ORLANDO, Fla. – ARC World Industry Forum – Feb. 7, 2011 – Bentley Systems, Incorporated, the leading company dedicated to providing comprehensive software solutions for sustaining infrastructure, today announced its first release of eB Insight, the foundation of Bentley’s AssetWise platform. First introduced a year ago at the 2010 ARC World Industry Forum, AssetWise provides operations information modeling that increases the return on investment for owner-operators of infrastructure assets. Bentley’s new eB Insight features powerful asset lifecycle information management (ALIM) capabilities to manage change and to control information throughout the life span of infrastructure, ensuring the delivery of relevant, trusted information, in context, to operations, where and when it is needed. Uniquely integrating configuration and change management best practices with advanced information modeling, the new release enables owner-operators to:

• further reduce the cost of operations,
• improve decision making,
• more efficiently meet regulatory and compliance requirements,
• reduce business risk,
• increase safety and performance.

eB software, which Bentley added to its portfolio through its acquisition of Enterprise Informatics in February 2010, is a leading mainstay in nuclear operations – one of the most heavily regulated industries in the world – where it is deployed in power generation units, fuel processing, waste management, and research. Among other sectors globally taking advantage of eB software are energy companies, rail, government, and construction. Representative users of eB include Constellation Energy, Ameren Corporation, Nuclear Fuel Services, Crossrail, Rolls-Royce, City of Las Vegas, Colorado Springs Utilities, CH2M HILL, Aker Solutions, South African Airways, De Beers, and Network Rail.

Sid Snitkin, vice president and general manager of enterprise advisory services, ARC Advisory Group, said, “With the new release of eB Insight, the market is finally getting what it has been looking for – Asset Lifecycle Information Management software that can address both operational optimization of asset performance and engineering content from modifications and upgrades to existing assets. This puts Bentley in the singular position of being able to improve infrastructure asset operations across the entire lifecycle – delivering Project Information Management through Bentley’s ProjectWise and Asset Information Management for engineering and operations content through AssetWise.”

Alan Kiraly, Bentley vice president, Operations Products, said, “With Bentley’s first release of eB Insight, our AssetWise initiative has come to fruition. eB Insight supports the delivery of innovative and robust asset information modeling and management capabilities to owner-operators, enabling them to realize the full potential of intelligent, better-performing infrastructure assets. In Bentley’s continuing development of eB Insight, we are able to take advantage of the company’s extensive project and engineering content experience and knowledge to increase the fidelity with which our AssetWise platform deals with project deliverables throughout an asset’s lifecycle.”

What’s New in eB Insight?

eB Insight maintains the network of information relationships needed to combine operations effectiveness and efficiency with safety and compliance. The new release of eB Insight enables users to define unique information relationships in addition to those provided out of the box. Information classifications and behaviors can be configured to enforce predefined business rules that must be met during the lifecycle of the information. For example, eB Insight can ensure relationships are established between a project, physical items, responsible people, standard operating procedures, tag numbers, and records management file plans before a package of information can be approved and delivered for use on a work order. 

Also new is information scoping, which enables multi-asset control and segmentation of information. This feature is extremely useful for fleets of operating plants where overlapping fleet-wide and asset-specific configurations, information models, and operations must be managed independently. Secure user roles determine access, and selected scopes determine visible information. This provides an asset-specific user experience while supporting the consolidation and reporting of fleet-wide information and key performance indicators (KPIs). The new release also expands role identification and information access to include hierarchical roles based on the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) standard on Role-Based Access Control.

Another innovative feature enables the creation of an information “snapshot” that documents the current network of relationships for any information at any point in time. A snapshot is a static record that can be rendered in different formats (e.g., XML, PDF, etc.), making it available for a compliance audit or to package information to be transferred to other systems. A Change Package snapshot, for example, could include all impacted physical assets, documents, responsible people, and approval workflows. Enhanced auditing and traceability features include a complete historical view of the asset information, from creation to deletion, which improves governance and compliance controls.

New eB Insight handover services are based on its ability to publish independent information packages that contain comprehensive asset information (engineering, configuration, procedural, and operational) for archiving and reuse. Handover packages can be defined using a combination of explicit references and/or searches and can be published at lifecycle milestones or on demand. The packaged information can be navigated via web pages and includes content from the eB Insight repository and any federated information source. This information is used to provide evidence for regulatory compliance audits or to transfer information to other enterprise systems.

Moreover, operations personnel can now enter knowledge items through intuitive forms as part of normal business processes. The captured knowledge items are then linked to all other relevant interrelated data so they are visible when information is being accessed or changed, making the knowledge actionable when and where it is relevant.

eB Insight also provides greater support for the management and control of federated information. Its networks of relationships can encompass information in third-party content management systems (including EMC Documentum, IBM FileNet, and Microsoft SharePoint) and can create relationships that enable control, access, and change management as if the information were stored in the eB repository. Accordingly, KPI dashboards can be configured to uniquely present a system-wide view.

Finally, recognizing the broad acceptance of Microsoft SharePoint for content management, the new release of eB Insight provides a rich set of services for seamless integration with SharePoint. The new software can automatically provision a SharePoint site and populate it with controlled information that maintains the interrelationships with the information network being managed by eB Insight. It also supplies SharePoint “web parts” that provide seamless user access to information controlled by eB Insight.

What Analysts and Users Are Saying About eB Insight

“The new major release of eB Insight, one year after the acquisition of Enterprise Informatics, demonstrates that Bentley has successfully integrated the development teams and is executing on its commitment to the AssetWise initiative. The ability to control information visibility with role-based security for large diverse project teams is well suited for asset information management for operations of complex infrastructure projects.” – Martin Gandar, Associate Senior Research Analyst, Ovum – Butler Group

 “By integrating eB into Energy Solutions’ business processes, we have been able to establish a suite of robust systems that support over 5,000 users worldwide, meeting our specific needs for document control, human performance, condition reporting, requirements management, and occupational medicine. As a result of these systems, we have realized marked improvements in quality and efficiency within our records management, document control, and condition reporting processes. In 2011 Energy Solutions will expand deployment of eB Nuclear across three business groups around the globe.” – Philip Coretti, Vice President, Environmental, Health, Safety, Quality, and Security, Government Group, Energy Solutions 

A particularly notable testimonial comes from the head of technical support services for Crossrail, London’s $24.5 billion railway project that is the largest construction project in Europe. Crossrail recognized that “information is the blood that flows through the project’s veins,” and is at the heart of how Crossrail will be achieved. It chose Bentley’s ProjectWise as its project team collaboration and work sharing platform to manage the design and engineering information among the many multidisciplinary firms concurrently working on this megaproject. When Bentley announced its AssetWise initiative, Crossrail evaluated eB Insight and determined it was the ideal complement to ProjectWise to manage the extensive and multidimensional requirements of the project and ensure regulatory compliance over its lifecycle.

“At the beginning of October 2010, Crossrail successfully launched the first phase of its implementation of the eB Document Control system, covering three large contracts and around 240 users.  Eventually we anticipate eB will store, manage, and transmit over 2 million project-critical documents by over 2,000 people, and so far so good. Our users have quickly taken to the new software, impressed not only by its ease of use, but also the significant improvement we have seen against our old transmittal processes, cutting the time taken to complete these from hours to minutes.” – Malcolm Taylor, Head of Technical Support Services for Crossrail