With the functionality to act as a briefcase, Bentley Facilities Space Planner is the only product in the marketplace that addresses the problem of disconnected workflows between the owner/operator and sub-contractors.
Imagine the following scenario:
You are the facility manager for a large Owner/Operator. Your organization uses ProjectWise for document project collaboration and Bentley Facilities to manage all corporate facilities.
Until recently you faced a serious challenge when your company’s IT department didn’t grant sub-contractors access to the corporate ProjectWise/Facilities database. Subsequently, floor plan changes and related Facilities data could only be updated by your own internal people, giving you little options to contract out.
The Bentley Facilities Briefcase capability is the solution to this problem.
Here is how it works:
(1) The Owner Operator exports floor plans, references and related facilities information out to the subcontractor.
Using the Briefcase export capability, Bentley Facilities Space Planner allows users to export a single facilities floor plan AND the associated (ProjectWise/Facilities) database information into a compact single dgn file (the briefcase). Plans are marked as exported in ProjectWise. ProjectWise functionality can be used to separately copy out or export out the desired references to the master document.
(2) The Subcontractor edits the data with a desktop client while being disconnected from ProjectWise and the Facilities database.
Within the Bentley Facilities Space Planner client, he or she has capabilities like navigating a hierarchy of the data in his designfile, locating and highlighting objects from the navigation tree, searching for information, running thematic maps and reports, labeling the floor plan and of course modifying any type of facilities attribute information related to the data in his file.
(3) The Owner Operator gets the modified floorplans back from the Subcontractor and imports and synchronizes them back into the PW datasource. Both graphics and Facilities data are synchronized.
Unique ProjectWise document identifiers are embedded in the exported file. No mismatches can happen during import of the file. Upon import the user gets to see a list of changes: Created, modified and deleted content.
The import is created in a specific facilities proposal version so that after the import is done and the results are unsatisfactory the proposal can be ignored and deleted.