FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Fire Safety Consultants, Inc. (FSCI), a third-party plan review company, has selected e-PlanSoft’s leading electronic plan review solution e-PlanREVIEW® and goPost™ Public Portal as its software of choice to improve its plan review and intake processes.
FSCI specializes in fire, building, and life-safety plan reviews for companies and agencies in 14 states and Canada, serving an area from the Rocky Mountains to the east coast of the US and the Gulf Coast to Canada. With offices located in Illinois and Michigan, its projects are substantially in those areas. The company conducts an average of 3000 reviews per year for over 200 municipal and private clients across the country, using traditional paper plans. Due to the broad geographic area served, intake is conducted primarily through the use of courier services. Even though the company is headquartered in a city of 150,000, USPS deliveries are more commonly made to mailboxes rather than directly to its office. The onset of the COVID pandemic and transition to a remote work model for staff caused even greater delays in deliveries.
As part of its commitment to provide the best possible service to its clients, the FSCI team conducted a SWOT analysis. The findings showed that the intake and outtake processes are the most time-consuming stages of their current workflow. The time required is compounded by resubmittals, even when only minor changes are needed. It became a priority to find a solution that would equip the organization to perform plan reviews more efficiently, and especially at those stages.
After extensive research, FSCI selected e-PlanSoft’s e-PlanREVIEW and goPost solutions, largely for the robust capabilities within goPost.
“We chose ePlanSoft to improve our customer service on many levels,” stated Keith Frangiamore, President of Fire Safety Consultants, Inc. “We specifically wanted to increase efficiency for our administrative process and plan reviews, to improve and streamline communications with customers, reduce overall handling time, especially in transporting paper plans, and ultimately reduce the actual review time. With the increased handling and review efficiency, our ultimate goal is to complete work more quickly, further reducing our plan review times for our customers.”
FSCI will leverage goPost’s unique ability to allow for separate portlets. Each portlet will be customized for FSCI’s individual customers, providing a better user experience. And it will have the ability to track all customers’ projects in a single dashboard. No other electronic plan review solution on the market offers this level of customization in intake for third-party reviewers. Once plans are uploaded, all participants will have full visibility into the status of each project at every stage.
Additional benefits will be realized with the adoption of cloud-based e-PlanREVIEW, e-PlanSoft’s leading electronic plan review offering. After an exhaustive market search, FSCI found that e-PlanREVIEW most closely aligns with and accommodates its processes, while improving efficiency. The transition to e-PlanREVIEW will bolster communications in the plan review process and provide robust tools for comments and markups. The cloud-based solution also allows for real-time remote collaboration, which has proven to be essential, especially during the current pandemic.
“This is a perfect example of how to leverage the benefits of a cloud-based solution to eliminate unnecessary extra time needed for paper plan intake and delivery,” says Esther Byrd, Regional Sales Manager at e-PlanSoft. “FSCI will experience time savings at every stage of its plan reviews, from intake all the way through approvals. And the fact that the e-PlanSoft solutions are configured to customer requirements and processes allows for a much faster implementation, and a quick and easy learning curve for users.”
About Fire Safety Consultants
Founded in 1983, Fire Safety Consultants, Inc. is an industry leader in third-party fire, building, and life safety plan review and inspections. Fire Safety Consultants provides expert code consulting on many projects worldwide, involving a vast array of fire and building code regulations. Their experienced team also develops and teaches seminars on fire, building and life safety topics throughout the country as well as internationally. Fire Safety Consultants, Inc. was acquired in 2017 by Paramedic Services of Illinois and is a fully integrated division of the PSI family.
www.firesafetyfsci.com/
About e-PlanSoft
e-PlanSoft™ develops industry-leading cloud-based electronic document review software that assists governmental agencies, construction and manufacturing industries, developers, and owners with their plan review, design review, product review, construction, and asset review management in real-time.
www.eplansoft.com