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Plans Room
 Goes Electronic

By Ian Harvey

An Ontario-wide Electronic Plans Room is set to roll out in the New Year.

John Mollenhauer, president of the Toronto Construction Association (TCA), said things are on track for an agreement between the 11 Ontario construction associations by Christmas.

“The consultation process has been gone very well,” said Mollenhauer. “We share the same agenda and the platform Wade-Tech platform was an excellent choice. It’s very user friendly and it’s in our collective best interest to have a provincial plan room.”

Contractors will need to set up an EPR account log for $1,000 a year to access the site, said Edwin Zeng TCA’s EPR co-ordinator.

“At any given time there are 50 or 60 projects on line but until now they have all been for Toronto,” said Zeng. “By adding all of Ontario we will double that.”

He said while some of the files - formatted as PDF or TIFF - are huge at up to 15 gigabytes each, equal to the contents of three DVDs - could take an hour or more to download. However, most contractors simply want the plans pertaining to their trades and though those files are also large, they shouldn’t take more than about 10 minutes to download unless they have industrial-sized Internet access.

Still, it’s a big step forward for contractors who had either been limited to accessing their own association’s EPR or been forced to drive to another jurisdiction to physically inspect plans to formulate bids.

“It’s important because contractors having a down cycle in their area can bid out of their local region,” said Tom Dool, general manager of the London & District Construction Association.

“It’s also good for construction buyers,” said David Frame of the Council of Ontario Construction Association. “They want to be able to attract bids from more than just their local areas for competitive reasons.”

“This is long overdue,” said Dool. “We’ve trying for a while to come together on a provincial basis.”

Frame said the plans are generally skewed to ICI projects and should appeal also to major buyers of construction services.

“What they want also is one stop shopping,” Frame said.

The Ontario-wide EPR is also seen as an alternative to the MERX tendering system, run by a private company which is more expensive for individual contractors and tends to favour large multi-national conglomerate contractors.

As such, the provincial construction associations wanted to create a collaborative system as an alternative to MERX to show it could be a more accessible concept.

Wade Tech was chosen after a presentation during a special meeting of the parties last spring. TCA’s revamped platform launched in September.

Les Wojcianiec, Wade-Tech managing partner and developer of the proprietary software behind the system said there were more than a few challenges in getting the project up and running.

“We use a compression technology that is similar to that being used by the National Department of Defence in the United States, because these are really large files and they have to be encrypted as well for security reasons,” he said.

Wade Tech specializes in Architectural-Engineering-Construction technology and its document management system was only the beginning. At the front end, the system had to be user friendly and simple to use, but at the back end there were many challenges.

“We also had to create migration engines because lot of the regional construction associations were on different systems,” he said. The migration engines allowed the different systems to talk to each other without having to go back and install new systems.

He said the work is an extension of what his company has been doing and thinks it can be expanded into any area where companies need to move large files over great distances quickly.

“One of our clients is a project which is being built in Bulgaria with the owner in England and the general contractor in Austria while the architect is here in Toronto,” he said. “They are moving large files all over the place and it’s working well.”

Mollenhauer said with all the effort that has gone into securing the province wide agreements between associations, there’s been no thought about the future including a nation-wide EPR.

“We’ve been so focused on this we just haven’t thought of anything else yet,” he said. “You got walk before you run so for the moment we’ve been keeping the eye on the ball and there has been no discussion at any of the meeting on looking above and beyond this for the moment. It’s really a big enough undertaking and we want to ensure it’s a seamless transition.”