ORLANDO, Fla. — (BUSINESS WIRE) — February 7, 2011 — Bentley Systems, Incorporated, the leading company dedicated to providing comprehensive software solutions for sustaining infrastructure, today announced its first release of eB Insight, the foundation of Bentley’s AssetWise platform. First introduced a year ago at the 2010 ARC World Industry Forum, AssetWise provides operations information modeling that increases the return on investment for owner-operators of infrastructure assets. Bentley’s new eB Insight features powerful asset lifecycle information management (ALIM) capabilities to manage change and to control information throughout the life span of infrastructure, ensuring the delivery of relevant, trusted information, in context, to operations, where and when it is needed. Uniquely integrating configuration and change management best practices with advanced information modeling, the new release enables owner-operators to:

• further reduce the cost of operations,
• improve decision making,
• more efficiently meet regulatory and compliance requirements,
• reduce business risk,
• increase safety and performance.

eB software, which Bentley added to its portfolio through its acquisition of Enterprise Informatics in February 2010, is a leading mainstay in nuclear operations – one of the most heavily regulated industries in the world – where it is deployed in power generation units, fuel processing, waste management, and research. Among other sectors globally taking advantage of eB software are energy companies, rail, government, and construction. Representative users of eB include Constellation Energy, Ameren Corporation, Nuclear Fuel Services, Crossrail, Rolls-Royce, City of Las Vegas, Colorado Springs Utilities, CH2M HILL, Aker Solutions, South African Airways, De Beers, and Network Rail.

Sid Snitkin, vice president and general manager of enterprise advisory services, ARC Advisory Group, said, “With the new release of eB Insight, the market is finally getting what it has been looking for – Asset Lifecycle Information Management software that can address both operational optimization of asset performance and engineering content from modifications and upgrades to existing assets. This puts Bentley in the singular position of being able to improve infrastructure asset operations across the entire lifecycle – delivering Project Information Management through Bentley’s ProjectWise and Asset Information Management for engineering and operations content through AssetWise.”

Alan Kiraly, Bentley vice president, Operations Products, said, “With Bentley’s first release of eB Insight, our AssetWise initiative has come to fruition. eB Insight supports the delivery of innovative and robust asset information modeling and management capabilities to owner-operators, enabling them to realize the full potential of intelligent, better-performing infrastructure assets. In Bentley’s continuing development of eB Insight, we are able to take advantage of the company’s extensive project and engineering content experience and knowledge to increase the fidelity with which our AssetWise platform deals with project deliverables throughout an asset’s lifecycle.”

What’s New in eB Insight?

eB Insight maintains the network of information relationships needed to combine operations effectiveness and efficiency with safety and compliance. The new release of eB Insight enables users to define unique information relationships in addition to those provided out of the box. Information classifications and behaviors can be configured to enforce predefined business rules that must be met during the lifecycle of the information. For example, eB Insight can ensure relationships are established between a project, physical items, responsible people, standard operating procedures, tag numbers, and records management file plans before a package of information can be approved and delivered for use on a work order.

Also new is information scoping, which enables multi-asset control and segmentation of information. This feature is extremely useful for fleets of operating plants where overlapping fleet-wide and asset-specific configurations, information models, and operations must be managed independently. Secure user roles determine access, and selected scopes determine visible information. This provides an asset-specific user experience while supporting the consolidation and reporting of fleet-wide information and key performance indicators (KPIs). The new release also expands role identification and information access to include hierarchical roles based on the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) standard on Role-Based Access Control.

Another innovative feature enables the creation of an information “snapshot” that documents the current network of relationships for any information at any point in time. A snapshot is a static record that can be rendered in different formats (e.g., XML, PDF, etc.), making it available for a compliance audit or to package information to be transferred to other systems. A Change Package snapshot, for example, could include all impacted physical assets, documents, responsible people, and approval workflows. Enhanced auditing and traceability features include a complete historical view of the asset information, from creation to deletion, which improves governance and compliance controls.

New eB Insight handover services are based on its ability to publish independent information packages that contain comprehensive asset information (engineering, configuration, procedural, and operational) for archiving and reuse. Handover packages can be defined using a combination of explicit references and/or searches and can be published at lifecycle milestones or on demand. The packaged information can be navigated via web pages and includes content from the eB Insight repository and any federated information source. This information is used to provide evidence for regulatory compliance audits or to transfer information to other enterprise systems.