Forge - moving from product sales to more solution based sales

DANIEL MARCUS: So most welcome to this class, this class about industry talk, moving from product sales to more solution-based sales with Forge. So we're going to follow a journey from one of our customers called HAKI and how they have been using Forge.

So my name is Daniel Marcus. I'm working as a key account manager at the Cadcraft, an Autodesk reseller in Sweden, and I'm driven to help our customers be more competitive. That's what I really like, seeing them increasing their value to their customers in their turn. Later on, if you have the possibility to join the Q&A session, Mattias Kuduk, the VDC manager for HAKI will also be joining together with my colleague Rikard Nilsson who is an expert in product configuration.

So let's have a look into the agenda. We will start on telling a little bit more about HAKI, who they are and what they are doing. Moving on to the challenges, what have they done? Why change at all, and why now? Looking into the solution, how did they implement the solution and what kind of solution?

And also, of course, the results, the benefits, what did they actually see with this solution? And next steps, constant improvement, what are they thinking about the next steps to do? And a short summary before we head for a Q&A if you have the possibility to join that one.

So in this class, the learning objectives is to get a better understanding about Forge and design automation. How could actually Forge help you increase customer service with digital offerings? This is also then connected to actually moving from product to more solution-based sales.

And seeing the advantages of standardized workflows, how you can with smart tools actually automate workflows? And also, using automated BIM content, how you can use Forge for creating BIM automatically? So hopefully, you will have a better understanding after this class about these topics.

So we start with an introduction of HAKI. HAKI is a company based in Sweden, South of Sweden. It's been along for more than 60 years making scaffolding solutions for the industry from the construction and building industry but also for infrastructure energy making safe working conditions. And HAKI likes when it gets a little bit more challenging. We will see this a little bit later. And they are dreaming trying to be the best in class.

And if you're looking to market trends that's driving HAKI's operations, yeah, as you know, the population is growing. There are more buildings needed. The increasing labor costs, the scaffolding is often something that does need to be there. And also, the current for safety, more and more stringent requirements, and that's something HAKI are really good at.

So you see some numbers, and I think one interesting thing is their focus on simplicity and efficiency. It's also something we can see later on. And here are some examples of their projects. So you can see it's quite impressive scaffolding solutions in the energy sector, in the marine sector, infrastructure, building and construction. So you can see it starts getting quite complex.

And looking into the business model of HAKI, so they have both direct contact with big construction companies like [INAUDIBLE], et cetera. But they also then have customers like scaffolding companies, which in their turn have construction companies as customers. They are selling the equipment, but more and more, they're also doing rental. This subscription model is growing more and more also at HAKI.

So let's have a look into the challenges that HAKI met. So why change? Why do anything? So HAKI, the product itself is quite simple. So they are easily copied so they need to add more value for the customers, and that can be time consuming adding more value, sort of putting a lot of time supporting customers, finding the right scaffolding solution, finding the right amount of material, et cetera. And also, the bigger customers started to ask you about BIM, and the scaffolding industry is quite unmature so some of the customers don't even use a CAD software. And other customers are starting to ask for BIM so that was a challenge.

And also, using the same workflow for all kinds of projects. The simple one, standard projects, were mixed with the more complex projects making it hard to work in an efficient way. Problem with the data and the source, they had no continuous digital chain, broken links, data on different sources. This made it hard to calculate the actual need for a scaffolding solution of the customer.

Often over deliver material, and in the same time, difficulties with logistics and planning. So that overdelivery, of course, that affects the margins. It's also not sustainable, et cetera. So high pressure on HAKI actually on the big potential loss of profit margins. So something needed to be done.

So just to get an idea of going from quite simple products themselves, the items are quite simple, but as you've seen before, an example is quite complex structures. And you can imagine handling this in Excel spreadsheet 2D layout. It's very difficult to keep track of changes and also keep track of the right bill of material, et cetera. So challenge is accepted.

So going into the solution, what did HAKI do to meet those challenges? And I think this one is really important. They set a digitization strategy high level from the board. They wanted to be a digital data front runner, or actually, front runner for their industry.

So they understood that they need to change how they work, think, share, innovate, become more digital, become more innovative, and together with clients and strategic partners have a better understanding what to offer. So I think this is really important. It was just not a project where it started. It's a continuously cycle of improvements building a form of culture around digitalization.

So how to do this and how to move from product sales to more solution-based sales? How to actually add more value to the customer, but at the same time, be more cost effective. So we're looking into the pictures. How do we move from a lot of data sources into one true digital 3D model? Let's see.

So Mattias, the VDC manager at HAKI, did get the mission from the board to investigate how to digitize this workflow, and now we're talking about the workflow from sales order planning. They've done some massive changes in the production as well with robots, et cetera, but now we'll focus on the sales and order process. So looking into the customer need and what kind of technology should we use and also how to implement this.

And when start asking the customers what they need, it's able to make more faster and more accurate proposals because that was quite time consuming. They need some kind of tool that they can easily do this themselves, easy to access, easy to use. Some of the customers weren't even used to CAD as discussed before. And some of the customers were needing BIM so quite the range of demands. It needs to be scalable so you can use it for both standard and complex projects. So I know the customer wanted to stay competitive and making business easier.

And what technology to use for this? The team with Mattias as the lead, they understood that it must be some kind of standardized tools. It couldn't be something customized. Of course, that would be a dead end. It must be scalable, and it must be cloud and web-based. So Mattias had some prior experience from other companies using Tacton. It's a product configurator. It's also been some experience about SolidWorks and their configuration.

HAKI was already using Autodesk tools at their R&D department, Inventor and Vault so it became natural to look into other Autodesk offerings. And HAKI, of course, really liked the fact that Autodesk were providing software both for building industry and for the manufacturing industry. I think that together with Autodesk's clear mission about cloud and the cloud message that they came with. So they used Autodesk, and of course, we were very happy for it.

So back to the implementation of the project, so being a front runner means that you have a moving target. So it's constantly changing demands from the market so you need to be very agile and adaptive. You need to be prepared to rethink and redo, and of course, a step-wise implementation.

They did a lot of proof of concept, engaged with customers, learning, training, and change again, and of course, support went on to find the right resources. You need to invest, recruit right people internally but also get the right partners, external partners in the project. And again, fully support from the board because this kind of job will be a bumpy road. There will be obstacles that you need to address. So again, it's very important that you have that in mind.

So Mattias and his team came up with a concept called HAKI Design Tools. And they start looking to what they already got with Inventor, and within Inventor, you have something called iLogic, a rule-based engine. So they started to play with that, did some smaller configuration, engineering and automation, and tried this out. Together with us at Cadcraft, we built a bigger product that could be configured almost directly into Inventor.

But how to move this into the web? At the time, there was something called Autodesk Configure 360. So that was the one they started with. And that was a really nice experience because then they could publish this Configurator of a standard product, in this case, I think it was a weather projection system, a scaffolding solution. So the customer could itself start to try and play with the scaffolding and actually getting a great deal of material and seeing things without actually having any CAD software installed.

So it started good, but then the bigger customers start asking for BIM, and if you know, Inventor is not the BIM tool. That's Revit. And also, there were discussion about the performance. So when you put something in the web, you want instant feedback. And Configure 360 for those of you who tried it out, you know there is a waiting time for each update. So now they couldn't wait the 30 seconds. Before they could wait one day for a proposal, but now on the web, it needed to happen immediately.

So when Autodesk launched Forge, this was really interesting for HAKI. And they understood directly the power of Forge because now they could use both Inventor, and of course, more than Revit as a background tool. And Forge, is a set of web services, set of APIs that powers the future of making according.

So let's see. So today, the HAKI Design Tools suite has expanded. We have something called the HAKI Configurator, which we will look into in a little more detail. We have the HAKI BIM. That's an add-on on Revit, a smart toolset on Revit. We have something called HAKI app and HAKI Playground. But now we'll focus on the two about the HAKI Configurator and the HAKI BIM.

So this is the workflow for standard projects. This is only on the web. So here you can do standard configuration by yourself as a customer 24-7. Just log into the portal, choose the kind of project you want to configure, and start configuring. And in this front-end solution, they're using a viewer based on WebGL. So it's a very fast viewer. It's the same technique used by Autodesk Web Viewer, the large model viewer. That means you instantly get feedback of your changes on your configuration.

So that's the front end. When you are done with your input, you push a button, and then you send the parameters to the back-end solution, and that's then Autodesk Forge with design automation API. And at HAKI, they're actually using both Inventor and Revit. So in some cases, the products are still based on Inventor, but we'll see some of them using then Revit for getting a full BIM model.

So let's see how this works in reality. So here we are at the portal, the web portal at HAKI. I'm a customer. I'm just logged in so they can also track what's happening at the portal and which customers have logged in. And here we can choose to start HAKI Configurator. And at the time, they have certain standard products that we can start building. In this case, we're going to look into the weather protection system.

So here, it's accepting the terms, putting in some metadata about the project, and we'll start doing some inputs. And you see that immediately it responds in the viewer and continues with some BIM adopters, et cetera. And continue doing inputs and you see instantly it happens on the screen. So this is very interactive for the user. And we'll start adding some more base, and it happens directly.

So when we are done and we think we have a good solution, we have tried it out, and until now, we actually didn't use any CAD in it at all, but now we want some real data out of this. So what's happening? We are actually then pushing parameters to the Autodesk Forge solution.

So at this time, we are sending parameters, and here, we will have I've done a [INAUDIBLE]-- here, we will have some waiting time up to 30 seconds something. But in this case, you are actually done. OK, we're waiting because you have already done the configuration. And from here, we can then actually decide what do we want the users to be able to download. In this case, we're downloading a PDF file on the solution. This is made in this case with Design Manager for Revit-- sorry, for Inventor, and we have the part list, the BOM-list, everything. So now we have everything we need as a customer to make the order.

So that was more like a standard product only using the web, and now we're going to a more advanced complex scenario. And here, they're combining HAKI Configurator with HAKI BIM. So here we're actually combining the Autodesk Forge with desktop solution with Revit.

So we start at the same end in the front-end solution starting configuring and pushing the parameters when we're done into the back-end solution with Autodesk Forge and Design Automation for Revit. We're getting back a Revit file of a model that we then can continue to do the more advanced work in the desktop environment. So this is for the more complex projects and for the more advanced users. So let's see how that can work.

So back again in the portal, and this time we're doing a scaffolding solution for a building so we'll have some kind of reference geometry you're working against and doing some input of decking type, brackets, et cetera. And you see I'm doing a little bit fast forward [INAUDIBLE]. It pops up immediately so you get an instant understanding what you actually are building.

So this is really cool that you can build this kind of advanced solution directly in the web. And in this case, we're doing some small adjustments adding some additional things. And we think now we're ready, but we still need some more things to be done, and that's not possible in the web-based tools. It demands more advanced functionality. So when we're done, we're actually then pushing this to Design Automation for Revit and let the tool give us a true Revit model back.

So the next step will be that we should just open the file-- it's a Revit file-- directly into Revit. To make this work a little bit easier, HAKI has developed a HAKI BIM plugin. It's some kind of power tools for Revit building scaffolding so that's really cool. And of course, you have the output you decide from Revit, [INAUDIBLE], whatever you want.

So we are inside Revit. You can actually see the HAKI menu special developed for HAKI. Picking up the model and you recognize the model that we made with Forge in the web-based solution, and here we're doing some adjustments. Don't need to go into detail, but there are some really cool features just working with scaffolding within Revit.

And I would say this is HAKI's add-in so it's not a general. So it's made for HAKI. So we can see, though, still building something, and we can do some more advanced mirroring, et cetera, whatever we want. So this is working inside Revit, really nice and smooth.

So this was looking into HAKI Configurator and HAKI BIM. We'll also have a little short look into HAKI app and HAKI Playground. HAKI app, it's free to download. It's actually how you then can access technical documents. You can do some load calculation. They have a cool feature for augmented reality. It's actually me standing at my summer house testing doing a scaffolding tower.

There's also something called HAKI Playground, a digital showroom for showcasing scaffolding solutions, could be project, could also be some new scaffolding items they want to showcase, and it's really good also for training. They could also use this for training and learning. And it could also be together with VR, Virtual Reality. So it's based on Unity, and as you know, Autodesk and Unity also have a cooperation so that's really cool. So you can see they're really on the front using digital offerings.

And this could be all cool, but you also need to see some results, of course. So what did HAKI see by this? Let's see. So they have increased the customer's value a lot. So the customer now have a faster process from proposal to delivery. They can themselves do the standard configurations whatever they want to 24-7.

They don't need any CAD tools. They get the right information, the whole process. They have better cost and profit control. They know what they should deliver to the customer site. And they have full BIM. For those who need a more advanced complex, they can utilize the whole BIM process with this.

So it's been really good response from the customers, and it's a win-win because internally at HAKI, they also get the right information from their customers. The standard products are more or less automated so don't need to spend any support on those. They can focus much more on the complex products because there, they can give more value to the customers. And again, also for HAKI a better cost and profit control. So it's been really nice results.

So look into some more hard facts-- in this case, it's a case study about Storkyrkan. It's a church in old town of Stockholm so it's really a prestige project. It's nearby the Royal Castle in Stockholm. So HAKI did some really cool things already in the quotation phase. They actually used Google Earth as a mock-up model, and they start building the digital scaffolding solution and could make an accurate enough proposal.

So they did get the order, which, of course, is very nice, and when they had the order, they needed to refine the model. So they actually use drone technique to scan the whole church to get a digital twin so they can then build up the scaffolding and plan how to build it. And they saved a lot of time in the project phase.

But also in the planning phase at site, you can understand it's very narrow streets. You can't just dump all the scaffolding material in one place in the old town of Stockholm. So it must be delivered just in time. And this wouldn't be possible, I would believe, without these kind of tools.

So if we look into more the numbers, and the quotation went on half the time, and if you see the order preparation is even more, especially for the adjustments, all the changes back and forth. And they had full control of the BOM-list, the product planning, and of course, as I said before, the logistics with 160 ton of scaffolding material and the time planning.

So this has been a big success. So this saved actually 60% of the time compared to using the old workflows. That's some real cool numbers. I visited Stockholm just three weeks ago. This was actually me taking a photo from the church. It's quite impressive I must say.

So what's next step? So being a front runner means you're constantly on the move, just constant improvement. So HAKI is not standing still at all. So they are looking for adding even more value to their customers. And the next step for this is load calculation. So you get the load calculation directly on the web, and that's actually something they've already been implementing.

Hawk scanning as this one case study is something they want to do more like a standard offering helping the customers in getting a digital twin. Many times, there doesn't exist any BIM model of the construction. And one other thing they want to add is more advanced calculations with Autodesk Robot Structural, and in this case, it's one building where the projections you have wind loads, et cetera. That's quite hard to calculate without a proper FEM calculation software like Robot Structural so that's something they want to implement.

And also BIM 4D and 5D, that means actually they have a better control over the cost and the planning. Although, they already now have the cost within each item, they also want to understand and get how long time does it take to assemble, deassemble the scaffolding, and what is the labor cost, how many hours. This together can make them even more accurate with planning and the cost. So that's really interesting moving to 4D and 5D of BIM.

So in summary, what have we been looking at? We've been following HAKI's journey from moving from product sales to more solution-based sales. And a big part of this, an important part of this, is Autodesk Forge and Design Automation. And they have been using this to increase the customer service so the customer themselves can do a lot of more work whenever they need 24-7 and now engaging even more with more digital offerings for making the life easier for their customers.

And also, we have learned about standardizing workflows. So instead of putting a lot of time in the standard projects, they are now more or less automated so they put more effort into the more complex products. The products become more and more complex, and then we have much more time to use for that. And we also looked on how Autodesk Forge with Design Automation for Revit can help us automate BIM content. So we can actually get the BIM directly from the web and start working with that.

So in all, it's been very nice to follow HAKI's journey. As we can understand, the profit margins are going up. And so I hope this has been inspiring for you. And for those who have the possibilities, after this class, there will be a Q&A session. So please prepare some questions if that's possible. Then we'll get the chance to talk directly to Mattias, the VDC manager, and also to Rikard Nilsson, who is an expert in product configuration at Cadcraft. So thank you very much for joining this class, and I hope you have learned something, and all the best.