Added Anne-Marie Walters, Bentley global marketing director, “Our new additions to OpenPlant are key facets of our ‘Smart Plan’ ( www.bentley.com/SmartPlan) for PDS users that we introduced in March. The plan provides users of PDS software around the world with an economical migration path that protects their knowledge investments and enables them to reuse their catalogs, specifications, and PDS databases.

“Strategic initiatives such as these have been instrumental in making Bentley the number 1 provider of plant creation software to owner-operators, the number 1 provider of schematics software, and the number 2 provider of plant-creation software overall, as reported annually by Daratech.”

Today’s commercial release of Bentley’s new OpenPlant applications has been highly anticipated by Bentley users. Said Jeanine Hargis, CH2M HILL senior technologist, “CH2M HILL recently completed Bentley’s early access program for the new OpenPlant products, which I see providing opportunities to add value to the project delivery process. We are a global delivery firm focusing in six key markets, so having data-open software that’s compatible with the core tools used on multidiscipline and cross business group projects, such as PDS, AutoPLANT, and PlantSpace, is something we’re really looking forward to.”

Added Brent Mauti, CH2M HILL architect and BIM leader, “I’m impressed with the interoperability that OpenPlant products provide across platforms and business streams, and I will be implementing these products across my business group. As a multidisciplinary firm, our architectural, structural, civil, and piping disciplines and tools for any given project all have to talk to each other. With OpenPlant products, all the tools use the same platform, leverage the same dynamic views and data sources, and provide a single hub of information, helping to improve efficiencies.”

The versatile and productive OpenPlant Modeler V8i provides functionality for piping and equipment, and serves all of the other disciplines involved in real-world plant design projects through Bentley’s V8i intraoperable applications for civil, construction, environmental, building and HVAC, electrical, structural, instrumentation, and process design requirements. OpenPlant Modeler V8i offers infrastructure organizations the ability to:

• rapidly and easily create 3D models using the widely employed and highly intuitive MicroStation V8i user interface, making it the most productive and easy-to-learn “industrial-strength” plant design environment ever introduced;
• easily reuse corporate standards, including piping catalogs and specifications from PDS, AutoPLANT, and PlantSpace, facilitating faster project start-ups and continuity of design;
• review and augment existing PDS designs, through ISO 15926 protocols and/or i-models, to escape proprietary lock-in;
• cut IT costs and meet new budget imperatives.

OpenPlant ModelServer V8i can automatically migrate PDS models, piping catalogs, and piping specifications so data can be reused for design modifications. In addition, it lets infrastructure organizations around the world:

• empower individual users to easily check out the information they need to work on – wherever they are located – and maintain tight version control for all deliverables;
• quickly create reports from any and all project components, enabling the tracking and management of design work distributed to teams;
• simultaneously manage all files and components on a project, reducing both collaboration costs and errors;
• securely administer project contributions across disciplines.

OpenPlant Isometrics Manager V8i provides management control capabilities for pipe models and isometrics from OpenPlant, Bentley plant products, and PDS. It offers users:

• automatic versioning and global distribution of isometrics using ProjectWise;
• the ability to easily create intelligent isometrics that contain component information from multiple sources.

This powerful new functionality is valuable to not only designers and constructors, but also owner-operators, who can use it to automatically, and in real-time, generate required legal and useful documentation from as-built 3D models.

Bentley also announced today the next versions of Bentley OpenPlant PowerPID V8i and ProjectWise PDx Dynamic Review Service V8i. Bentley OpenPlant PowerPID V8i is the only commercial software for process and instrumentation diagrams to be based on a completely open data model. The V8i (SELECTseries 3) version adds support for ProjectWise Managed Workspaces and common specifications/catalogs, and shares the same iRING-enabling schema with OpenPlant Modeler. ProjectWise PDx Dynamic Review Service V8i enables real-time interactive workflows to visualize, query, analyze, and annotate complete PDS data, and to extract i-models and V8 DGN files directly and completely from the PDS relational database.