"It is official. With the acquisition of Rebis, Bentley Systems is now the biggest supplier of plant technology in South Africa with around 70% of all users on one of our two premier Plant solutions, PlantSpace or AutoPLANT," says Tex van Deventer, managing director of Bentley Systems South Africa.

"And to add to our impressive product range, aimed at serving MicroStation and AutoCAD users, we now have the services of Caddman, a company that has been the leading force in AutoPLANT in Africa for nearly a decade. We are delighted that we will be able to call on their solid skills base in this very important business sector."

At the heart of Bentley's activities in the plant industry are a number of core values. These core values have led to a value proposition, which helps define Bentley's ongoing objectives for the development of its software offerings, and together they form a clear plan for shaping the plant industry's technical needs both current and future.

These core values spring from an understanding of the needs of the plant industry. Needs such as information access, data reuse, scalable applications, and links to ERP systems such as SAP, with which Bentley is intimately familiar.

These key needs are the drivers of Bentley's values for plant and the company's commitment to these need-based values in the development of its applications has helped Bentley achieve its leadership position in the plant industry.

Modern information tools

Bentley's dedication to provide modern information tools has led to advances in intelligent modelling that improve the project design process, and to making data instantly accessible and simpler to manage.

Plant engineering content is not a neat collection of documents and files that can be readily stored in a relational database. Such data is typically quite complex, encompassing varying formats, both intelligent and non-intelligent drawings, geospatial and schematic representations, and so on. In addition, there is typically an array of application-specific files associated with the drawings and models.

Such content can be made available to the multitude of 'consumers' within the broader enterprise context, increasing the return on the original investment in creating that data. Bentley's content management and publishing platform greatly simplifies the configuration of servers, clients and licensing aspects of implementation.

Concurrent engineering

Today's projects are often executed in diverse geographic locations. Bentley provides solutions that support those work processes that take place in diverse locations.

Shared intelligent project environments are essential to performing concurrent engineering, which leads to a quicker time to market. Concurrent engineering supports compressed schedules with multiple, dependent, overlapping design phases.

AEC content created by applications both documents as well as components can be managed and published via Bentley's content management and publishing platform.

Bentley ProjectWise provides a set of services known as connectors, which connect applications to Bentley ProjectWise so that data can be moved to and from engineering creation tools, or to and from EPCs and owner/operators.

Productivity through data re-use

Bentley's solutions emphasise the 'create ones - use many' philosophy wherever possible. The technology enables engineering content to be published and distributed in a variety of formats.

The technology is open and customisable, providing for access to corporate databases as part of the design process.

Bentley also provides a variety of client applications to enhance the end users' ability to extract value from the content. Users can also access content through the Web or other third party portals.

'eWarehouse' from ESSI, used in conjunction with Bentley ProjectWise, provides a full plant lifecycle repository.

Facility lifecycle management

Tools such as Bentley ProjectWise provide an effective means for presenting enterprise level information in the context of the engineering content to users throughout the enterprise.

Components - the individual elements and features that comprise a completed project exist at a much finer granularity than the files containing the drawings, maps and models. It is common for the information about any single component to be spread throughout the content.

Bentley's tools for managing engineering information at both the component level and the document level are a cornerstone of its offerings. This is one of Bentley's key strengths.

"It is about applying the business rule-based integration technology that is delivered with the content management and publishing products," says van Deventer. "This technology automatically associates enterprise information, from the enterprise systems such as SAP, with the engineering content. The result is the ability to publish an enterprise view of the engineering content."

For more information contact Bentley Systems SA on 011 462 5811, or Caddman on 011 974 3333.