Since 2013, the Construction PDF Coalition has grown from a handful of frustrated GCs into a grassroots movement driven by the shared pains felt between design, build, inspect, and operate (DBIO) professionals looking to optimize digital handoffs. By capturing and sharing best practices from these digital pioneers, we hope to transform digital practices, as opposed to disrupting them.

There’s confusion impacting the digital progression of the AEC industry: Industry software giants like Autodesk, Trimble and Nemetschek are battling one another for market share of the “connected BIM” utopia, and their marketing sometimes clouds the vision.

在Autodesk 2016年用户会议上的产品主题演讲中，首席产品官Amar Hanspar表现出对AEC专业人员面临的数字合作挑战的尊重。In addition to a bold claim that Autodesk’s latest cloud BIM solution would solve the previous challenges with BIM collaboration because “the data automagically reconfigures itself for the work you are about to do,” Hanspar really lost touch when he casually referred to PDF drawings as “smelly” despite the fact that PDF data loss is most often the result of poor design authoring workflows inside Autodesk products like Revit and AutoCAD than an issue with the PDF format itself.

In a follow-up tweet exchange Hanspar offered to retract the adjective, but not the claim.

The last thing this industry needs is for DBIO professionals to be mislead by promises that technology alone will solve our barriers to collaboration.

The search for a solution

As a project engineer for Skanska USA in 2012, Kyle Hughes experienced first-hand the benefits of managing a “paperless jobsite.” Traditional document control duties often took him an entire Saturday to “slip-sheet” the current paper sets of full-size drawings. But after discovering the batch tool workflows that PDF-based document management system Bluebeam Revu had recently released, Hughes found he could automate both the slip-sheet and detail hyperlinking process with a single, click of a mouse.

Yet, it was while sharing his newfound PDF drawing management process with other project teams inside Skanska, that Hughes found that not all PDF drawing sets behaved the same way. Frustrated and confused, Hughes reached out to Sasha Reed, then director of account services at Bluebeam, to look for a solution.

里德（Reed）听说了其他几个大型GC面临同样挑战的类似PDF质量问题，他们共同决定提出一次思想会议。

CPCOALITION的首次面对面会议于2013年7月在洛杉矶举行。来自美国各地的十几个GC共同分享了PDF的最佳实践和经验教训。在一日讨论之后，如果没有设计师的观点，很明显，下一次会议将不会富有成效。

A year later, the GC veterans were asked to invite any designers they knew who would understand the shared pain-points from a different perspective. The collaborative debate between designers and builders produced eye-opening discoveries that led to the publication of PDF Guidelines for Construction, Version I.

然后，该联盟致力于通过与其他行业组织的合作伙伴关系，包括共识，AGC Bimforum和The Buildingsmart Alliance（BSA）来提高项目级PDF标准的认识和采用。

我们试图传达一条信息，即我们的目标是开源合作，而不是PDF的统治，我们并没有试图脱轨其他标准，例如行业基金会类。

Regardless of the BIM or CAD authoring tool used—Revit, AutoCAD, Microstation, VectorWorks, ArchiCAD, etc.—maintaining the reliability between 2D and 3D project data is a critical step to digital collaboration. While the IFC file format is currently the industry standard for construction and operations data handover, it does not have a 2D drawing viewer.

CPCOALITION认为，PDF和IFC可以同时为不同的项目利益相关者提供不同的目的，但只有在从相同的“单一真实来源”中产生时。

Ever since Adobe relinquished the rights to the PDF file format to the International Standards Organization (ISO) in 2008, PDF has become the de facto file format for both digital collaboration and document security across a wide range of industries. We use the analogy of Google Maps and Google Earth to explain, because each serves a different purpose but both are based on the same underlying data.

CPCoalition引起电子的注意logy firms like Autodesk, Procore, PlanGrid and others. With an ability to influence the development priority and integration strategy between industry standard design and collaboration tools, we see an opportunity to develop a different kind of relationship with the DBIO software industry.

相同的愿景，新方法

The CPCoalition recently filed with the Internal Revenue Service to become a 501c3 non-profit organization with the purpose of helping DBIO professionals maximize digital collaboration through grassroots education and knowledge sharing. Since we remain agnostic about technology platforms and data standards, we allow (and encourage) the transparent review and feedback of current technology. We believe that the democratization of best practices among the practitioners who are implementing them will provide the greatest value to our DBIO members.

同样，到目前为止，CPCoAlion被重新命名为“建筑进步联盟”。尽管目前的重点仍然集中在PDF的建设指南上，但这个新标题更适合我们最初定义的更广泛的愿景：

“通过自适应和开源方法，通过协作指南最大化数字交接的质量和效率。”

This small but significant step recognizes that our purpose, is, in fact, to continue to address the grassroots collaboration challenges faced by our Design, Build, Inspect, and Operate (DBIO) professionals, and not any single issue.

Learn more about opportunities to support our cause at ConstructionProgress.org.

Nathan C. Wood is founder and chief enabling officer at technology integrator, SpectrumAEC which supports the digital transformation of AEC organizations and design-build teams. He also is president of the Construction Progress Coalition.