American Electric Power (AEP), one of the largest electric utilities in the United States, initiated a major project to enhance substation design practices with Bentley Substation earlier this year. AEP is now making Bentley Substation available to the more than 100 staff members in its transmission and engineering organization and plans to extend the software’s use to also include its primary outsourced engineering contractors. By taking advantage of Bentley Substation’s integrated set of capabilities combining intuitive 3D modeling, electrical design functionality, and automatic bills of materials and report generation, AEP anticipates faster design cycles and improved collaboration across physical and electrical design disciplines. 

“This project will provide a substantial return on investment by allowing projects to be executed more quickly, with better quality, and at lower cost,” said Daniel J. Recker, managing director, transmission engineering. “Smart 3D technology provides a gateway to many future innovations that were not possible with the old system. Not only will station design be revolutionized, but the improvement in project execution cost, speed, and quality will greatly benefit our internal customers in construction management, project management, procurement, dispatching, and maintenance.”

AEP is also implementing Bentley’s AssetWise capabilities to integrate Bentley Substation with existing systems that house data integral to the design processes. AssetWise provided a foundation to integrate with AEP’s Work Management System and serves as a data hub for design. This not only allows data to be concentrated into a primary location for the designers, but also enables an interconnected dataflow from Work Management through AssetWise into Bentley Substation and ProjectWise. In addition, AEP introduced a Lifecycle Management component to support assignment of work orders and status on every object within a design. This enabled the reverse interconnected flow from Bentley Substation back to AssetWise and then into Work Management.