The advantage that we can offer to cities and counties is that we can provide a:
- Building Permit System
- Electronic Plan Check system
- Customer Portal
If a software company can’t provide all three of these, then they really aren’t doing your city any favors. Most companies can offer one or two of these items, but we are one of the few companies that provide all three of these components together.
We brought all of these components together as you really can’t have a complete electronic plan check solution if one of these is missing. Inevitably there would be duplication of efforts without one of these. Without our complete ePC system, there would still be travel cost to the applicant. There would still be printing of paper plans. And there would still be staff time wasted on the data entry and acceptance of plans at the Building and Safety counter.
Some cities only have a Building Permit System. Others have a Building Permit System with an electronic mark-up tool (i.e. Adobe Acrobat). But up until now, very few cities could purchase all three of these software modules together because it has been too costly.
Components
The Customer Portal is the web site that may provide the first interaction between the Customer and your Building Department. This web site needs to be easy to navigate, work across all modern browsers and provide the customer with a solid experience. In our opinion it should also have credit card capabilities for the customer to pay any plan check fees.
The Electronic Plan Check system should have a full set of plan check features that gets out of the way of the Plan Checker. It shouldn’t be overly complicated for the user who is not computer savvy. However, it should provide various measuring and calculation tools for the experienced user too. We have partnered with Bluebeam to provide Bluebeam Studio Project for our electronic plan check. Bluebeam Studio is an industry leading markup tool for the Architect/Engineering/Construction industry which is why we integrated it into our solution.
Last, the Building Permit System is the backbone of any permitting solution. Our Permits system collects the permit data and PDFs from the Customer Portal. Then sends that data and PDFs off to Bluebeam Studio for plan check. Later, it collects the PDF’s and then sends the PDF markups back to the customer’s account. Permits is a complex solution that handles both the paper plan check process and electronic plan check process seamlessly so you can work smarter and not harder.