Bentley Inside Plant

Equipment Placement

Place racks on a floor plan and populate them by specifying a precise rack unit number or position from the top or bottom of the rack. You can even use your mouse to slide the piece of equipment to the desired location in a rack. Racks can be placed on any existing floor plan drawing, and a profile of the rack is created on the fly. Rack kick plate and venting space can be taken into consideration when placing equipment. For cards, click on the Edit Slots icon to open a form that will help you position cards in a chassis. The equipment standards prevent users from placing equipment in the wrong place.

Inside Plant Connections

After equipment is placed, you simply select the two racks containing the equipment you want to connect and a graphical form opens to document the connectivity. You can see a front or back view, existing jumper cables and ports, and can place or disconnect new jumpers.  Again, business rules will prevent connection of two ports that don’t match, such as a coax port with a fiber port or an output port to an output port. Information, including service name, can be added to the jumper when installed and rippled throughout the network. A circuit schematic can be automatically created using the service name.  Connections can also be made from an outside cable to inside equipment.

Connection Report

Bentley Inside Plant provides a Connection Report that allows you to follow the network connectivity throughout the inside and outside plant. You can trace the path upstream or downstream simply by clicking on the next button and the information is updated accordingly. It is possible to review the customers connected to a particular piece of equipment and thus know which customers are affected by equipment upgrades or outages.

Copying Racks

Bentley Inside Plant has many time-saving capabilities such as allowing a user to copy a rack with all its equipment and the jumper connections to a different place in the floor plan. This makes it extremely easy to document similar racks. It is also possible to copy a group of racks, or even an entire inside plant design and simply edit the equipment that needs to be modified for the unique instance.

Rack Elevations

Bentley Inside Plant creates rack elevations on the fly. Raster images of equipment or MicroStation cells can be used to construct the elevation, and you can create both front and back elevations. The rack elevation can be created for a single rack or by selecting multiple racks with a fence. Ports drawn on the rack elevation are displayed with different depictions that show whether or not a jumper is connected.

Circuit Tracing

Bentley Inside plant allows users to follow port connectivity in a rack elevation view just by clicking on a port and navigating from one item of equipment to the next with a simple circuit trace dialog box. 

While navigating through equipment connections, temporary lines are drawn on the elevation to show which equipment ports are connected. Fiber information will be displayed in the circuit trace dialog box if tracing continues to the outside plant. Inside Plant Technicians find the capabilities handy in identifying jumpers and equipment for a specific circuit or optical system.

BOM creation

Bentley Inside Plant will create a bill of material for the current inside plant. The report includes the ID, type, manufacturer part number, internal part number, quantity and cost for the racks and equipment found in the inside plant. Every type of connector, terminator and jumper used are also added and displayed in the report. The report can be saved to a text file format for further processing.

Wire Run Creation

Bentley Inside plant will create a Wire Run Report that shows every jumper installed in a building, on a floor plan, in a rack or on an item of equipment. Cable ID, cable function, cable color, and port, slot, rack and row where both ends of the jumper are connected are displayed in this report. The report can be saved in a text file format, or a CSV file format.

Schematic Creation

Bentley Inside Plant can create schematic or logical diagrams of your facilities. You simply select one of the services previously defined when connecting jumper between equipment ports, and the application will automatically create a schematic of that circuit. Circuit schematics are essential to understanding the path that a circuit takes throughout the equipment.