provided by: 
More than a decade after they burst on the scene, online plan room products are proliferating. They offer shops the chance to give their customers Web-based repositories for plans, specifications, and other project information.
But just how valuable plan rooms are to wide-format imaging professionals is still up for debate. At least one observer, for instance, believes the technology has not realized its full potential in giving reprographers the opportunity for additional profits.
In this month's Wide-Format Imaging, we examine the products of some of the providers of online plan room technology, and how print providers can best utilize plan rooms to add to their own bottom line performance.
Océ PlanCenter
Océ Plan Center from Océ North America was originally developed by AutoDesk and called Plans & Specs, has been owned and marketed under the Océ banner for four years, says director of marketing services Bob Honn. "It's a technology that uses a hosted service provider, called SunGuard, which provides the back-end infrastructure."
One of the major benefits of Océ Plan Center is the architecture, which is hosted by that Phoenix-based secondary application provider. That hosting provides a high degree of security and reliability, Honn says. The operation will withstand any kind of force Mother Nature presents, and has its own backup redundancy and power supply.
"You have the security of this service provider offering its own security against virus attacks and hackers that throw a lot of bogus traffic on the Web site," Honn says. "It eliminates the concerns with regard to security and computer hacking, viruses and system uptime you would have if you hosted it yourself at your own shop."
Another plus is Océ Publisher, which can be given to architects, allowing them to publish the drawings directly into the vault from their own desktops.
"Normally, the architect burns the drawings to a CD, or prints out drawings and provides them to the reprographer, who then has to import those into the vault," Honn says. "That requires a lot of hands-on at the repro level, and that's extra work and extra time for the reprographer. Because the architect is able to publish directly into the vault, the reprographer saves both time and effort."
Océ Plan Center offers users a multitude of ways in which to reap profit, he adds. They can charge customers set-up fees, and can also charge the customer per drawing for scanning drawings. In addition, management fees can be charged back to the owner on a per-project or per-month basis and online storage fees can also be levied.
IDEAL Online Plan Room
Another plan room product is IDEAL Online PlanRoom, developed by IDEAL Scanners & Systems. IDEAL started in the repro market, introducing low-cost, high-resolution scanners in the late 1980s, says president Jay Magenheim. "We developed our plan room out of that knowledge of the business," he adds. "We're also the largest distributor in the US of low-cost scanners, and our plan room was an application for management of the scanned images."
According to Magenheim and vice-president of sales Ed Delaney, scanners make larger-that-average sized files, and viewing these very large files is critical.
"With IDEAL, everything is server-side viewing," Magenheim says. "That means the file resides on the server, and that we're basically translating that to HTML on the fly. So anyone with a Web browser can view in large and reduced without the need to download."
The system features a number of patented technologies, he adds. "We manage bid sets from the beginning to during and after the construction process."
The software was designed with the construction industry in mind, and can take in not only monochrome but also larger-than-average color images for viewing.
IDEAL Online PlanRoom helps address one of the more significant trends impacting the construction industry—the increasing tendency of companies to use plan rooms to store redlines and redline markups of blueprints.
"What will happen is you'll have a guy out in the field making redlines on a blueprint, [but] everyone thinks they have the most updated sets of blueprints," Magenheim says. "The solution we [developed] was an online, on-time repository of the way the building is built, and not just designed."
PlanWell
PlanWell Technologies was developed eight years ago by American Reprographics Company (ARC) as a response to the document management needs of the client base with which ARC does business, says Shaun Meany, executive director of The PEiR (Profits and Education in Reprographics) Group, which licenses PlanWell Technologies.
Speaking of PlanWell, he adds, "we developed an automated document workflow solution to manage the digital assets of our customers."
Under its automated system, PlanWell features a suite of products. They include Enterprise, the document management component; BidCaster, the invitation to bid and communications component; and EWO, an electronic work order component that is an e-commerce solution, Meany says. Enterprise, BidCaster and EWO are all Web enabled, meaning end users require no special software to use them.
Users access PlanWell through a data center. Bandwidth and all infrastructure for handling customer transactions are managed by the data center, using data center expertise, Meany says. By contrast, other approaches require individual reprographers to manage the bandwidth and all transactions themselves. "We protect end users' investment by offering this data center, which assures users get their information when it is needed," he adds.
ARC could have retained this technology for its exclusive use, Meany adds. "But for the industry to succeed, we feel it requires some specific document management standards. We felt it is in our best interests to promote a healthy industry, and that's why we're making it available to reprographers through The PEiR Group."
MySmartPlans
Not everyone is happy with the way today's plan rooms are constituted, or with the level of profit they afford companies. One such observer is Kevin Rowe, president of US Reprographics. Through much of its history, the 11-year-old firm has worked as a consultant to the reprographics industry, providing national print fulfillment services.
"We have a lot of experience in [plan rooms], and I owned five at one time," he says. "The issue is that what the reprographics industry thought would be an additional profit center has in reality become another way to do what we already did. And it costs us more money to do it. Most people are not charging enough for their services, or they're giving the plan room services away for free to get clients' printing business."
There have been "pockets of success". "For every one reprographer doing well, there are probably 80 who are not," he says, estimating more than 200 different plan room technologies have come and gone. "People have spent a lot of money developing plan room software, but in reality allowing subcontractors to go online and view plans is a relatively easy thing to do."
Part of the issue is that subcontractors, most of whom are not experts in the digital world, resent having to spend time online selecting the right information. Much of the time, they have to download information to use it, Rowe says.
Firms that have been successful asked the clients what they needed, provided other services in addition to the plan room to complement it, and then charged for those services so that customers perceived a value, Rowe says. More important, they taught their sales staffs how to sell digital services.
"Most printers' salespeople just want to sell printing," he notes. "So printing has become a commodity, and like any other commodity it is priced accordingly. Instead of putting it on a Web site, and everyone pulls it down, this information has to be pushed out from the reprographers to subcontractors and other customers. You ensure everyone looks at the same accurate information at the same time."
Because repro people controlled the workflow, every subcontractor had the same accurate information at the same time. The reprographer was providing a value-added service each of the shop's customers was willing to pay for, Rowe maintains.
That's what MySmartPlans, a new product from US Reprographics, also achieves, he says. MySmartPlans gathers information electronically and pushes it to the end users electronically, employing a centralized "dashboard" that looks identical to all users. "If I send information out to you today, and it changes tomorrow, you receive the new information automatically and it repopulates your dashboard," Rowe says. This is a service customers will pay for. The kicker, he adds, is that MySmartPlans typically reduces the amount of printing shops must produce by about 60 percent.
According to Rowe, his company has "decided to lead this charge, instead of letting someone else do it. There is a multitude of national companies out there promoting their services to reduce the amount of printing.
"If that's the case, then we inside the industry need to lead the charge. We looked at it from the standpoint of how the reprographer can remain involved. And with MySmartPlan, they're involved from pre-bid to closeout, a length of time reprographers have never been involved in the past," he concludes.
author: BY JEFFREY STEELE