Scheduled Maintenance
Scheduled maintenance and server upgrades are scheduled to begin on Saturday October 21st at 1:00 AM EST. We expect the application to be unavailable for a period of 10-15 minutes.
Scheduled maintenance and server upgrades are scheduled to begin on Saturday October 21st at 1:00 AM EST. We expect the application to be unavailable for a period of 10-15 minutes.
Database upgrades and maintenance are scheduled to begin on Sunday September 3rd at 1:00 AM EST. We expect the application to be fully operational within 30 to 90 minutes.
The idtPlans development team has been working hard to both make improvements to system performance, as well as implement a variety of client feature requests. Here’s a brief rundown of the improvements and new features that you may have missed.
General System Improvements
Plan Review
Fees & E-Commerce
Inspections
Coming Soon!
There are so many organizations that benefit from using our electronic plan review software, that we here at idtPlans thought it might be a good idea to share some of their perspectives with you. To that end, we’ve started a new quarterly blog series where we can highlight some of the great folks out there using idtPlans, and share how it has affected their day-to-day work.
Lauren Simmons, AICP
The City started looking for ways to use planning staff’s time more efficiently in a fast-paced growth environment. I came on board with the City of Brighton in early 2015 and saw a great opportunity to use technology to assist planners in managing development projects with electronic plan review. I had worked in a municipality that was using electronic plan review in my previous position and saw that it enabled staff to not only easily manage their own projects in a high-growth environment, but allowed staff to comfortably manage more concurrent projects than Brighton staff were managing at the time.
We met with idtPlans’ staff once a week via GoToMeeting in order to go through all of our paper applications, workflows, processes, and regulatory items. After seven months of steady work from the City’s staff and the staff at idtPlans, we were ready to go fully electronic with a custom website containing all of our land use applications including rezoning, site plans, annexations and plats. idtPlans staff customized the software and work flows where we needed to accommodate our processes and regulatory environment.
We looked at a few different systems and found that idtPlans had the specific plan review software that we were looking for. Some vendors had a program that we could use for plan review, but it was intended as document review and storage software, or their software did not have all the capability we were looking for. We were also impressed with idtPlans’ support program and ability to customize the review process with the software and the user-friendly interface.
Our review process before idtPlans depended on the Planner managing the review process by creating review memos, setting up tracking, sorting plan packages, and managing emails and the applicant’s responses. We used many programs that did not talk to each other, so it was up to the Planner to keep track of everything. idtPlans cuts down the original time it takes to send out plans from several hours to just a few clicks of the mouse. We also started using Bluebeam (software) which has been a great improvement over redlining plans manually.
Definitely adding Bluebeam to our review process. We were redlining plans before, but each reviewer was redlining separately. Bluebeam allows for each reviewer to redline the plans in real time, which reduces redundant comments and allows everyone to be on the same page. It clearly draws the applicant’s attention to marked up areas of the plan sheets and for reviewers, has an overlay feature that makes finding changes from submittal to submittal very easy. We also work closely with a plethora of outside review and viewing agencies due to the regulatory environment in Colorado. idtPlans helps us coordinate directly with those agencies in a timely and efficient manner through its email function that not only gives them immediate access to the plans, but allows their comments to be seen by all the reviewing parties.
We have found the system is easy to use and the community appreciates the precise checklists and application requirements embedded into the system. We worked closely with idtPlans to create several guides and walk-throughs, many of which are now included on the idtPlans website. And, to make these easily accessible to our users, we linked to these documents directly on our custom idtPlans website.
As a Planner, I spend more time working on the technical aspects of my projects and less time coordinating submittals and administrative functions of the plan review processes. I am also able to assist the management team at the City with project tracking, using idtPlans’ reporting functions as well as their easy to use interface for looking at projects in progress.
Lauren Simmons, AICP is a Senior Planner for the City of Brighton, Colorado. Brighton is a fast-growing community, located on the Front Range of Colorado, just northeast of Denver. Lauren has worked for over 10 years in municipal planning in Florida, North Carolina, and Colorado. A big “thanks” for her time and contributions to this interview.
gratisography.com/ryanmcguire
I don’t need to meet you to know that at some point in your life, you have made this face. The squished-face-to-palm-eyeballs-burning-exhausted-overwhelmed-face looking out at you from the picture above. I’m guessing you made this face because of something at work. Your boss probably asked you to put together an extensive report or document that you had limited turnaround time to create. Or maybe they asked you to review something that was just downright mind-numbing and to provide feedback.
Perhaps that was a bit of psychic-level guessing. Or more likely, you saw the headline of this blog post and thought, “Hey, I’m trying to write an RFP.” Either way you slice it, if that’s the winner, then I’ve been there too. Where do you even start on something like that? What questions should you ask? How extensive should your organizational background be? What information is a necessity and what information is just helpful? It’s so easy to get stuck at the beginning, not sure how to proceed, so I’m going to help you avoid making this face in the future by helping you now.
There is so much information that is contained in an RFP that it can easily get overwhelming. Terms of bidding, schedule of events, background of the organization, goals and objectives, existing system architecture and possible software integrations…the list goes on and on. A template can help you approach these logically, laying out the groundwork for a strong base of information pertaining to the organization itself, then expanding to talk about specific goals and objectives and how those might be reached. Starting broad and becoming more specific, your RFP should share the long-term vision in addition to the specifics of how it will be addressed.
Maybe you are like me, in that a well-organized chart or matrix is going to be easier to understand than paragraph after paragraph of narrative. While charts aren’t always appropriate, when it comes to an RFP, they are a necessity. Take pricing information for example. What better way to get clear at-a-glance information on cost? And more importantly, what better way to easily compare your bidders? When everyone breaks down their information into the same format – understanding the differences becomes a lot easier.
A template is just your starting point, and as you continue to build your RFP, revisions and modifications will likely be necessary. With that in mind, a template should allow for these changes. Be wary of templates that act as a template wizard. These are the templates that ask for the basic info and then use what you input to create the document on your behalf. While there is something to be said for making things easier, there is such a thing as TOO easy. These often leave little room for editing, modifying, or otherwise. The result is a document that looks nothing like what you want and doesn’t cover what you need. Use a template that’s provided in a word format, and is editable down to the most minor formatting detail. This way you can truly make it yours.
If you have read this blog and think an RFP template may be helpful – then I’ve done my job. And if you are in the market for electronic plan review, and wish you had an RFP template, I’ve got one for you. Just go to the RFP Template Page on our website, fill out the required information, then download the template.
Whether you choose idtPlans for your electronic plan review platform or not, we want to be sure you start on the right foot in getting your information out there. Download the template today and get started.
If you are planning to attend this year’s National Planning Conference in New York City, stop by and see us. idtPlans is excited to join the exhibit hall and we are looking forward to sharing some of the new features we’ve rolled out in the last year. We’ll also introduce you to our friends from iPlan Tables, creators of large format touchscreen displays used across the country for plan review.
Our CEO, Jace Coleman and our Implementation Manager, Katy Rucker will be on site May 6th thru May 9th. They’ll be ready to answer your questions and walk you through the idtPlans platform. Get hands on experience with the system and understand how easy and efficient cutting out the paperwork can be. If you’ve been thinking about improving your existing process, come talk to us. And if you haven’t, come talk to us anyway! We like people.
That’s okay, we’ve got you covered. Follow us on LinkedIn for regular updates from the conference floor in New York City. See new features, new products and new people.
You know how there are some things in life that you are just naturally good at? Algebra, cooking, successfully completing a cartwheel as an adult without pulling eighteen muscles you didn’t know you had…it’s different for everyone. And I’d argue that only a very small percentage of people would say that their “thing” is being great at keeping track of paperwork.
In an age of digital everything, there are still a lot of strongholds for the all paper environment; especially in plan review, where the large format documents have traditionally made it hard to switch over to digital. And while new technologies are coming into the market to help ease the transition, adoption is still a slow process.
Check out the infographic below to learn how paper cuts can be a good thing:
Have you thought about cutting the paper with Electronic Plan Review? Going digital can certainly benefit your organization and your record keeping in a big way. And I know – change is scary. But so is lost paperwork.
There are always limits – how fast you can drive, how many donuts you can safely eat, and how loud your amp can get. The same is true of plan review. There are limits to what can be done with paper copies and scales.
You know what works for your organization and what doesn’t, and you have an existing process that meets the deadlines under which you operate. In short, you’ve already got your efficiency dial cranked up to 10.
By utilizing an electronic review platform, you can streamline the processes you already use, or review them for efficiency and make changes. Either way you go, transitioning benefits users across the board – from applicants all the way to administrators.
When you implement an electronic plan review platform, you should see several benefits immediately. You’ll be able to:
With all these features available, your organization will definitely turn that amp up from 10 to 11; working smarter – not harder – in what should be a fully transparent environment designed from your existing plan review process.
Start checking out some of the options out there. Focus on what your current needs are and look at your existing processes. Do you need a plan review system that can integrate with a document management system for archiving? Maybe it needs to work with your GIS system, or another software solution you already have in place. Ask the companies you talk to about integrations.
No matter what, don’t be afraid to ask questions and learn about the full scope of what the company can offer you. When you are ready, come find us. If any of the above sounds interesting to you, we’re here.
Turn your efficiency up.
Give us a call at 877-319-0990 or check us out online at https://idtplans.com.
Beginning on Wednesday 11/29/16 at 12:00 am est we will be applying a minor release along with routine scheduled maintenance.
We’ve been hard at work improving the way that document markups associated with Bluebeam are returned to the applicant. Previously the documents were auto-flattened when a review cycle was completed. This allowed the applicant to view the document and it’s markups in any pdf viewer but also removed the list of markups that were associated with the document. We have recently developed an alternative methodology which will auto-embed the markups instead. This has a similar effect as the flatten option but preserves the list of annotations within the viewer. This allows the applicant to easily find or search through the list of markups and when one is clicked, the viewer takes the user directly to the appropriate page.
In addition we’ve also added the following features:
Coming Soon:
Beginning on Wednesday 11/2/16 at 12:00 am est we will be applying a minor release along with routine scheduled maintenance. This release brings many improvements and new features including some exciting additions to the Inspections Application.
We’ve been getting great reviews of our new mobile inspections system and there have been a lot of excellent feature requests. With this update we have integrated the dynamic form builder into the inspection request and inspection complete events. This allows you to customize the information that you request and or require the applicant to enter when requesting an inspection. This also positions us for another enhancement in the coming months to allow inspectors to enter customized information regarding inspection results. For example you might require a soil inspection lab results to be submitted when a soil inspection is approved. This custom form data is configured to also display on the inspection dashboard and associated reports.
In addition we’ve also added the following features:
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