Meridian, Mcgraw Hill Connect Their Project, Document Management Tools

Meridian, Mcgraw Hill Connect Their Project, Document Management Tools

  • Submitted By: kelbell0422
  • Date Submitted: 11/29/2009 1:48 PM
  • Category: Business
  • Words: 386
  • Page: 2
  • Views: 374

Categories: Construction software new releases, Project Management
Posted by Brian Eastwood | Feb 24, 2009 | 08:26am
Lack of interoperability among construction software products makes collaboration and workflow rather difficult. It can also be costly, to the tune of nearly $16 billion a year in the US construction industry. (All that time wasted re-entering data or copying and pasting does add up.)

To that end, two key makers of construction software, Meridian Systems and McGraw-Hill Construction, have made their project management and document management tools interoperable.

McGraw-Hill Construction's Project Document Manager, as its name implies, helps construction firms manage documents such as bids and plans. In addition, PDM ties into the McGraw-Hill Construction Network, which includes the Dodge database of more than 600,000 commercial construction projects as well as plans and specifications. Meridian's Prolog and Proliance, meanwhile, are construction project management and infrastructure lifecycle management products, respectively.

Sue Watkins, director of marketing for Meridian Systems, noted that Prolog has been on the market for 15 years and is robust as it is. The field of project management isn't undergoing significant change either. What is changing, though, is how the technology deployed in project management software is now being extended to mobile technology (through Web services) and to document management. The Web services part was covered when Meridian released Prolog Connect -- and, now, document management interoperability is covered.

As Watkins described it, a PDM user can, for example, respond to an invitation to bid, create a submittal and then push that submittal into Prolog. There it becomes a contract, complete with invoices, payments for application, audits, change orders and other activities that need to be tracked.

Meridian's partnership with McGraw-Hill came about due to a desire for strategic partnerships,...

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