COWI Chooses Bluebeam Revu As Its Enterprise-Wide PDF Solution

Background

COWI is a leading northern European engineering consulting firm whose impressive project portfolio includes Denmark’s Great Belt Bridge, the world’s third largest suspension bridge that spans the international shipping route between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea, and Italy’s Messina Bridge, which will connect Sicily to mainland Italy and will be the world’s longest suspension bridge once completed. Since 2008 COWI has used Bluebeam® PDF Revu® enterprise-wide for a variety of PDF creation, markup and editing needs such as digitally commenting on PDF project drawings and creating and editing multi-page PDF reports.

Challenge

Prior to rolling out Bluebeam, most COWI employees had a PDF viewer, and a small percentage of users had Adobe® Acrobat®. Yet as more and more users relied on PDF files, it became necessary to provide everyone with a tool for creating and editing PDFs. Adobe Acrobat’s pricing was determined to be too expensive for enterprise use, so COWI set out to find an Acrobat alternative that would provide the following:

• Easy-to-use tools for professional PDF creation, markup and editing
• High quality CAD to PDF creation for engineering users
• Flexible options that would satisfy power users, basic users and everyone in between
• Affordable pricing

After evaluating a variety of Adobe Acrobat alternatives, COWI rolled out Bluebeam Revu. Revu is a professional PDF editor designed for the architecture, engineering and construction industry that retails for significantly less than the cost of Adobe Acrobat.

Solution

COWI’s administrative professionals use Bluebeam Revu Standard, which provides all the PDF creation and editing tools needed for assembling project reports. Using Bluebeam’s PDF printer driver and plugins to MS® Office for one button PDF creation, users convert a variety of text-based documents and spreadsheets to PDF. These files are then assembled together using Revu, from which users can insert, delete, rotate and reorder PDF pages.

Technical professionals in COWI’s engineering departments use Bluebeam Revu CAD. This powerful version of Revu provides all the features of the Standard plus a PDF plugin to AutoCAD® and Revit® and a high quality PDF printer for converting MicroStation® files to PDF. In addition to using Bluebeam for reliable CAD to PDF creation, engineering professionals use Bluebeam for quality control. Rather than reviewing and redlining printed copies of project drawings, they digitally comment on PDF copies using industry standard markups such as text, change clouds and measurement tools.

Results

While COWI’s initial goal was to find a more affordable, intuitive alternative to Adobe Acrobat, Bluebeam Revu has far surpassed their expectations. Since being deployed throughout COWI, Bluebeam Revu has been revered as a powerful document processing tool and workhorse across departments. “Bluebeam is speeding up the process of creating final PDF reports as we no longer have to go through an expert with knowledge on the Adobe products,” said Tage Bote, Project Leader at COWI. “Now we are taking Bluebeam a step further by standardizing electronic commenting and integrating into Bentley® ProjectWise® and Microsoft® SharePoint®. We are working towards a more digital workflow to handle commenting drawings, where PDF files received from our partners or generated internally are redlined using Bluebeam then sent to the author.”