CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
2 May 2007
Implementation Investments
City of Lakeland, Florida, Joins Bentley's Municipal License Subscription Program
Bentley Systems, Incorporated announced that the City of Lakeland, Florida, has joined Bentley's Municipal License Subscription (MLS) program. The city will use its new MLS to make its engineers more productive and expand their access to advanced software. This will enable Lakeland to deliver enhanced services to its citizens at the lowest reasonable cost while maintaining its reputation as a low-tax city.
Bentley's MLS offers municipalities all the software they need to design and manage all their infrastructure for a fixed annual fee based on population. The program enables them to improve productivity and reduce administrative costs by outfitting their entire mapping and engineering organizations with fully integrated software for GIS and engineering workflows. This leads to improved services and more efficient government.
Lakeland provides its 91,623 citizens with a complete array of services, including electric power, water, wastewater and stormwater management (within the city's 72.2-square-mile area), land development, road maintenance, and emergency services, to cite just a few. It also generates and distributes electric power from its city-owned-and-operated power utility to 253,405 residents spread over a 246-square-mile area.
Said Tracy Kirkpatrick, Lakeland's assistant director, Department of Information Technology, "With our MLS, for close to the same price as our former subscription, we can access more than 10 times the number of Bentley products and solutions. Given the breadth of services that Lakeland delivers to its citizens, this is clearly an opportunity to which we had to say yes."
He continued, "There are a number of products we are anxious to test and possibly deploy - for example, Bentley Expert Designer to improve the productivity of our engineers when designing and operating our electric distribution network. However, at the top of our list is Bentley's ProjectWise collaboration system. Its implementation will help us support our site development workflows and eventually make Lakeland an excellent example of e-government in action."
Lakeland believes that site development automation will bring substantial savings through data sharing among city departments and external contractors and developers. In the medium term, the city foresees all of the paper in the site development process being replaced by digital documents posted to ProjectWise - available to users through secure log-ins and privileges. Currently, every time a contractor applies for a permit on a project, it has to submit 10 paper copies of all the specifications and drawings.
Benefits Lakeland is already enjoying from its new MLS include the ability to provide project teams with an increased number of licenses for the Bentley products it is currently deploying. Among these are MicroStation, Digital InterPlot, InRoads, PlantSpace, and SewerGEMS.
As Kirkpatrick explained, "With our MLS, our engineers don't have to wait for access to, say, a MicroStation license. Previously, we sometimes had to ask field engineers to bring in their laptops after just 48 hours in order to free up licenses for more pressing assignments. Now, our field engineers can keep their laptops and MicroStation licenses out in the field for months at a time. The same holds true for the other Bentley products we regularly deploy."
In addition, the city is saving both time and money as a result of dramatic reductions in software deployment times. As Kirkpatrick said, "With our old subscription it would take us a year to go through our planning and budgeting process, followed by a lengthy procurement process once the budget had been approved. Today, we just download the software we need and go from there. Without question, the MLS is making us a more nimble and responsive organization."
Bentley's MLS program provides municipalities with unlimited access to a comprehensive portfolio of integrated GIS and engineering software for all of their infrastructure, including:
• Public works - roads, bridges, water, sewer, and storm
• Land development
• E-government
• Light rail design
• Community broadband
• Electric and gas network design
• Water and wastewater treatment plant design
• Urban planning
• Cadastre management
• Public safety
• Municipal building design
• Mapping and 3D modeling
Because the program's fees are fixed, Bentley's MLS guarantees predictable software costs and budgeting. In addition, it removes the administrative burden of complex software licenses, shortens procurement cycles, speeds project starts, and ultimately leads to more efficient government.
For more information about Bentley's MLS program initiative and software or to contact a Bentley representative, visit http://www.bentley.com/MLS .
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