Expect EADOC SaaS functionality to grow and extend to other Bentley CONNECT Edition solutions, says Eric Law.
The November 2015 Bentley Systems Year in Infrastructure conference in London provided the perfect opportunity to get an update from Eric Law of California, USA-based EADOC, acquired by Bentley Systems in March 2015. I was also able to see a presentation from a Be Inspired Awards “Innovation in Construction” finalist, engineering firm HDR, who presented their work on the Los Osos wastewater project in California, which deployed EADOC, and this case study helped explain the fit between EADOC and its new sister products.
EADOC and Bentley convergence
EADOC founder Eric Law is now a senior director of product management at Bentley, applying his project management software experience to a Bentley Project Delivery solutions portfolio which includes EADOC, ProjectWise and Navigator. The EADOC capital project management cloud-based solution helps construction managers and infrastructure owners gain real-time visibility into risks and costs.
Eric retains key responsibilities at EADOC including development of the EADOC software user interface so that it will reflect the Bentley look and feel; for example, its project performance dashboard is expected to resemble the dashboards of other Bentley software products. At the same time, Eric anticipated some of the EADOC cost management functionality beginning to surface in other Bentley CONNECT Edition products, alongside scheduling information.
Care had been taken to position EADOC as a construction management product separate to the ProjectWise collaboration platform, with the two products regarded as complementary not competing. More generally, now as part of Bentley’s sales effort, global visibility of the EADOC product had also grown, Eric said, with account managers in Europe, the Middle East and Australia now familiar with an increasingly internationalised product previously only marketed in the United States.
As a SaaS, multi-tenant, web-based tool, Eric also expected the EADOC product to develop as a real-time mobile tool too (potentially with location capability – it is already integrated with ESRI GIS, used at Los Osos).
Los Osos
Following a moratorium in place since 1988, the County of San Luis Obispo, California, undertook construction of a US$180m wastewater treatment system consisting of 49 miles of pipelines, 580 manholes, 4,700 laterals, 21 pump stations, a 1.2 million-gallon-per-day tertiary treatment plant with 34 storage ponds, and 100 percent recycling through irrigation and groundwater percolation.
A major goal for HDR, Ron Perkins said, was to minimise the impact of construction on residents, who had opposed the project. EADOC was used to connect the geographically dispersed project team, exchange information, and conduct public outreach through its GIS interface – with teams challenged to complete streetwork sections in under 40 days, and progress tracked through red (in progress), amber (imminent) and green (completed) RAG reporting.
The EADOC toolset helped reduce costs associated with building the project and managing public relations, and is expected to help reduce future costs for operations and maintenance. Eric told me EADOC Archives can be output for the client as parsable XML data – not just in static PDFs – capable of being shared with other applications.
Post-script
This week (11 February 2016), Bentley has underlined the attractiveness of Bentley’s EADOC to water-related projects, announcing that California’s Carollo Engineers has chosen the cloud-based construction management software as its corporate standard for capital project management. However, it would be wrong to think it’s just for water projects – EADOC is also used extensively for other civil engineering projects.
[This is the latest of several blog posts held over from 2015 due to pressures of other work. I’m slowly catching up….]
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