I sat down with Anssi Auvinen, the CEO and founder of Finnish startup Aecmaster, to discuss the future of design and how the company plans to make it happen. Anssi envisions data-driven design as the next radical change in the AEC sector.
Anssi Auvinen started working in the building industry as a 16-year-old construction worker. Since then, he has acquired two master’s degrees: structural engineering and architecture.
During his career, Anssi has witnessed how the digitalization of the design sector has progressed, but the results for both designers and building owners could have been more impressive. That inspired him in 2019 to start up Aecmaster, a software and consulting firm that aims to fulfill the promise of digitalization. The company’s software product launched in January 2024.
The need for digital twins
Anssi states that you can’t say you own a building until you possess its digital assets, the digital twin.
A digital twin gives building owners a well-organized, up-to-date, and reliable data representation of their assets. The challenge with digital twins is that they require work to build, even after a freshly built project.
The current design and construction processes typically produce a stack of files during and after the project. Consultants must do extra work to extract and analyze data and create reports on their content. For every change, they must redo part of the work.
Design management can be difficult
The design phase is critical because it offers the greatest potential to impact lifecycle costs with minimal investment. Despite its significant role in a construction project’s success, the design phase often doesn’t receive the attention it deserves. For example, Granlund’s Jouni Ojala told me during an interview that “design schedules don’t actually exist nor are monitored properly.”
In addition to the project status, the client is also interested in how well the design meets the project’s KPIs, such as cost and carbon footprint.
Transparency during the project, showing exactly who is doing what, is one of Anssi’s goals.
The digital disappointment
We discussed the backstory of the current state of design work. Anssi talked about “digital disappointment” that many experience regardless of all the technology we have.
The digital evolution of architectural and engineering design started in the 1980s. First, we moved from paper to 2D CAD, then to 3D CAD, and finally to BIM. However, the workflows remained unchanged. As a result, the productivity of design work has not increased, and the cost of design has not decreased.
A 2024 Gray Work Index report by Quickbase has confirmed the existence of that same phenomenon. In the study, 54% of US and UK workers believe maintaining day-to-day productivity is more challenging than ever.
The vision of a single model
Even during the early days of BIM, visionaries discussed a single model encompassing all the information necessary to construct a building. Everyone would be working on the same model, a digital twin of the building.
Fast-forward to 2024, and design disciplines mainly work on separate model files. As a result, a BIM coordinator, for example, must aggregate the files to create a combined model for detecting collisions, managing information quality, and monitoring the work progress.
Building and maintaining a coherent model becomes even more challenging if we want to include machine-readable metadata in the models.
Building a digital twin from the get-go
Anssi’s company aims to tackle the significant challenges we covered earlier.
Aecmaster provides a cloud service that starts building a digital twin during the very early stages of a project and allows the project stakeholders to collaborate through it. The twin accumulates data during the design, construction, operations, and maintenance phases of a building.
Aecmaster allows project owners and managers to control the design project with KPIs without manually aggregating individual BIM models. Any changes and versions in the models are updated automatically in real time. Currently, the software reads models from Archicad and Tekla software, but more will be added along the active development. It can also import and extract IFC files during the “transition period” before software plugin coverage is comprehensive.
Aecmaster enables designers to create and manage metadata centrally. It outputs cost estimates, LCA reports, and files for Finnish digital building permission.
The software uses its internal format for the digital twin. Any other software can communicate with it through an API. This offers opportunities for AI-powered software to use well-structured data for analysis and other purposes.
Great potential
Aecmaster offers software and consulting services to real estate owners, investors, and developers.
Anssi believes that when the built asset’s data is comprehensive and up to date, proactively identifying problems, money pits, and underperformance becomes possible. Design management becomes data-driven and effective.
The company promises substantial benefits over traditional workflows. Through better control, design and project management costs will decrease by 20-40%, construction costs by 10-20%, and maintenance costs by 20-40%. Based on pilot project experiences, these figures are realistic.
Anssi emphasizes that an up-to-date digital twin with transparent and comprehensive data can help get project funding. Preserving and increasing the value of the asset also becomes easier.
Going forward
Aecmaster has recently entered the market, and not everything is yet finalized. Since it requires a renewal of operational practices, the company provides services along with the software, ensuring that customers can realize benefits from the first pilot project.
Entering a new era of building design is a journey, and Anssi and his team want to ensure that it is as smooth as possible for everyone involved and that Aecmaster does not become just another digital disappointment.
As we wrapped up our conversation, it was clear that Anssi Auvinen isn’t just building software; he’s constructing a new reality for the AEC industry.
Contact Aecmaster at https://aecmaster.com/
View the original article and our Inspiration here
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