By Tom Fiske, ARC Advisory Group
Summary
Earlier this month, Bentley Systems held its inaugural Be Inspired: Infrastructure Best Practices Symposium and Awards in Charlotte, North Carolina. This provided an opportunity to recognize exceptional infrastructure projects and allow finalists to present the best practices used to implement their projects. The 51 finalists were chosen from projects nominated by more than 250 organizations in 17 categories. Independent panels of infrastructure experts selected the winning projects.
At the event, Bentley observed its 25th year of operations supplying software solutions for infrastructure projects. Looking back over its 25 years in operations, Keith Bentley, CTO and founder, noted that an important element to the company’s success has been strong collaboration with users and professional organizations. Greg Bentley, CEO, explained how the company creates value for its users by, among other things, making software a service. During the opening session, Bentley officials discussed several important announcements concerning acquisitions, partnerships, and product development that enhance the company’s offerings.
The “Be Inspired” finalists were on hand to present their projects and answer questions. The finalists were selected based on several criteria. These included impact of project on team members, overall project management including collaboration, impact on community and region, application of engineering principles, project ROI.
ARC believes that the Be Inspired: Infrastructure Best Practices Symposium and Awards is a great concept. The recipients, who were obviously honored and excited to receive the award, received peer-recognition for their hard work. It is not often for professionals such as these to receive recognition for their innovation and thought leadership outside their own organizations. In addition, the event provides a vehicle for users to share ideas and network among the elite in their fields.
Be Inspired Program
In 2004, Bentley Systems established the Bentley-empowered (Be) Awards program to recognize infrastructure project work innovation and excellence among its users. Since its inception, the program has acknowledged more than 1,000 users for their outstanding projects. This year, the company held its first annual Be Inspired: Infrastructure Best Practices Symposium and Awards to recognize exceptional projects and allows finalists to present the best practices used to implement their projects.
The Be Inspired: Infrastructure Best Practices Symposium and Awards was held in Charlotte, N.C. Architectural, engineering, construction, and geospatial professionals, and owner/operators from around the world attended this invitation-only event. More than 250 organizations nominated projects in 17 categories. From the 250 projects, 55 were selected as finalists to present their projects. Independent panels of infrastructure experts selected the winning projects.
Celebrating 25 Years of Operations
At the conference, Bentley observed its 25th year of operations supplying software solutions for infrastructure projects. Greg Bentley, CEO, and Keith Bentley, CTO and founder, highlighted this milestone in their keynote session. This included a recap of Bentley Systems’ 25-year history, followed by their perspective on business and technology trends that will affect the next 25 years of infrastructure design and information modeling.
Greg Bentley kicked off the keynote session by relaying a message from the governor of Pennsylvania, Edward Rendell, a leading advocate for improving US competitiveness by building and sustaining its infrastructure. Governor Rendell congratulated Bentley Systems for its 25 years of service providing software infrastructure design, construction, and operations.
Looking back over the company’s 25 years in operations, Keith Bentley noted that an important element to its success has been strong collaboration with users and professional organizations. The company spends the majority of its efforts solving problems for existing users. In addition, the company has only changed file formats once in order to maximize its users’ investments in Bentley products and solutions.
Greg Bentley explained how the company creates value for its users by, among other things, making software a service. From the early days of Bentley’s Comprehensive Support Program (CSP), to today’s flexible licensing and support methods, the company continues to innovate to lower the total cost of ownership for its users while increasing their productivity.
Bentley offers several subscriptions-based licensing and support programs.
· The Passport Subscription comprises a discipline-specific portfolio of software products, training courses, and manufacturer’s content for different types of project work.
· The Bentley SELECT subscription program provides flexible and pooled licensing, assisted support, software upgrades to optimize productivity, Annual License Exchange opportunities, along with many other benefits.
· The Bentley Enterprise Licensing Subscription (ELS) reduces annual software costs for large, multi-office, and global organizations responsible for sustaining assets. The ELS provides professionals with unrestricted access to a comprehensive software portfolio for a single annual fee.
· A Bentley LEARN training subscription eliminates training-related travel time and cost, reduces scheduling conflicts, and creates a culture of continuous learning with unlimited access to Live Training and OnDemand eLearning for a fixed annual fee.
Announcements
During the opening session, Bentley officials discussed several important announcements concerning acquisitions, partnerships, and product development that enhance their offerings. For instance, Bentley announced that it had acquired 9SQ Corporation, a provider of integration services and plant design software based in South Korea. Through this acquisition, Bentley extends its ability to support users of plant design software in Korea and the surrounding region and adds PlantWAVE software to its portfolio. With PlantWAVE, users can streamline the production and delivery of 2D orthographic general arrangement drawings for process, power, and offshore and marine industry applications.
Bentley also announced the signing of a definitive agreement to acquire KSJ Beijing Software Technology Co. Ltd., which includes the BridgeMaster product line. BridgeMaster is used to automate production of bridge construction drawings. Bentley’s development plans for BridgeMaster include integration with Bentley’s ProjectWise collaboration system for connecting people and information. Longer-range plans call for integrating BridgeMaster with the Bentley Bridge family of software for modeling, design, and analysis of all bridge types.
In another acquisition, Bentley acquired gINT Software, based out of Santa Rosa, CA. The company provides geotechnical and geoenvironmental products. The company’s newest product, gINT Enterprise, facilitates the reuse of subsurface mapping information to better serve civil, structural, geotechnical, and environmental information processes for owner-operators.
Bentley also recently bolstered its offerings through partnerships. The company entered into a technology agreement with Pointools Ltd., a supplier of high-performance software to exploit point clouds captured by 3D laser scanning of infrastructure assets, including aerial LiDAR surveys. Through this agreement, Bentley licensed Pointools’ Vortex API engine for incorporation in MicroStation and all other software products that leverage Bentley’s platform technology.
The company announced the release of the newest version of MicroStation at the symposium. MicroStation V8i (SELECTseries 1) features numerous enhancements for infrastructure professionals highlighted by RealDWG library support and integrated 3D printing capabilities. SELECTseries updates for all Bentley products maintain forward and backward compatibility across the entire V8i lifecycle.
MicroStation V8i (SELECTseries 1) fulfills its interoperability agreement with Autodesk and provides its users with high fidelity reading and writing of DWG formats. The latest version enables broader reuse of information generated during the design, construction, and operations phases of an asset, and enhances the ability of project teams to choose among multiple software sources.
Also available, is the new release of ProjectWise Navigator V8i (SELECTseries 1), dynamic collaboration software for iterative project review. Infrastructure teams can use this new version of ProjectWise Navigator to interactively view, analyze, and augment project information. To make this process dynamic, so feedback can flow in both directions for any participant to contribute, Bentley also introduced i-models.
An i-model is a container for open infrastructure information exchange. A key characteristic of i-models is “provenance,” or knowledge of its origin and evolution – its change management history. The data-independent i-models store information using industry standards including CIS/2, IFC, and ISO 15926, and are reusable, enabling teams to reference, repurpose, or republish the content to increase accessibility by a wider audience.
Country-Level License Pooling, Bentley’s latest SELECT subscription enhancement, expands the benefits of site-level license pooling. The Country-Level Pooling enables project teams to share software resources across all sites within an individual country. This affords more efficient asset management and more flexible allocation of project work to dispersed professionals to improve workforce utilization.
Passport Subscriptions provide, for named users, an affordable alternative to perpetual license purchases. Passport Subscriptions cater to individual infrastructure practitioners and provide the benefits of “software as a service.” For a single annual fee, a discipline-specific Passport Subscription provides access to the full range of software, training, and content that a project mix typically requires. Subscribing to the appropriate Passport offers an affordable “professional upgrade” in software toolset and skills, for practitioners to quickly make their work more valuable.
Be Inspired Presentations: Year in Infrastructure
The theme for the Be Inspired Awards was “sustaining infrastructure,” which is appropriate considering the focus of Bentley’s users and their emphasis on building infrastructure throughout the world. The finalists were on hand to present their projects and answer questions. The finalists were selected to present their projects based on several criteria including impact of project on team members, overall project management including collaboration, impact on community and region, application of engineering principles, and ROI of the project.
The projects were grouped into several categories including:
· Process Plant, Mining and Power Generation
o Metals and mining
o Oil & gas
o Power generation
o Water and Waste Water treatment
· Building and Structural
o Generative design
o Buildings
o Campuses, airports, and military
o Structural engineering
· Transportation
o Bridges
o Roads
o Rail and transits
· Government and Utilities
o Cadastre and land development
o Utilities
o Water, wastewater, and storm water networks
o Communication networks
The projects ranged in size from tens of thousands, to several billion dollars. The presentations made it apparent that the EPCs are good at collaboration within their organizations, especially at bringing together diverse disciplinary teams from around the world. However, they find it more challenging to effectively communicate and exchange information with equipment suppliers and incorporate as-built information from brownfield projects into their design efforts and 3D models.
Another observation was the difficulty in asset information handover to the owner/operators. Some owner/operators now request that more information be turned over in electronic format. Some are even requesting 3D models and information in digital formats that comply with the ISO 15926 standard. It is still difficult to ascertain if the owners/operators are using this information in operations.
It appeared the most successful handover of asset information includes pre-populating asset maintenance and ERP systems. This is very useful asset information for owners/operators, particularly upon initial startup. Some companies claim benefits, such as being able to start up plants faster and having greater availability during the first year of operation, which results in a quicker and higher ROI.
Most of the presentations were unique in some manner. Several examples of the topics covered include:
An Integrated Geospatial Solution for Mining
This finalist project was done by Anglo Coal of South Africa. Its New Vaal Colliery mine produces 20 million tons of coal per annum. Planning mine operations requires statistical evaluation of numerous databases that are typically viewed sequentially and present numerous problems of assimilating various data for operational decision-making. In addition, proper planning necessitates that planning personnel know to find such data.
The primary objective of the project was to implement a universal system that provides a single data repository, links geo-referenced data, and incorporates all the necessary data for each discipline (survey, planning, geology, environmental, safety, etc.) influencing operations and decision making. To date, Anglo Coal has developed a pilot system linking spatial information (GIS) to various databases to determine high-value operational decisions. Much of the information is linked to survey data. The next phases will improve access and reporting capabilities, along with linking other discipline data to the system.
Casa Grande Water Recover and Reuse Project
Camp, Dresser, & McKee (CDM) conducted the winning project in the water and wastewater treatment plant category. The primary objective was to select technologies, design, and build a near-zero-discharge water treatment facility for a large corn and potato snack food facility. The water recovery treatment system design requirements were to process production wastewater to meet federal primary and secondary drinking water standards and achieve at least 80 percent recycling.
A major challenge for the project was to create an innovate design with all the required technology for water treatment in a compact space within 16 months. The ability to produce 3D and 4D data enabled team members to collaborate more effectively and improve workflow efficiency. Tangible benefits included a 27 percent reduction in labor hours to produce drawings. CDM was also able to reduce the design schedule to four months while better managing more than 3,500 documents in a collaborative environment. This enabled geographically dispersed individuals to function as a team more efficiently. The facilities 4D model will support efficient operations, asset management, and knowledge transfer.
Central Solar PS20
The goal of the project was to design and construct the largest solar power plant in the world. The 80 million euro solar unit has a 20 megawatt capacity, enough to power 12,000 households. Energoprojekt-Gliwice, S.A conducted this winning project in the power generation category. The project highlighted the use of technology to design a clean power source and facilitate collaboration among a multidisciplinary team.
Since this project is using leading-edge technology, the design and material selection was highly dynamic, with constant changes and updates. A system was developed to manage the changes and allow team members to collaborate and use the latest information. Using MicroStation and a variety of other Bentley software products, the company performed basic and detailed design and was able to integrate systems from other suppliers to ensure design and schedule integrity while meeting the rigorous specification of the solar facility.
For a complete list of winners of the Be Inspired Awards click here.
Awards Dinner and Ceremony
The winners of each category were announced during the evening’s awards dinner and ceremony. Music, bright lights, fanfare, and pageantry kicked off the celebration. The ceremony included talks by CEO, Greg Bentley, Jay McGraw, Group Publisher, McGraw-Hill Construction, and the Mayor of Charlotte, Pat McCrory.
Round Table Discussions
The second day of the event featured executive roundtables designed to get a dialog started and exchange ideas on several important user issues.
Last Word
The Be Inspired: Infrastructure Best Practices Symposium and Awards is a great concept. The award recipients were obviously honored and excited to be recognized for their hard work. It is not often that professionals such as these are publically acknowledged for innovation and thought leadership outside their own organizations. In addition, the event provides a vehicle for users to share ideas and network among the elite in their fields.
All Signed-in visitors can view the complete report in pdf format at Bentley Inspires at Infrastructure Best Practices Symposium and Awards
If you would like to buy this report or obtain information about how to become a client, please contact info@arcweb.com