Provides Improved Project Performance via Instant-on Environment With Pre-configured Best Practices to Serve All Design and Engineering Firms

LOS ANGELES — (BUSINESS WIRE) — September 25, 2014 — Bentley Systems, Incorporated, the leading company dedicated to providing comprehensive software solutions for sustaining infrastructure, today announced the availability of ProjectWise Essentials, a cloud-based, instant-on design integration environment for all projects. This “software at your service” provides immediate access to key advantages of ProjectWise, the world’s leading design collaboration and work sharing solution, while enabling user organizations to further benefit from a budget-friendly, predictable cost model.

ProjectWise helps AEC project organizations avoid risk and stay competitive by enabling high performance project delivery. It provides information mobility with integrity, cross-functional work process management, and change management to increase information quality and visibility throughout the project lifecycle.

Deployed in 101 countries, ProjectWise is the design integration and collaboration system of choice for all of the ENR Top 25 Design Firms, the majority of U.S. state departments of transportation, and 81 of the ENR Top 100 Design Firms, with over $120 billion in annual design billings. With ProjectWise, these firms report 14 percent higher professional utilization (than comparable firms without ProjectWise) and are assured that every hour of professional work is fully leveraged for project advantage, without waste or risk.

Susan Brandt, Bentley vice president, ProjectWise collaboration products, said, “While projects may vary in size and complexity, all projects benefit from a robust collaboration platform, and all firms and all engineers benefit from work sharing. That’s why I’m excited that we’ve extended the ‘industrial-strength’ ProjectWise to all design and engineering firms, enabling each to realize the benefits being achieved by the top AEC organizations around the world. Our cloud-based ProjectWise Essentials ‘software at your service’ eliminates the necessity of system or server administration – which might have posed particular challenges for smaller firms and projects – and gains are immediate. For example, ProjectWise Essentials is engineered to painlessly overcome the ‘big file problem’ when work sharing across offices in different locations.”

Within the ProjectWise Essentials environment, geographically dispersed teams managing projects small to “mega” in size and scope can leverage industry standards and best practices required to speed secure information sharing and the exchange and delivery of project drawings, models, documentation, and complex reference files – in support of applications commonly used in AEC projects, including Revit and AutoCAD Civil 3D. This increases team productivity, mitigates project risk, lowers costs, and improves project performance. ProjectWise Essentials also improves the fidelity and reliability of this information – through, for example, the provisioning of provenance and audit trails – reducing redesigns and the risk of errors.

In addition, ProjectWise Essentials enhances the agility that design and engineering firms need to quickly respond to varying project requirements, improving operational readiness as well as return on investment. In this instant-on collaboration environment, project teams, including site personnel, are connected virtually. To achieve information mobility with integrity, they are granted immediate and secure online, offline, and web access to design and construction information. The included Bentley CONNECTIONS Passports entitle ProjectWise Essentials participants to use all of Bentley’s mobile apps, including Bentley Map Mobile, Field Supervisor, InspectTech Collector Mobile, Navigator Mobile, ProjectWise Explorer Mobile, and the Bentley LEARN App.

User organizations further benefit from the ability to:

• take advantage of the industry standards and best practices required to support today’s BIM workflows across distributed teams;
• control access to BIM models, support version control, and manage change in associated models – contributing to better cost control and construction quality;
• automate the management of complex relationships among documents and components;
• share large work-in-progress datasets across offices in real time and instantly communicate design changes made by others without the need to resend large files;
• control access to documents; and
• search easily at both the file and component levels.

Moreover, ProjectWise Essentials lets project teams interact with project information in views that directly relate to their specific task requirements – without needing the authoring applications. These views include a spatial view for map-based navigation, a web view for online browser access, a permissions view for access control management, a dependency view for understanding and managing complex file relationships, and a component view to search across 2D and 3D content.