By leveraging Autodesk Forge, a small start-up, OnTarget, is working to address the woes of the architecture, engineering, and construction industry:

• Projects suffer delays, and cost overruns are standard.
• Billions of dollars are lost annually due to fragmented teams, myriads of different software packages on the same projects, and out-of-date data.

OnTarget believes that these woes can be remedied because the industry is ready for transformation:

• More and more companies are adopting Building Information Modeling. This allows scheduling, cost, and traditional CAD data to be combined.
• Site workers use mobile devices for field work. FAX machines are almost a thing of the past.
• The industry is moving to all digital processes and is ready to tackle big data. What starts out as digital is best kept as digital until just before it becomes a physical reality.

OnTarget aims to ride this wave of transformation by offering an integrated solution that features visual analytics:

image courtesy of OnTarget

The integrated OnTarget solution provides:

• real-time visibility and allows for immediate action
• a single source of truth
• visual and dynamic collaboration

These three tenets of the OnTarget solution make them perfectly suited for Autodesk Forge. Recall that Autodesk Forge is Autodesk's collection of Application Program Interfaces (APIs) and supporting materials (e.g., sample code, documentation) backed by Autodesk and a community of non-Autodesk developers who are using those APIs (e.g., forums).

OnTarget uses the Forge platform as the basis for their 3D viewing:

OnTarget uses the Model Derivative API to convert the original data, their "single source of truth," to the Simple Vector Format (SVF, a format that the browser can display natively) so that teams can collaborate using the Forge Viewer and take action when problems arise. (Perhaps you may have heard of the Forge Viewer by its earlier name when it was used exclusively in Autodesk cloud services, the Large Model Viewer? Well, it's that same time-honored technology.)

The ability to combine 3D plus time (the 4^th dimension) allows OnTarget to:

image courtesy of OnTarget

It's great to see Autodesk Forge in action in the management of real construction projects. Are you ready to ride the wave? Check out Autodesk Forge for yourself.

Visualization is alive in the lab.