"Millions of rands! That is what is lost in industry every year either in time spent looking for drawings or through construction errors resulting from having the wrong version of a drawing." Says Denis Mullane, Senior Partner, LC Consulting, a committed ProjectWise user. ProjectWise, the engineering information management system from Bentley has received good reviews worldwide.

In South Africa, ProjectWise is installed at more than 15 sites within major organisations. A consulting firm particularly excited about the benefits of ProjectWise is LC Consulting. LC Consulting is a medium sized civil and structural engineering consultancy based in Johannesburg and Cape Town and in Dubai (UAE). The company has a high commitment to technological development and to the use of IT in its work and, as such, has spent considerable time and effort in formulating a technology 'action plan' to move its business forward.

The company has a strong allegiance to its investment in the Bentley suite of software products and, some years ago, set about linking these products together. The fundamental philosophy of the company is quite similar to that of the Bentley organisation, in that it believes that all information should be captured once, accurately, and then be available throughout the full course of the project; indeed for the full life cycle of the built facility.

Integrated design and management

The idea, of developing a CAD-based suite of programs into one unified IT base led to the adoption of ProjectWise as the main backbone of the company's IT system. The adoption of ProjectWise on this basis has led the company to pursue the policy of creating 'one virtual office' in which all of the company knowledge and experience (from all of its physical offices) can be combined seamlessly into any project.

Integrated project management

LC Consulting runs its total business within ProjectWise on a network of leased lines between its offices. This has significantly reduced the time spent in locating information, ie documents from completed projects, specific documents in dispute resolution and all other related problems associated with accessing information which is held within the company.

The use of ProjectWise as the team link on major projects is a new development, which is thus far showing a major return on effort. Currently the full documentation on a head office project for a South African bank is collected on a project network and major efficiencies are being experienced through the system.

In this case a three dimensional building model has been developed by LC Consulting and is held on the company server in Johannesburg. All project documentation developed by the team is loaded on to the server in ProjectWise and all team members have access to the relevant documentation through ProjectWise.

As the major traffic on the project runs between the architect and LC Consulting, these two offices have been linked with a leased 'Diginet' line. Other members of the team are connected through ISDN connections. Access control for security and management of the project has been set up individually with each team member and a system of notification to relevant parties has been set up so that, when any document is published, the intended receipts are automatically notified. The co-ordination of services, structures and architecture is facilitated by the automatic assembly of overlaid drawing files from the various disciplines.

Building libraries

The next step in the 'value capture process' is to extract from existing and new documents a library of standards which could range from engineering details to contractual documentation. The company intends to construct a library of this information for easy access and utilisation on future projects.

"ProjectWise has proved to be invaluable to our company. The high cost of distributing massive sets of documents to all participants through all the design phases of a major project makes it sensible in embracing an IT-based solution such as ProjectWise," says Denis Mullane.

AST Enterprise Engineering

(011) 476 4100