New Report Places Bentley's OpenPlant Products at the Forefront of Interoperability and Plant Creation

Early Adopters and Industry Analyst Schnitger Applaud OpenPlant’s Leveraging of Design Data Throughout Plant Lifecycle as Bentley Releases SELECTseries 3.

Bentley Systems, Incorporated, the leading company dedicated to providing comprehensive software solutions for sustaining infrastructure, today announced that a new report from industry analyst Monica Schnitger, of Schnitger Corporation, puts Bentley’s OpenPlant products for plant creation at the forefront of data interoperability. Improved interoperability, says the report, enables owner-operators to achieve faster project completion and more efficient operations. Schnitger cites comments by early adopters of OpenPlant – including CH2M HILL, Hatch, RAFAKO, and DuPont – offering enthusiastic support for the software’s use of ISO 15926 as its intrinsic data model to meet the real-time interoperability goal of the iRING user community. Excerpts of these comments, along with remarks from early adopter MWH Global, appear later in this press release.

Schnitger Corporation’s publication of its findings comes as Bentley announces the SELECTseries 3 versions of Bentley OpenPlant Modeler V8i, Bentley OpenPlant ModelServer V8i, and Bentley OpenPlant Isometrics Manager V8i. These enhanced offerings introduce support for European and DIN engineering standards, water and wastewater treatment industry standard fittings, and HVAC design and modeling functionality, and provide multiple project support across a single data source, lowering administrative costs. In addition, isometrics generation becomes a stand-alone application, creating isometrics from OpenPlant, AutoPLANT, and PDS without requiring a modeling license.

OpenPlant: Taking ISO 15926 from Theory to Practice

Schnitger states in the report, “Bentley has been working with ISO and the iRING community to take ISO 15926 from theory to practice. It is the first independent software vendor to provide solutions using ISO 15926 as a data model rather than as an electronic data interchange filter on top of otherwise proprietary tools. Bentley’s OpenPlant engineering and design solutions use ISO 15926 to capture, maintain, and present information in the right format to engineering, construction, and operations throughout each phase of a plant’s lifecycle.”

Commenting on the added advantages Bentley’s i-model technology brings to OpenPlant, Schnitger said, “Bentley has also developed the i-model, a container for open, bidirectional infrastructure information exchange. An i-model can encapsulate just about anything – an Autodesk Revit model or a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet – and i-models can now be accessed using the ISO 15926 standard. This extends the reach of OpenPlant into the many other domains that are crucial to the complete design of a plant – such as architecture, civil engineering, procurement, and construction.

“Owners are looking at OpenPlant and ISO 15926 to create mechanisms that leverage much of this data for the lifecycle of the plant. EPCs are interested in ISO 15926 and OpenPlant because a standards-based workflow will allow them to better control the millions of documents created during the design and construction of a plant and enable them to more effectively collaborate within their enterprises and with owners and partners.”

OpenPlant SELECTseries 3

The SELECTseries 3 versions of Bentley’s OpenPlant products introduce the following benefits:

Bentley OpenPlant Modeler V8i – Supports EN and DIN standards as well as American Water Works Association (AWWA) standard fittings, enabling users to deliver European projects and water and wastewater projects faster by reducing setup times; also adds HVAC design and modeling capabilities, extending the breadth of disciplines supported, to streamline processes, reduce errors, and resolve clashes earlier for power, mining and metals, water and wastewater, and high-tech projects;

Bentley OpenPlant ModelServer V8i – Provides multiple project support across a single data source, lowering administrative costs and increasing coordination between projects;

Bentley OpenPlant Isometrics Manager V8i – Offers stand-alone capability enabling users to more easily generate isometrics from model sources such as AutoPLANT, OpenPlant, and PDS.

Commenting on the enhanced versions of the OpenPlant products, Bentley Vice President Ken Adamson said, “OpenPlant combines the power of the underlying MicroStation platform with ISO 15926 for truly open information modeling. It also leverages the ProjectWise collaboration and work-sharing platform for integrated projects, resulting in federated engineering content delivering rich information models that can be fully utilized in operations. Accordingly, owner-operators can employ Bentley’s AssetWise asset lifecycle information management software to use these information models to improve operational performance, safety, and compliance. The SELECTseries 3 release of the OpenPlant products more broadly extends all of these capabilities.”

The newly enhanced OpenPlant products are immediately available for download by Bentley SELECT subscribers at www.bentley.com/selectservicesdownloads. For additional information about Bentley’s OpenPlant products, visit www.bentley.com/openminds.

What Bentley software users are saying about OpenPlant

“We have dozens of users for OpenPlant right now but are building master schemas and developing ways of deploying it more broadly using ProjectWise, possibly to hundreds or thousands of users over time.

“OpenPlant’s scalability lets us transfer and share work between locations. Our back- office tools won’t change, but the front-end design tools can be what’s best for each project.” – Rob Brawn, Director of Automation Systems Integration, CH2M HILL

“We want contractors to use whatever engineering and design tools they want. Specifying which tools contractors must use leads to surcharges and delays when they don’t have trained people available. But this means that we receive data in all sorts of formats at handover.

“DuPont sees ISO 15926 as crucial in making use of design deliverables to maintain and operate our plants.” – Chris Schwander, Engineering Systems Competency Leader,

DuPont Engineering

“We’re trying to solve the problem of n! connections – between the different teams of designers and engineers, from design to construction, from one partner to the other – and only an approach like ISO 15926 can work to make data accessible to the right people in the right format.

“When plant operators want to maintain a pump, they need to have all of the manuals, how to do maintenance, information about spare parts, and so on available in a database. When we hand a facility over to the operator, we need to do a wholesale transfer of information. By using software compliant with ISO 15926, we can use systems that make sense for the project and transfer that information in a way that they can import into their own systems, without losing any of the knowledge that went into it.” – Peter Blake, Director of Project Delivery Group, Hatch Chile

“At MWH Global we pride ourselves in being a leader in wet infrastructure, which includes the water/wastewater treatment market. We have been a user of Bentley’s plant design tools and ProjectWise for many years and have been evaluating OpenPlant. We are delighted with its improved user interface, which helps us be more productive, as well as with its support for open standards, which will enable us to interoperate with our clients and partners to deliver a higher quality product. OpenPlant combines the best design functionality with management tools to deliver plant designs to multiple industries through strong collaboration, productivity, and open information deliverables.” – William Vogel, CAD Systems Manager for MWHA, MWH Global

“OpenPlant and the i-model framework enable us to exchange data with partners that use Bentley’s or other plant design solutions. We also see the openness of Bentley’s solutions in general as very important because no one tool is good for doing everything. We use a number of CAD and other programs, such as analysis tools, during our design process. We need to have a single platform where we can gather all of the different types of data to perform collision detection and optimize equipment arrangements.

“OpenPlant is a modern, open solution with bigger possibilities now and in the future. We can do our jobs better with this system than with other plant design systems.” – Zbigniew Harezlak, Engineering IT Manager, RAFAKO S.A.