Michelle Salyer:                Welcome to Outside the Box with BRPH, where we discuss the most innovative, interesting, and outside-the-box solutions to some of the most exciting and challenging projects in the world of architecture, engineering, design, construction, and mission solutions. You’ll hear directly from the problem solvers at BRPH as we dive deep into the latest news, trends and topics in aerospace, defense, manufacturing and industrial, commercial, education, entertainment and hospitality. I’m your host, Michelle Salyer, and I’ll be your guide as we open the lid on these topics and more and invite you for an insider’s look at one of the most successful, fastest-growing employee-owned AEC firms in the United States. Welcome to Outside the Box with BRPH.

It’s often said that the technology we carry in our pockets has more computing power than the machines use to send men to the moon. Nowadays, the power of modern computing is igniting imaginations and enabling productivity, speed and accuracy across industries. Whether it’s aerospace, launch pads or theme park attractions, jumbo jet manufacturing facilities, or high-end resorts, one architecture, engineering, and construction firm is using technology to transform the AEC industry and connect a worldwide workforce in unexpected ways.

Here today to speak to that transformation are Adam Stadnik, senior information system architect, and Mark Myers, digital technologies leader for BRPH. Welcome, Adam and Mark.

Adam Stadnik:                   Great to be here.

Mark Myers:                      Yeah, thanks for having us.

Michelle Salyer:                Absolutely. So before we jump into talking about the tech, tell me a little bit about your backgrounds and what led you to the roles you’re in today.

Adam Stadnik:                   I’m Adam Stadnik. I’ve been working at Enterprise IT and MSP environments for over a decade, focusing on clients with very high performance and very high security requirements.

Michelle Salyer:                Okay.

Mark Myers:                      I’m Mark Myers. I’ve been in the industry for roughly 27 years. I started with architectural design, worked my way up through structural design. When BRPH came and decided they were going to do Revit 17 years ago when I started here, that was really intriguing to me and I kind of took that and just really ran with it from there. And we’re here today and using Revit for almost everything we do and technology and it’s all just really exciting.

Michelle Salyer:                In terms of technology, a defining moment for a lot of companies came in March, 2020. As you know, as the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the US essentially shut down. Workers were sent home and companies were scrambling to figure out how to maintain productivity in that scenario. But BRPH was actually in a great place, so tell me about that week and what happened.

Adam Stadnik:                   So in January, 2020, we had completely redesigned our VDI system. VDI is a virtual desktop infrastructure, so it’s a virtual desktop you can use anywhere in the world, whether you’re at home or in the office. For the first time ever, our staff had access to the full production software stack whenever they needed it, regardless of where they were. So when the call came to start working remotely, we sent out one e-mail, the team went home and everyone picked up without missing a beat.

Mark Myers:                      And to add on top of the VDI, we also started using the Autodesk Construction Cloud platform from Autodesk, and it allowed us to basically host most of our projects in the cloud-based environment that were allowed to be up there so much, the non-proprietary NDA-type projects that we could put in there, but that helped us do that transition as well because we didn’t have to worry about maintaining our servers physically in the office and everything while we were during the shutdown. So it really helped with having that access as well for our team along with the VDI.

Michelle Salyer:                Okay. So essentially, you didn’t skip a beat there?

Mark Myers:                      Pretty much.

Michelle Salyer:                No lag time.

Mark Myers:                      We left on Friday and started Monday working at home for three months and just went right at it.

Adam Stadnik:                   We got some feedback that the efficiency actually went up because everyone was actually unified for the first time. And once they got started working digitally instead of in-person and learned how to collaborate, everything started working much more smoothly than it had before. So it was actually a benefit for us.

Michelle Salyer:                So just to back up for a second there. So BRPH has now 11 offices across the country, we had a fewer number five years ago. But before that, the teams were not necessarily meeting across offices, is that what you mean?

Adam Stadnik:                   They were, but it was much more challenging. So you would naturally have people who would just prefer to work locally or work with the team that they were next to because it was a challenge to get everybody on the same page. Now, everybody had the exact same platform to work on, so you could pick a person from our Linwood Seattle office and a person in our Melbourne office and they could work on it at the same time and there was zero friction. So it was a game changer in just the way the team functions.

Mark Myers:                      Yeah, it was huge. Because I’ve been here for 17 years, when I first started here, the firm was only a couple offices 17 years ago, and the old style computing with the server in the closet type of atmosphere and environment was fine for that. But as we really started expanding, especially when we started going out to the Northwest, we were really having troubles getting our data from Florida to Seattle. So the VDI really made a game changer on that as well as the BIM 360 Autodesk Construction Cloud platform because it allowed us to basically bring not only our teams from across the country, but our consultants that are not part of BRPH as well into the project in a much more seamless fashion. So it was really pretty cool.

Michelle Salyer:                Since this technology was already in the works prior to COVID, which has been almost five years ago, that’s hard to believe, but I understand it’s still not widely used at other AEC firms. So why do you think that is?

Adam Stadnik:                   Our VDI stack is pretty complex, and to be able to support it, we had to make a series of pretty bold, large decisions ahead of time. Before we launched the VDI system, we had started architecting everything from scratch. So we built our own custom private cloud environment that was built to scale, all modeled on much larger companies as if we were 10 or a hundred times the size of where we’re currently at.

Michelle Salyer:                Okay, wow.

Adam Stadnik:                   So when we started doing that, we said, okay, now let’s look at the next issues. And the next issue was VDI system needed to be updated. We had a huge need for very large complex models for our entertainment division, and the old system just could not handle it. We sat down and said, “Okay, let’s design a whole new system.” And we built that in the same way, built to scale, built to grow. And from the time we started building it to the time we actually launched it, the performance demand went up eight times from the initial design to launch.

Michelle Salyer:                Wow.

Adam Stadnik:                   That is now our metric is we shoot for roughly 10 times what we think we’re going to need, but that comes with a cost. It’s very expensive. It requires a lot of foresight and planning, and a lot of companies just have not been willing to commit to that kind of decision. It’s a large decision. In our case, it paid off tremendously, but not everybody can do that.

Michelle Salyer:                Okay. When you say a large decision, a large investment of both time and money?

Adam Stadnik:                   Yes. The VDI transition, even after the platform was running, it took us almost a year to get it ready for the users to actually log in, just customizing it and getting the software loaded and tuned.

Michelle Salyer:                And the performance demand you’re speaking of is the client needs, the capability we need to be able to meet their needs.

Adam Stadnik:                   It’s all driven by the client. So in that case, we had a specific model where what we were given by the contractor was a single piece of geometry that encompassed a massive component of a large entertainment ride, basically a roller coaster, and it was so large that the existing system couldn’t run it. We had, at one point, I think a $10,000 specially built AEC workstation that could barely open the file. It was that complicated. So we built the whole thing to build that as our baseline instead of as our top end, and then we are now long since exceeding that. We have things that are crazily complicated that just, it’s hard to even explain how complex they are.

Mark Myers:                      Our entertainment market definitely was the benchmark for how our technology was put together, especially when it came to the VDI stack and how that was put together. And it still kind of is the benchmark even today because those models get pretty involved, especially when we get all the client input from them and they’re all making their own 3D models, as well, and we have to put it all together and those files just get immense. And the graphic demand and everything of that is just huge. But it’s paid dividends not only in the entertainment market, it’s come across all the other markets, as well, because everybody’s using 3D now. Everybody’s getting into that environment and these models are just… At BRPH, we don’t do anything small. In the 17 years I’ve been here, I’ve never worked on a little tiny project. It’s been always a challenge of how we work better, faster, more efficiently, and the VDI has pretty much solved a lot of those issues for us.

Adam Stadnik:                   One of the other challenges we deal with is that we have to support whatever the client wants. Sometimes what the client wants or what their standard is not as modern as what we have or it’s not up to the standard we would normally set, but it’s what they have. So we don’t have the luxury of telling our clients to go, “Hey, you need to upgrade.” You don’t do that, so we have to support everything. And that, again, feeds into the same idea of scaling and flexibility of, “Hey, we have this new project. This client’s got something that’s very outdated. For whatever reason, they can’t upgrade, we’re going to support that as best we can.” So we have a stack. I think the last time we counted, I think we had 300 line of business apps available. So it’s a lot, but it means that we can handle anything we get thrown at us.

Michelle Salyer:                Wow.

Mark Myers:                      We are limited by what our client wants us to use. Not everybody goes in and upgrades their software on an annual basis like we do. So we run multiple versions of design software, just different years of the software so that we can work with different clients and different consultants throughout the whole market because not everybody has, like I said, the latest and greatest 2025 software or whatever. They might be working on 2023. The software’s expensive. So a lot of the smaller firms that we like to work with as consultants really can’t afford that upgrade on a regular basis. So we have to be flexible and VDI allows us to come in and have that flexibility and sponsor, I think we got what four versions of Revit that we run actively right now inside, and the NavVis works in all those pieces. So the VDI has to just be able to not only handle all the storage, but also all the performance that’s required for those as well.

Adam Stadnik:                   We actually have one project for an older project that is not able to be upgraded. It’s far too complicated to even attempt it, and so we have a special pool just for them that, in addition to the models that we’re already supporting that Mark mentioned, we have an additional two versions on a special pool just for that team so they can finish closing the project out for at least the next year or two, however long it takes without having to impact the rest of production. And because we have that flexibility, when the time came, they said, “Hey, we have to upgrade because we’re being forced to by the vendor.” We said, “Okay, well the client needs this.” So we made a whole separate system just for that team, and it took us maybe an afternoon, I think, to spin up. It was pretty straightforward.

Michelle Salyer:                Interesting. Wow. That is just so complex.

Mark Myers:                      The IT group can flex pretty fast on any of that type of stuff. Even for me, I’ve gone to Rick and Adam and said, “Hey, I need a test pool. We got some software we want to test” and this and that. “Yeah, no problem. We can get that for you.” And I had it the next day. Within hours they can get it for you. It’s really pretty impressive what they can do with that and how quick they can bring something up and be ready.

Michelle Salyer:                So imagine not only are the tools a big investment, but having a staff that can manage all of these many programs and demands.

Adam Stadnik:                   It’s a very special workload and a very special type of mindset. And one of the things we’ve had challenges with is finding somebody who is both able to do the work and willing to do the work because most people who are at that level of operations, they don’t want to get down in the weeds. They don’t want to be dealing with frontline tickets. They want to be doing enterprise backend stuff, but we don’t have that option. We have to talk to our product team and go, “Hey, oh, you need this plugin to work? Okay, let’s test it just you and I.” Even though I might be an enterprise person, I still have to work with the frontline people and work with the people doing the work. And everyone on our team does that every day. We just don’t allow people to be isolated like that.

Michelle Salyer:                Fantastic. So let’s talk a little bit more about VDI and the benefits that it presents to the team members in terms of being able to collaborate across offices and work from home or in remote environments. Tell me more about that.

Adam Stadnik:                   Sure. One of the things that we decided early on is that we’re going to use a single image for everybody because we’d had a previous system where we had stratified systems where the structural team might have one set of software, the electrical team might have one set of software, and it ended up being this nightmare where we had to condense everything down and almost everybody had everything anyway, because when they handed a model off from one to the other, it just didn’t translate. So we were kind of naturally being pushed into this direction of why don’t we just have everyone have access to everything all the time? We decided to commit to that, and so now we completely eliminated issues with model corruption because everyone has the same version of Revit.

Everyone has the same version of every plugin. It’s one golden image for everybody on the team.

Michelle Salyer:                Internally?

Adam Stadnik:                   Yes. So there’s no rework from models being eaten alive because Revit upgraded on somebody’s laptop or something. There’s no issues with, “Hey, I don’t have that plugin and it broke something.” Everyone has everything loaded, and so things kind of just work and we don’t really have to deal with that kind of technical issue anymore. We just completely eliminated that whole category of problem.

Mark Myers:                      Well, and the nice thing about that too, and having that flexibility of having everybody on the same image is that the way our teams are built and the way we work, the dynamic of it is you may be working on a very large complex project today, and then tomorrow you may have to come in and jump in on another team and help them with something a little bit smaller or vice versa. And when we had segregated virtual environments for different team members, depending on the market you worked in, we were challenged with having to, oh, well, poor Peter doesn’t have this much horsepower to be able to work on this project, so he really can’t do it efficiently, so it’s not really going to be able to help you as well. Where now, with the single image for everyone, that problem has pretty much been alleviated and everybody can work on whatever. And it really works better with the way BRPH works because, like I said, we build our project teams across multiple bases of people, and it’s not, this team works on this type of project, this team works-

Michelle Salyer:                You’re not siloed anymore.

Mark Myers:                      Right. We’re not siloed. Everybody works on everything. It’s worked really well. And the new VDI images has been really instrumental in helping with that, as well.

Michelle Salyer:                So I know we have team members that are working on projects around the world, say Guam, wherever it may be. Is there any downtime for them in terms of timing?

Mark Myers:                      Not as far as I know. Adam, I think we’re pretty much ready to go at any time.

Adam Stadnik:                   Yeah, all you need is internet access. So it really doesn’t matter where you are, you can get onto the system and work, and so as long as you’ve got reasonably okay internet, you can do anything you need to from anywhere in the world.

Michelle Salyer:                Okay. So what is the benefit to the client then?

Mark Myers:                      As far as the VDI technology, it allows us to work with a much greater integrated team, allows us to bring in talent from different locations that maybe we couldn’t do before. Allows our teams to work on current updates. So by that I mean, I like to have our models working in a live environment, so we’re not waiting a week to get updates to our consultants or even to our client who wants to have change or see changes or anything like that. We can do it right then and there. So if I was to save something or someone was doing production and they saved the model or whatever it was, they could send a Team’s message or an email or jump on the phone or whatever and say, “Hey, I just changed this, reload it. Let’s look at it and let’s talk about it and see what’s going on.”

So it allows us to really collaborate effectively across the whole design team, having that type of technology and also different time zones. It just allows us to have the teams working cohesively across all the different time zones. Like you said, we have 11 different offices spread across United States, so we have up to three hour differences in time. So having that flexibility and being able to, maybe someone’s not in the office first thing in the morning, but they got a meeting in Seattle and our meetings at 8:00, well, they’re not going to want to go sit in the office and commute at that time so they can jump on at home and be in the exact same environment that we can.

So it allows us to have that flexibility for our team, which in the end, benefits our clients. The efficiency and everything gets passed through to them.

Michelle Salyer:                I understand. We also embed team members with selected clients at times.

Mark Myers:                      We do, yes. We’ve had-

Michelle Salyer:                They don’t to be tied to a certain server, they can pull these models up.

Mark Myers:                      We can roll right into, in a client’s office and really pull our VDI up as long as we have access to their wifi or their internet connection, and we can get right into our production environment and pull those models up and be able to showcase them to our client efficiently without having a bunch of really painful experiences for everybody there. So no one wants to watch your screen ratchet as it goes across and skip. But the VDI solves that problem, and like I said, as long as we have an internet connection, we can work seamlessly wherever, a client’s office, in the field even, as long as we have great internet or reasonable internet in the field or at a construction trailer or whatever. Or even we go to some of our clients and we don’t know what environment we’re going into, but we can showcase everything in a really professional fashion. So it’s been very helpful.

Adam Stadnik:                   Adding onto that. The other advantage of having the system work the way it does is when they go to be in a client’s office or do a special visit or however we’re handling it, so they’re not showing them a package that’s made for the client, they’re showing them their actual models that they’re working on at that moment so the client can see everything that we see. And so all of our tools are built for that, and we can do live walkthroughs of a model in real time, simulating a camera at head height in a virtual environment and seeing what it’s going to look like when you walk around it before it’s ever built. And that’s been huge for a lot of people who just have a hard time visualizing from a top down drawing or even seeing it on the screen, being able to walk around it and control the camera yourself, we can literally just hand the client the mouse and say, “Here, go explore”, and they are blown away by it. It’s really incredible.

Mark Myers:                      It’s been great. Like I said, getting the client involved in that type of collaboration is really instrumental in the success of the project. I think they have to be able to feel like they’re part of the design and not just dictating it. They want to be able to see it and touch it and feel it and kind look at it and see, “Now that I’m really looking at it in 3D or whatever, and I can really play with it, I don’t really like it. Let’s change it and let’s do this.” And they get to have that input without just us saying, “Yeah, this is going to work. It’s great. You’re going to love it.” Now they can be like, “Oh yeah, I don’t love it. I want to do this. And I know it was my idea, but I want to change it.” It’s okay.

Michelle Salyer:                I imagine that saves money in the long run-

Mark Myers:                      Absolutely.

Michelle Salyer:                … in terms of change orders-

Mark Myers:                      Of course.

Michelle Salyer:                … if they can see it and walk through it ahead of time.

Mark Myers:                      Yes, it does.

Michelle Salyer:                So I know we’re talking about large models, entertainment projects, but give me an idea of how large are these files that we’re talking about?

Adam Stadnik:                   Quite large. So we have one project that was a design build where part of the deliverable was camera raw photos taken of the construction site from specific spots on a regular basis. That project, the last time I checked, it was three and a half terabytes, mostly because of the photos. The project itself wasn’t that big. But sometimes we get requests like that and we built the system to handle it. Because of the way we build the VDI system, you don’t need to put that on your laptop. You don’t need to carry around the horsepower to handle all that. You can just dial in and go see what you need to see.

Some of these models, we have dozens or even hundreds of sub-models where there’s different layers of different disciplines doing different pieces, and they’re all integrated in one master, and each of those can be 20 gigs or bigger.

Michelle Salyer:                Wow.

Adam Stadnik:                   Trying to run that on a single laptop, it doesn’t matter what kind of horsepower you give them, there’s a point where it just can’t do it. But we’ve built a system that’s powerful enough that the load is, even the VDI isn’t handling load, that’s got its own separate storage system just for that. Because the performance needs of our storage were so high, we couldn’t find something to handle it, so we built our own system to actually deliver storage just for the VDI system, and it’s been another game-changer.

Mark Myers:                      Yeah, the size of the models is [inaudible 00:19:19] we were saying, they’re huge. The base model itself for each discipline could be up to 20 gigs, but the way we work is we have each discipline has its own model, and then we link them all together for every discipline to see. So if you think about having your 20 gig model plus four or five other models linked into it at the same time and trying to maneuver that on your screen or work with that, it becomes a very large file. We manage it with different things throughout the software, but still, when you have it all on for collaboration and coordination to make sure that our design is where it needs to be, you don’t want to struggle with that. So we try to make enough horsepower for us to be able to go in and do this, and we’re there. The system is, I’m impressed with what we got and I think it works really well.

Michelle Salyer:                Okay. Well, tell me about some of the other technology that BRPH is using.

Mark Myers:                      Sure. So we have a lot of different things here that we do. We do the virtual design and construction, and that houses a lot of different elements underneath that umbrella. So it’s not only just the BIM models and the Revit and the NavVis works and all the 3D pieces, but we also do, here at BRPH, we use technology like our Corner Cave as an example, where we have some short throw projectors set up into the corner of the room and we bring people in and we can put them into the 3D environment in a group and not just having them individual and allows for a great collaborations.

Michelle Salyer:                So more life-size versus looking at something on a laptop.

Mark Myers:                      Its may not necessarily be life-size, but I mean it is a much larger scale than just looking at it on your computer screen. The purpose of that Corner Cave is to wrap you into the environment and allow you to be immersed in it without having to maybe put on a VR headset or anything like that, but allows you to really explore the space. And so we put an entire team in there and we collaborate that way and they can really see, “oh, well, I didn’t realize that this was here and it’s causing a problem.” And it just helps us with the collaboration spaces there.

Michelle Salyer:                I’ve even seen where it can simulate sunlight at a particular time of day.

Mark Myers:                      Absolutely, yeah.

Michelle Salyer:                So if the sun moves through a room-

Mark Myers:                      Yeah, we’ll make executable files and we’ll bring in our graphics team to help us with that, as well. But they will come in and they will really do a whole animation of a rendering and show actually certain times and as the time goes and allows the show, the sun exposure on a different times of the day to the building and really helps us work with that and really design the best and most efficient building project for our client, for sure. So all these tools kind of go together. We also do laser scanning. So we are, as far as I know, one of the few AE firms that actually have our own reality capture team in-house, and it allows us to go out and capture a lot of these buildings.

Michelle Salyer:                Tell me what you mean by that.

Mark Myers:                      So a lot of times we’ll get a project and maybe the as-built documentation the client gives us is old or dated or it doesn’t have the latest edition or there’s being been remodel inside and they don’t have the plans.

Michelle Salyer:                Okay.

Mark Myers:                      Reality capture and laser scanning allows us to be much more efficient in not only capturing the as-built conditions and bring it back to our team, but it also allows us to save our time in going back out to the field. The laser scanning and everything that we do not only captures a point cloud of the facility that we use later for design, it also captures 360-degree images. So we can have our team look at those images, pull dimensions, do things like that instead of going back out to the field. As an example, one of our clients right local here is just literally right across the river from us. However, it takes you an hour just to get there. You got to go way out of your way to get there and then get escorted on site. And by going out and doing a scan of that facility, we are able to come back and our team never has to leave again. They can see everything that we captured right there and use it for that.

Michelle Salyer:                So if they forgot to measure something or just need to look at-

Mark Myers:                      Exactly, forgot to take a picture of something.

Michelle Salyer:                … how something is laid-

Mark Myers:                      Or they’re like, “Oh, I don’t remember. I meant to measure how big that door was or how far this was from here.” We can do that in the laser scan now and we can pull that with the software and pull the dimensions and everything right there. And then we use that point cloud. We’ll bring that in whole into the Revit environment and use that as the backdrop for our design so that we’re actually designing to what’s actually sitting in the field as of the time we captured it versus ten-year-old drawings that we may have gotten that could or could not be up-to-date. And then realizing after we complete our design that this isn’t right. This isn’t what’s actually there. So it’s been very helpful with that.

Michelle Salyer:                Again, I imagine that saves money in the long run.

Mark Myers:                      It does. It does. Yeah. The reality capture piece of it has been pretty beneficial to us over the time that we’ve been doing it. So it’s been pretty neat. Trying to think what else we do. We do so many different things. We use our Navisworks models. We don’t just design in Revit, we run Navisworks on our projects. We run Navisworks every day on almost every project that we do. The reason for that is that it allows our teams to see the work that we did the previous day in the morning when you come in. And we could look at it in Revit, but Navisworks is a much more user-friendly environment, we’ll say. It’s a lot lighter. It’s color-coded per discipline, so it’s very easy to go in and look and see what’s going on in there. But we run all of those models through our automated task servers that we have here.

We have four task servers that run hundreds of tasks every night from making Navisworks models to exporting PDFs to printing CAD files to model exchanges from the cloud to our server or vice versa. Using that and Newforma info exchange site to be able to couple those together and do exporting files to our client who wants to see those on a normal model exchange. So we do a lot of automation behind the scenes, too, that really help with our client and allows us to pass that savings of the redundant tasks that we don’t have to pay for onto our client as well for their fee. So automation is key on a lot of the things that we do.

Michelle Salyer:                Sounds like you’re providing a lot of support for the team, for the architects and engineers.

Mark Myers:                      We do. We do. And we can set up a lot of different tasks. And listen, we can do multiple things. There are limitations, but we do like to try to automate the redundancy so that no one has to sit down, no one wants to sit there and export a hundred PDFs. No one wants to do that. And then there’s no need for it. What the IT team has done with the task servers and allowing me to have that access to those and going and do these things has been, like I said, really key. Using that technology, put our teams back into design and allow them to have the time to really do what they love instead of doing a redundant task of PDFs or something like that has been great.

Adam Stadnik:                   There’s a lot to it that’s not very glamorous or even AE focusing, too. So one of the things we focused on, again, when we started this commitment to overhaul all of our stuff five or six years ago, is eliminating all the common pitfalls. So we have a very robust backup system. We’ve eliminated every single point of failure in the system we can find. We have recovery systems in place where, most of the time if there is a hardware or there’s a software failure, most people don’t even notice. So most of the time we can even tolerate a complete failure of a system in the middle of the day in peak production. And if there is an impact, it’s a little blip and you don’t even notice it.

We’ve had a couple where people didn’t notice at all. Literally on the phone with somebody while they were being impacted and they didn’t even notice. So that’s one of the design features we strive for, is we try to put that in place at every level and periodically we go through it and take a hard look at it and say, “Okay, is there something we missed? Is there something that needs to be upgraded?” So we have a very strict hardware life cycle. We have a very strict software life cycle. We don’t let things age out where they start becoming a problem. And again, it’s an investment, but we go in and we say, “Okay, this is getting to end-of-life. We need to replace it in the next 18 months.” We’re going to start talking to the vendor today. We’re going to start designing right now and plan, schedule that maintenance window in advance so that we’re not reacting to it when it fails. We’re coming into it saying, “Hey, you know what, this thing’s still got six months of life on it. We’re replacing it tomorrow.”

And it has completely changed the entire dynamic where there was a point where we had issues so often that all we did was react. We called it firefighting. All we did was put out fires, and we don’t really do that anymore. So it’s really been great for us, too, because now we can actually help people with what they’re working on instead of having to go, “Oh my gosh, this is broken. I’ll get back to you.” It’s “Oh yeah, you know what, we can actually handle tickets on the day they come in or within minutes of them coming in instead of-

Michelle Salyer:                When I get locked out of my computer again.

Adam Stadnik:                   Exactly.

Michelle Salyer:                Or forget my password. Gotcha.

Mark Myers:                      Well, the nice thing, too, about that and having these maintenance windows, as Adam brought up, too, is that it allows us to roll software out on a more frequent basis. Our team are always asking or looking for efficiency and bringing software to the table, and we want to test it. And once it goes through that testing process, we may want to roll it out on an odd time and having those maintenance windows for us allows us to do that. But not only that, update the software because we could be having issues with anything, and it could be an update comes out and we’re able to remedy it really quick and not have to say, “Oh, well, we’re going to have to wait until we shut the network down to do this.” And we only have to do it one time with the BDI where we don’t have to do it on 150 computers, we do it in one spot and the image goes out, which is huge savings as well. And it just keeps everybody on the same platform, which in turn, makes the production effort a lot smoother.

Adam Stadnik:                   One of the most common issues that we deal with is when somebody else’s software doesn’t work. So we’ll get a request, “Hey, can you upgrade this to support this project?” And we’ll say, “Okay, we’ll test it.” It looks good. We roll it out and to discover that it causes more problems than it solves, or it just breaks something completely. So we can roll that back almost immediately. And the impact to the team is so much smaller than it used to be, so it’s not a disaster where everyone’s sitting around waiting for days, it’s “Hey, we’re on it immediately. Usually within an hour, maybe two, if it’s really bad, we’ll have the old system back up and running and everyone’s up and working without any disruption. So it’s all built around trying to avoid making mistakes. And if there is a mistake or somebody else causes an issue, we just don’t allow it.

Mark Myers:                      We’ve run into that. We’ve done it a few times this year alone, just on some of the stuff that we use on our production staff regularly. There’s been a couple pieces of software that have to work hand-in-hand in order for us to work the way that we do, and they may just randomly update one piece of it but not the other piece, and it ends up breaking stuff. So we’ll have to go through and we’ll troubleshoot it. Between Adam’s team and my team, we’ll sit down and we’ll troubleshoot it, and then we feel it as comfortable and we’re ready to go out for mass production for the team.

And then we quickly realized by the tickets that come in that it’s not, so we’re able to back up really quick and not skip a beat. We’re not shutting everybody down. [inaudible 00:29:25] like, “Okay, hey, we got to remove this software and then we got to reinstall it and we got to everybody set up.” Now it’s just, we roll the image back and it’s done and everybody just keeps on going. They don’t even know what happened, and they’re just going about it. So it really kind of just took a lot of the downtime from IT issues and from VDC issues. And the software, it’s not really something that the team even sees anymore. It just happens in the background. [inaudible 00:29:50]

Michelle Salyer:                Something we take for granted, for sure. Well, that all sounds very impressive. Thank you for all you’re doing behind the scenes.

Adam Stadnik:                   Absolutely.

Mark Myers:                      Of course.

Michelle Salyer:                For sure. All right, well thank you so much, Adam and Mark. This has been really enlightening and we will hopefully talk to you again on Outside the Box with BRPH.

Mark Myers:                      Thank you.

Adam Stadnik:                   Thank you.

Michelle Salyer:                Thanks for joining us today for Outside the Box with BRPH. We hope you’ve enjoyed today’s episode as we explored some of the most innovative and challenging projects and the most pressing issues and trends in the AEC world. Learn more about us at BRPH.com. Email us at [email protected] and follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and X. You’ll find this podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you find your favorite podcasts. Be sure to subscribe so you’ll be notified when new episodes are posted. See you next time on Outside the Box with BRPH.