Boasting sunshine on more than 300 days of the year, Las Vegas draws millions of people to its desert climate. It also draws developers, builders, and owners interested in taking advantage of the weather, the ambiance, and the liberties that Las Vegas is known for throughout the world. The result: the City of Las Vegas averages close to 20,000 permits a year.
Big numbers with big problems behind them. The city was faced with inefficiencies using paper-based plan reviews where plans could only be reviewed one department at a time, taking a week or more each, across a minimum of five different disciplines. Printed mylars then had to be routed to five utility companies for final signatures, a lengthy process which takes up to six weeks.
Storage was also an issue, with paper plans scattered across three different repositories. In addition, when remote working became mandatory due to COVID-19, in-person, paper-based review sessions were no longer possible. The solution was found in technology.
Bluebeam Revu was chosen as a single solution that could combine planning, building, and licensing together into a collaborative digital environment, transforming the city’s paper-based workflows into an electronic plan review process. Bluebeam Studio linked multiple departments, as well as submitters and plan reviewers for real-time concurrent reviews, allowing reviewers to work remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Under the city’s previous process, a customer would come in with 2-3 rolls of plans, for which a technician would create a project number in the city’s permitting system and manually stamp that number on the plans. A physical tag number would also be added for ease of use and location. Plans would then be checked in to the city’s permitting system by the administrative staff and stored in an “active” repository for the plans examiners.
Plans examiners would then send an email to the administrative staff with the plan number when they were ready to review the project. Then the examiner would physically walk to the repository to pick up the plans. The administrative staff would retrieve the plans for the plans examiner and log it out to them. Next, a plans examiner would return the plans when their review was completed and again the administrative staff would check it back into system and store it in the repository for the next reviewer.
When all reviews were done, a technician would collate the final plan, confirm all the pages are included, add additional approval stamps if needed and separate a “job” set copy for the customer. The job set would be stored in the plans area and given to the customer when the permit fees were paid.
Now, reviews are standardized, thanks to Bluebeam’s Markups List and Tool Chest features, which helped improve production times and ultimately facilitated more projects for the city of Las Vegas. Typical of the results is the Circa Hotel & Casino and Garage (Garage Mahal), the tallest and newest hotel in downtown Las Vegas. Reviews on their shell structure started in 2018 on paper before Las Vegas went live with Bluebeam Revu, but their revisions were submitted electronically throughout 2020 and reviewed on Bluebeam.
Building on these tools, Bluebeam has expanded its offering with Bluebeam Cloud, a new suite of mobile and browser-based solutions available globally as part of new subscription plans. According to Bluebeam, Cloud delivers the power of Bluebeam Revu so teams in the field can access critical data and work from anywhere, including from their mobile devices.
Bluebeam Cloud features a flexible Markup Editor for marking up, commenting, and collaborating on project documents, and Field Tools for the management and tracking of punch, RFI, and submittal workflows. These browser and app-based mobile solutions work with existing Bluebeam markups, toolsets, and documents, allowing project data to remain accessible to team members in the office and on the jobsite.
Bluebeam understood work was changing at an incredible pace, and that a total business transformation was required to deliver the value and services necessary to meet the challenge. Bluebeam Cloud represents much more than a software release, it’s the new way of doing business based on partnerships that go beyond just the sale, to deliver better outcomes on every project.
Designed specifically to address the evolving needs of modern hybrid-workplaces, Bluebeam Cloud and Bluebeam’s desktop-based solution Revu are being bundled and offered together as subscription plans for the first time. All subscribers will also receive unlimited data storage, an entire library of Bluebeam University on-demand training resources, and live global technical support. New Bluebeam subscribers can also expect to see additional services added to the subscription offerings in the future.
With the move to subscription, Bluebeam is focused on the areas that would have the greatest impact for streamlining everyone’s access to files and critical data from the office to the field with no disruption. They wanted to make onboarding and training easy with on-demand training and support resources that help customers get even more value from their solutions. With more than 2.5 million users in 165 countries, Bluebeam is increasing its customers’ advantage with the Cloud application.
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