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Monday, October 1, 2012


PlanWell Collaborate Scan to Cloud for HP Designjet



Bateman-Hall in Idaho Falls, Idaho, is a commercial general contractor and construction management company with over 30 years of experience. Their impressive client list includes Albertsons, Associated Foods, Fred Meyer, Home Depot, Lowes, and Walmart.

Dillon Dance, assistant project manager at Bateman-Hall, manages project documentation trails, such as RFIs and change orders. When on the job site, he spends much of his time helping subcontractors accomplish what they need to do. He also holds meetings with the superintendent and the project manager to review what needs to be done during the week. Key projects include a new Walmart store in California and a new high school in Idaho. The high school will involve more than 35 suppliers and subcontractors over a two-year period.

As every general contractor on such a large project knows, getting all parties on the same page is a challenge. In the case of the Idaho high school, the building partners are spread out, with one local architecture firm, one in neighboring Utah, and subcontractors and suppliers in various locations around the country.

Speeding up the submittal process:

A significant scheduling challenge is the pressure of downtime due to construction changes. When owners request a change to the job bid, they usually mail or deliver the changes to the general contractor on marked-up paper plans. The contractor in turn mails or delivers the cost changes to the owner. To improve this process, Bateman-Hall agreed to test PlanWell Collaborate Scan to Cloud, an integration of PlanWell Collaborate and the HP Designjet T2300 eMFP, a technology solution designed to accelerate project schedules.

“With PlanWell Collaborate Scan to Cloud, we can scan in changes,” says Dance, “and the turnaround time is a day. Before it would take four to five business days to get the changes approved.” The impact of changes on subcontractors’ time can also add additional days to the project schedule. When a project day costs an owner thousands of dollars, every day of idle time or time spent waiting for updated plans can be expensive.

“We used to use only paper plans and mail them back and forth. I think we will always have a hard set of plans on the job site, so people can meet around the plans and mark on the same page, but there has been a reduction in printing on the job with this integrated solution. Submittals are mostly on screen now,” says Dance. “Now the electrician can look at mechanical and plumbing drawings. Before if the electrician needed drawings, they had to request them.”

Additional benefits:

Color printing can now be done in-house, creating additional savings — between $50-300 and about eight hours per trip to the reprographics house. Says Dance, “Before we had to go to the repro house about twice a week, mostly for redlines. We could only scan in black and white in-house, but now we can scan in color and we can change colors right from the HP screen.”

The ease of scanning in changes and sharing them instantaneously with a team has another tremendous benefit: preventing subcontractors from building from the wrong plans. According to Dance, “Before, subcontractors would start with bid drawings and as changes came in, sometimes they wouldn’t get updated. With PlanWell Collaborate Scan to Cloud everybody on the team is notified when changes occur.” Dance estimates the new solution has reduced incidences of working from the wrong plans by about 75%.

PlanWell Collaborate Scan to Cloud for HP Designjet also creates efficiencies in the step-by-step office workflow. “It’s improved the workflow by minutes a day, and those minutes add up,” says Dance. “Now we can scan directly into PlanWell through the T2300, and notify everyone without using PCs, saving a couple of minutes. It saves maybe a total of 30 minutes a day.”

Ultimately, the solution has made communication among everyone on the job more effective, instantaneous, and efficient — accelerating project schedules.





Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Join The IRgA for Free !!!

IRgA MEMBERSHIP SIGN-UP ANNOUNCEMENT

Important News about IRgA Membership:

For the fiscal year beginning August 1st, 2012, IRgA membership is available – to all who are eligible for membership - at no cost!

The IRgA is encouraging you to sign up as a member of the IRgA. Please visit their "membership information” page for detailed information about membership and that will lead you to the membership sign-up procedure.

After you’ve submitted a request for membership, their site-administrator will receive your request, review it, and approve it.

IRgA memberships are "individual” memberships. IRgA encourages reprographers, printers and imagers to encourage all of their company team members to "sign up” for IRgA membership. In addition, Vendors to the reprographics industry are encouraged to sign-up for membership. Investors and financial analysts who follow the reprographics industry are also invited to sign up. Click here to sign-up

Remember to visit the forum section of the IRgA website. Post a question, Make a statement!








PEiR Group Members Receive Discounts on all PlanWell Technology Products


As a member of the PEiR Group you receive 40% discounts on all PlanWell Technology product.
This includes MetaPrint, AbacusPCR, PlanWell Collaborate just to name a few.
This give you a great opportunity to be a reseller of PlanWell Technologies.

Call The PEiR Group today for details 510-403-2435 or email John Bidwell at johnb@planwell.com

Visit PEiR Group Vendor Xpedx at the Graphic Expo in Chicago and SGIA in Las Vegas



October 7-10, 2012


McCormick Place South, Chicago, IL

Booth #1646

SGIA Expo

October 18-20, 2012

Las Vegas Convention Center, Las Vegas, NV

Booth #2481

xpedx plays a key role in helping you with emerging trends and technology that

represent opportunities for growth in the print industry. Embracing this change

can reveal exciting new opportunities. We integrate products and deliver full

service to meet your current and future demand, streamline workflow, improve

productivity, and enhance the impact of digital, offset, and wide format offerings.

equipment
consumables
media & substrates

to support

production digital
offset
wide format
flexographic

Wednesday, September 19, 2012


PlanWell Collaborate Success Story


Brown Studio Architects is an architectural design firm located in Montgomery, Alabama. With over 45 years of experience, they provide clients with award-winning architecture, interior design, and project management services.

Recently Brown Studio partnered with two local architectural firms and six not-so-local engineering firms from across the country to complete a large football stadium for a state university.

The architects in Alabama needed to store and organize files and drawings and make them easily accessible to consultants in different time zones. Sound familiar? It seems virtual teams are more the rule than the exception today.

Virtual teams need virtual file cabinets. For example, massive document packages must be released to bidders spread across the map. The bidders then need to share these documents with their potential sub-contractors.

Every project team faces the challenge of how to coordinate, share knowledge, and maintain and update project schedules and technical documents without breaking the budget. And do it without having to send the entire team to a week long training for a complex, expensive collaboration application.

Project managers face less than ideal choices when it comes to collaboration: they can use the traditional route of paper plans and scans, and couriers, or use slow but reliable FTP and email, converting plans to digital as needed. Another choice is to use a complex, ultimately ignored application that becomes a project on its own.

Brown Studio and its partners needed to share documents and efficiently update the remote project team. They also needed to archive documents as the project progressed. And do these things without spending the first week of the project setting up websites, FTP, creating address books and contact lists, and learning new software would be a plus.

After a little research, the tool selected for the job was PlanWell Collaborate.

PlanWell Collaborate is an intuitive, cost-effective cloud project collaboration application designed to make life easier for project managers.

According to Brown Project Manager Paul Zanglin, “Planwell Collaborate has been a way to easily organize our project files so they can be shared with consultants anywhere in the country and to deliver submittals to the owner, the bidders, and the general contractors in a timely manner while reducing printing costs for the owner and the firms involved.”

Doing more with less is a requirement on any project these days. Zanglin says that PlanWell Collaborate made the team more efficient, and “one person in the office can manage the files without involving the whole team and without tying up the office’s network to store and document all of the project information.”

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

PEIR Group HP Big Deal Now Included Inks

PEiR Group HP Deal Now Includes Inks and Media

Pricing is listed on the PEiR Group Website under SYNNEX, Wynit and Azerty