that maybe might not be enamored with the more popular PDF program. Okay, well if you can just take some time to kind of give us an introduction to Bluebeam and what the capabilities are, I'd really appreciate it. Sure. Bluebeam was designed from a tech person's perspective.

They were looking at the people that were working with CAD and looking for ways to make it easier for people to communicate. So they picked the PDF platform and said, what does the manufacturer and the technical guy from NASA and the construction company need that is not delivered by some of these other solutions? So what ended up happening was Bluebeam found that the construction niche really liked AutoCAD so they started building around the keystrokes and functionality that would make it an easy transition if they already used AutoCAD or any kind of CAD product on how to move around in the software.

And from that, then they started adding features and functions that would help the construction industry and the architectural engineering firms out there. And because that's my niche, I fell in love with it. I saw all the things that it did. So for instance, it's great for creating hyperlinked plan sets, you know, where you're on the sheet index page and it says A302 is a sheet for details and you need to look at that. So you just click on the sheet index where it says A302 and it hops you to that page.

Or if you're on a page that has a detail call out, it says, you know, that it's figure three on page A302 if you click on that, that it goes specifically to that detail. Some other things that it does really well, document comparisons, you can both do side by side comparisons and overlays. You'll see almost every construction company uses that whether they're a subcontractor or general because oftentimes an architect or an engineering firm, whoever's created the plan sheet has not clouded everything that's changed, although they have put in the margin above the title block somewhere that, you know, this is change one, you know, move the wall and you go, what wall?

Some other things that are often used by the general contractor are the design and constructability reviews, which they use in Bluebeam Reviews studio and studio project pieces, which come with every license of review so that you can have 500 people if you want all marking up a document at the same time. And then you end up looking at some other pieces, you know, further along in the, you know, past the pre-construction or even in the pre-construction, you can do takeoffs. So some of the estimators really like that because there's some, you know, quick tools to take off off of the 2D drawing.

At the end of the project, you can be doing a punch and back check that's very visual. But probably the thing that I find most interesting in Bluebeam is that there are so many tools in it that people just aren't even aware that they could do that in there. They think they have to use a CAD program to create something. And they don't because Bluebeam has functions like layers and drawing capabilities. You can say I want this line to be, you know, 25 feet long.

It's good for site planning, trying to figure out, you know, will this trailer fit in that area or do I need two cranes to cover the entire rooftop of this building or can I get away with one? It will show you the circumference reach depending on where you put the crane. I've seen people that have certainly used it in the specifications area when they want to incorporate 3D with 2D because you can make 3D images from Revit, Navisworks, SketchUp Pro, you know, all the common solutions that are being used by the industry and make it that somebody can open it and work with it in a platform that seems familiar, which is PDF.

Who knew that you could make a 3D PDF? Now obviously you'd have to have Revit or SketchUp Pro in order to push it in, but it's fascinating. You can be in the PDF and you can turn the model and you can put in a cutting plane and You can drop in a markup on the document, you know, whether you're clouding and putting a call out in there. What happens is once you put the markup in and you say I want it to be incorporated in, it becomes a blue sphere just floating in the model.

And if you click on it, it shows you what it says. So I don't have to be a BIM expert in order to be collaborating in BIM. Is it necessary for the plan or drawing to be uploaded in a version of these typical that are used to design? Or can it be uploaded in PDF alone and work just as seamlessly? In a 3D environment, if you have generated it out of the original program and put it a Bluebeam PDF, that Bluebeam PDF is to everyone a PDF.

So you don't need Bluebeam in order to work in it. And you can get the free Bluebeam viewer if you wanted to work in the studio collaboration space on it. So I mean, it can be no cost to you. Only one person has to buy a license to collaborate. And even in that regard, they offer a 30-day free trial.

So you can have it for 30 days and no one's paid for it. Kind of interesting. But I think the 3D PDF eliminates all of the questions of where do you mean because you can see it right in the model. Carol, that's actually really amazing. I really I'm amazed.

I don't think that most people have any clue that they can manipulate a model so much just in PDF. I think that revolutionizes some of the capabilities that we thought were possible with PDF. Well, it certainly eliminates the barriers that we have because that small subcontractor can't afford to buy Revit, let alone pay to have someone learn Revit just so that I can move a pipe two feet to the left. They don't have that expertise, but they can say you're going to need to move that two feet to the left to the company that already has invested in them, typically one of the general contractors or the architect.

And they go, oh, yeah, let me do that. That's good that you caught that. It might not have been something that was particularly in the way that it was going to be a clash, but maybe it wouldn't look aesthetically good there. And it could be the architect that said that we should move it or it could be the plumber or the HVAC guy. And you go, oh, I hadn't even thought about that.

Do they really look up when they walk in every room? Some people do. So Carol, tell me how the rights or authority works when 500 people have capability of revising a document. When you invite people to a Bluebeam Studio session, you give them rights and privileges of what they are allowed to do, whether they are allowed to edit a document or all of the documents, whether they are allowed to print them, whether they are allowed to mark them up. And every time anyone adds anything, they do a markup to a document, it is logging that in what they call the work list area.

So you know who did it at what time. And no one is allowed to change someone else's markup. So you don't have this, well, I said this and then you changed it. They can't change it. So it eliminates the finger pointing.

It gives you this full audit trail. It makes it that everyone sees it in black and white. And you don't have to worry about, well, how do they reply to this markup? Do they need to put another markup on it? Well, that work list that you might think of as a spreadsheet has a handful of really cool tools in it that you can do replies to markups.

So you can have a conversation back and forth on that particular markup. It also has a status function. So you can change the status and statuses can be a lot of different things, not just accepted and rejected or under review. You know, you can create your own sets of statuses and even your classifications of status. So I think of things like a punch and back check process where you may be on a really complex project, a large airport.

And, you know, there's I'll just say more than two or three levels of approval. There might be 15 or 20 because you get the county involved and the city involved and the state involved and the two different architects that worked on it and the construction manager and the two GCs that are now a joint venture. I mean, there's there's a lot of levels of approval that can go in there. And at that point, the statuses can be there's only two statuses for the architect. It's a go or no go.

And for other people, there might be five or six statuses that they want to track because the general might say the subcontractor says it's complete and I review it and I may reject it because I don't like the way he did it and I don't want the architect to see he did it wrong. So fix it before it moves up the chain to the next approver. So in in that work list area, you're going to you're going to see more than this is just a PDF program with some markup functions in a collaboration space.

It really is is there to to help the entire team. You can even have it notify people when you place something on the document that you want them to be notified or you can assign a responsibility to a particular item. What you're telling me, Carol, is that it's it's definitely more than just a collaboration software. That it really goes to the level of it tracks who's responsible for the discussion or that change in the PDF and literally goes through the the line of approvals, review and approvals and from A to Z, it goes through everything.

Yes. And with the work list, you can you can sort it and say, show me only the things that I'm responsible for because maybe we don't turn notifications on because this is just, you know, one sheet, one little area. Maybe I'm the I don't know, maybe I'm the I the specialty handrails on the stairs. And that's the only thing I've sold in here. And we're having a discussion about it.

Well, I don't need to be notified. It's just you and me collaborating. It's if it's not you, it's me. But at the at the same time, these are Bluebeam sessions are open ended. So if you can't get together at exactly the same time like we are today right now, if that's OK, so if the architect is in Japan and the project owner is on vacation in South Africa and the general contractor is here in the United States somewhere and we're all in different time zones, I can I can put my markups on and then you can jump in when you wake up or when right before you go to bed and answer the question and it'll be there when I wake up or I'm just about ready to go to bed.

It can be real time with everybody working at the same time or not. And it also has a function that I can follow someone. So if I want to see what you're doing and watch you physically do your markups, I can shadow shadow you, so to speak. I don't want to say I'm lurking, but maybe I am. So I was going to I wanted to add one other thing to that.

I can also say that as as as people are working, if we want everybody to follow one person's markups, we can do that as well. It's kind of like being in presenter mode, in which case, you know, now you're driving the bus, so to speak, of what everybody's going to look at. That's excellent. I really like the idea of having a software where globally people can collaborate no matter what time you wake up or go to sleep. You can follow activity and be keep.

Yeah, keep yourself abreast of everything that's going on. And you never really miss the beat. You have the capability to stay on top of it. Yeah. And it's a huge problem for the construction industry, because even if you all work in the same time zone, you know, you call a meeting and there's always if you need more than 10 There's always somebody that can't make it right then or comes late or has to leave early.

And this way, they never miss anything. So now that we've reviewed many of the capabilities of Bluebeam review, I want to find out from you from a training perspective, how long does it take for someone to really get acclimated to the software? It depends on what they are going to be using it for. I have a very small contractor that's a caulking, five man caulking company, and they are primarily using it for the document comparison and the estimating takeoff function. I don't think he spent more than an hour and he was off to the races.

You know, this, I'll just say this person wasn't necessarily, you know, highly tech savvy. I've had people that have just watched some of the videos that Bluebeam puts out, which they have, I'll just say a boatload. And then I have people that, you know, they like training and team training. They want to learn it over a WebEx or they want me to come and do a class training that everybody's doing it the same way. Because you know, like so many other things out there, you can do it three ways and come out with the same result.

Just one way is a little more efficient than the other. And we want to have our best practices and make it a smooth transition. So the larger teams tend to look at that and say, you know, what way would be best for us? You know, what are our processes? What are our workflows?

And so for some people, this could be an ongoing learning experience because they start with it to do the punch and back check. And then they want to do hyperlink plan sets. And then they want to learn the estimating. And then they want to do a real time punch and back check using the Bluebeam Studio function because they don't want any delays. And I want to know the minute that there's a quality problem on the job.

I don't want to wait for somebody to email me something and say, oh, you got to, you know, there's an issue. And they can keep moving forward. That's probably one of the reasons that I started blogging about a Bluebeam tips simply because so many people are only using it for a handful of things and they aren't aware that it can do others and that some people don't want to watch a 20 minute or an hour video but want something that they could learn in five minutes and go and do.

So training, training, I think, never really stops. If you're smart, you are always trying to improve your team. I'm giving them a free drip system, really. That's awesome that you do blogging and kind of give people hints and snippets about specific ways to utilize Bluebeam to do something that they can implement right away. I think that's absolutely valuable.

I have a question about potential integrations with other software products that different companies already use. What software can Bluebeam integrate with so that implementation of Bluebeam is pretty seamless when someone starts to use it? There are a whole host of products, some that I've already mentioned. The Revit, the AutoCAD, the SketchUp Pro, the Navisworks. They also integrate with the Microsoft Office and Outlook.

With that, there is also a print to PDF function. I see people using it as well with other products like the Bentley Systems Solutions, Tecla, and obviously with SharePoint, particularly in that studio project area so people can check in and check out documents. They may check it out or push it into a session to do some collaboration and then want to push it back in again. We want that revision history to be recorded and for replacing a document, we need to know why. All of those pieces are there.

I know that Bluebeam has worked on some APIs. I'm expecting to see some integrations to some project management and other document content management solutions. I've been shouting for some of that for some time and I have seen it delivered. There's a document management solution called RecordIt. They spell their name funny, but that really opens Bluebeam inside of the content management system which then gives you all the tools of Bluebeam which is just a marvelous thing to do.

We will have to figure out how RecordIt is spelled and put that in the show notes or make it available to the audience so that they don't identify the red button. It has a Q in it. We'll have to get clarification of it. That's great. It's good that Bluebeam is ever changing and trying to make sure that it's relevant.

API integrations are great, especially for companies who are fully utilizing some other system and I find that a lot of caution to starting to use some new software happens when they don't know if it's going to work with what is already existing. That's great. I'm glad to hear that. So now that we've talked about collaboration and the importance of it as well as Bluebeam review, can you tell us how can someone start implementing collaboration in their projects right now? Being very biased about Bluebeam, I tell you to quick run and grab the 30-day free trial which is available on my website at hagenbusiness.com under the Bluebeam tab.

But there are a handful of other products out there that allow collaboration and some of them being very web-based and very specific that it might only do collaboration. I've seen many people use GoToMeetings and WebExes and those are fine, they're just not open-ended so if you can get everybody in the room at the same time, at least do that. Or even start using some of the collaboration tools that you find in Office or in Google because some of that stuff is free. We like free. Even the document sharing, whether you're going to use Box or Dropbox or OneDrive or SkyDrive or whatever the tool might be to help you move the information to people and to be able to say why are we moving it and have it somehow record what the changes have been.

If you do decide to grab the 30-day Bluebeam review trial, I would say that you want to also look under the training section or go onto YouTube to get the access to the videos. There's a whole host of them up there. Feel free to call me if you can't find what you're looking for. There are many, many topics. But the collaboration piece, you want to watch the studio sessions and studio projects videos.

They explain how to use it pretty well and I find most people in the construction industry are visual learners so a video can usually do the job. With that, I do appreciate your recommendations, Carol. I would absolutely love to take your link and post it in the show notes and make it available to all who listen to this podcast as well as the YouTube videos that you mentioned, the studio session and studio projects. We'll make sure to have those links. Thank you once again, Carol.

It was a pleasure. It was all my pleasure. I look forward to hearing the end result. I'll spread the news. Thanks.

Thanks. Have a great day. You too. I hope you guys enjoyed this portion of the interview and you can find the resource links and this podcast at Constructor.com. Thanks.

Bye.