CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
15 March 2007
Implementation Investments
USACE Mississippi Valley Division Wins BE Award
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers ( USACE ) Mississippi Valley Division (MVD) of St. Paul, Minnesota, has won a BE Award for its extensive deployment of ProjectWise involving collaboration on more than 17 projects, including improvements to navigation and ecosystem sustainability on the upper Mississippi River and other waterways, an evaluation of the New Orleans hurricane and flood protection system and its performance during Hurricane Katrina, and major modifications to the Bayou Sorrel Lock in Louisiana. The award category was "Geospatial Managed Environment."
The USACE MVD reaches from Minnesota to New Orleans. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina in September 2005, MVD decided to deploy ProjectWise across its six districts and the Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) in Mississippi. MVD's goals included installing or upgrading ProjectWise in all MVD districts, implementing a common environment, using a common folder structure, utilizing caching, and conducting training where needed.
MVD's choice was supported by the New Orleans District's years of experience with ProjectWise, and was driven by the immediate need for a common platform to enable virtual teams, with members in distant offices, to work on hurricane recovery projects. Said Christine Afdahl, a civil engineer with USACE, "Bentley's ProjectWise has enabled us to truly accomplish virtual teaming within our organization. It allows the appropriate access to the project documents at all times."
ProjectWise served as a single access point for all project documents, creating powerful workflow efficiencies. Before implementing ProjectWise, in order for a team member at one site to view a document located at another, the document would need to be emailed or posted on an FTP site - wasting time and creating additional copies of the document. Any changes made to these copies would not be included in the documents viewed by other team members.
With ProjectWise, team members always have access to the most current document, without requiring the author to email or post it. In addition, for attributes that are project-related and consistent from document to document, Bentley created a custom application that allows attributes - such as the project's name - to be automatically populated across all documents created within that project.
Today, MVD professionals are using ProjectWise to collaborate on more than 17 projects, 15 of which are associated with the Navigation & Ecosystem Sustainability Program, or NESP. These projects are designed to improve navigation while ensuring sustainable ecosystems on the upper Mississippi River and Illinois waterways through 2050.
Another critical project under way, the Interagency Performance Evaluation Taskforce, or IPET, is providing scientific and engineering answers to questions about the performance of the New Orleans hurricane and flood protection system during Hurricane Katrina. IPET is comprised of some of the nation's leading engineers and scientists from federal, state, and local government as well as academia and private industry. These experts are using some of the most advanced scientific and engineering methods and tools in their comprehensive study. The IPET team includes approximately 150 engineers, scientists, and other professionals, representing more than 35 independent organizations and 15 USACE offices. The managed environment provided by ProjectWise was instrumental in meeting the constraints and volume of engineering and scientific data required by IPET.
Yet another project, the Bayou Sorrel Lock Modification, is located in Iberville Parish in south-central Louisiana, about 50 miles south of Baton Rouge. The project includes the construction of a new, large lock adjacent to the existing lock as well as approach channels to the new lock; the closure of the existing lock; measures to mitigate the impact of the project on fish and wildlife resources; erosion protection in the vicinity of the lock; and mooring buoy facilities adjacent to the erosion protection.
For more information on USACE's winning project and all of the other 2006 BE Award projects, visit http://www.be.org/awards . For more information on the Bentley products used in this project, visit http://www.bentley.com/en-US/Products/ProjectWise .
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