The amount of data generated for a construction site has skyrocketed. BIM models are larger and more detailed than ever. Doing as-built measurements and recording construction progress with laser scans can generate tremendous point cloud files and digital video files. Other sensors record and stream data continuously.
In short, we have a torrent of data that spills all over the place. It’s all very disorganized. It’s as if everybody has thrown books and magazines through a front door.
So it appeared to tech-founder-turned-investor Thiago da Costa as he was having an apartment building built. But where others saw chaos, the serial entrepreneur saw an opportunity. Da Costa founded Toric to pick up all those books and magazines and organize them on a shelf.
Toric is an online platform that aims to put all the data associated with a building, however complex and large, on the cloud and make it easy to find.
The name Toric comes from the lens. Da Costa chose the name because it means focusing.
“We do it with integrations,” said Da Costa. Indeed, Toric has integrations for Archicad, Revit, Autodesk BIM360, Oracle Primavera, Microsoft SharePoint, Excel and QuickBooks, to name just a few. Having databases, BIM files and spreadsheets all in one place makes for easier data integrations, visualization and sharing, according to Toric’s website.
That didn’t happen. SOLIDWORKS retained its title. But the young challenger did catch the eye of Carl Bass, then CEO of Autodesk, who paid Da Costa a king’s ransom ($60 million) for Lagoa. The plan was to catch up with and pass Onshape, which was well underway with its cloud- and Parasolid-based modeler. Autodesk had let the MCAD market slip away once before (to SolidWorks) and was not about to let it happen again with Onshape.
Enter Spreadsheet Hell
The ubiquitous spreadsheet, originally meant to just add up rows and columns for financial purposes, can grow to contain hundreds of functions and formulas in the hands of architects, engineers and constructors who must manage, design and build big projects. Spreadsheets are the Swiss Army knife of applications—able to adapt to do whatever is needed, whether it be making calculations, making to-do lists, generating bills of material or cutlists, providing project management, and so on. Everybody has access to a spreadsheet and there is always an Excel wizard who can make the spreadsheet perform any of the aforementioned functions. Never mind that the formulas are difficult to decipher and impossible to maintain. Or the spreadsheet is stretched thin to apply itself to tasks that its inventors[i] never imagined.
The spreadsheet’s versatility and popularity are also its curse. An organization married to its customized, complex spreadsheets will not jump on simpler, more reliable, purpose-built and optimized versions to complete a task. For example, PLM applications, specifically made to manage products and processes for an organization, will be held off in favor of spreadsheets that have been laboriously jerry-rigged to accomplish the same purpose.
Static vs. Dynamic
While at Autodesk, Da Costa found himself using the company’s AEC software for building design, but when it came to planning for construction, he had only spreadsheets.
“The good news is that I’m a master of spreadsheets,” he says.
But the spreadsheets quickly became a nightmare. One spreadsheet had over 30 tabs. Pivot tables. Using spreadsheets for takeoffs and estimates was possible, but only with great effort. Even worse than their complexity was that they were static—when the design was dynamic.
In the end, the building was six months late in getting built and went 10 percent over budget. It could have been even worse. On average, a building project slips 20 months and runs 80 percent over budget, according to a McKinsey report.
Furthermore, a data entry or change was unaccountable. A design review would grind to a halt when no one could tell why a change was made or who made it.
A spreadsheet must have data entered manually, so it is difficult to have it keep up with a building project that is changing as rapidly as its construction. Clearly, there had to be a better way, and that way—Da Costa’s Eureka moment—was integration. The trick was not to do away with spreadsheets but to have them updated automatically.
In-House vs. Professional Solutions
Big AEC firms have tried to automate updates and move beyond the manual updating of spreadsheets. They also build dashboards so building planners can get the big picture at a glance. The most innovative firms may even try to create a digital twin of the building—a database and 3D model—that mimics one or more aspects of the physical building
Da Costa would like to relieve them of the task of creating and collecting all the tools required to define, document and manage a building and connecting all the stakeholders to what they need access to, either in parts or in whole. Why should a construction company have to become a software company? he asks rhetorically. Software development is not their core competency. Their pipelines connecting their siloes of data will invariably break, says Da Costa. Best to leave the software to software developers, those who code for a living, who are good at it and keep to best practices in coding, unlike amateurs who don’t document code, care for updating it, and so on.
We’re not surprised at the audacity of Toric to jump into the deep end of construction with a platform for AEC. Da Costa, a mechanical engineer but also a serial entrepreneur, has realized that mechanical design is more or less a solved problem. Mechanical design already has all its data in order, is under the control of PLM systems, and is integrated with business processes. The AEC market, in contrast, is still the Wild West. AEC projects are huge and its data is in disarray—and therefore, has enormous potential.
If Da Costa knows of any AEC software vendors that are already offering data platforms for AEC, he does not let on. We know that Autodesk, Bentley and Trimble have solutions that offer to unify data and “break down data siloes,” and so on. We also know that software vendors insist their solutions have no equal.
Toric has raised $16 million in funding. Investors include Carl Bass, former CEO of Autodesk, and PlanGrid cofounder Ralph Gootee.
[i] Paper spreadsheets were tables of numbers used by bookkeepers and accountants. Rows and columns of numbers were summed by hand. Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston are credited for the first electronic spreadsheet on a personal computer, VisiCalc, for the Apple II in 1979. Changing a number in a table and having the sum automatically was like magic—and the main reason personal computers were adopted by businesses.