When exchanging deliverables with external organizations, data is usually sent in both directions - from internal producers to external consumers (outbound), and from external producers to internal consumers (inbound).
In Bentley Transmittal Services, a transmittal is an outbound package, and a submittal is an inbound package. An organization might need to send drawings and other data in a single transmittal package to an external client, partner, or subcontractor organization for their review and/or approval. The same organization might also receive submittal packages for review from their specialty contractors, partners, or other external organizations.
There are three major steps in the Bentley Transmittal Services transmittal workflow:
To begin with, ProjectWise datasources are enabled for transmittals management in ProjectWise Administrator. Then, individual projects in the datasource are enabled as needed in ProjectWise Explorer. Once a project is enabled, the current project participants can begin creating and issuing transmittal packages from that project.
Each transmittal package:
All project participants will be able to create draft transmittal packages from the project. Project participants who have an additional permission will be able to send transmittals to external users.
Given that it may take some time for all the data in a transmittal to be prepared, when creating a transmittal package users will be able to save it as a draft, close it, and reopen it as needed to add or change data.
Once the draft transmittal package is ready to be sent, the user selects to issue the transmittal. A cover letter PDF is then generated for the transmittal which the user can review before finally confirming to issue the transmittal.
When a transmittal is issued from ProjectWise, each user on the recipients list gets an email notification with a link to access the package from the Bentley Transmittal Portal.
The portal is a website that is generally setup in a DMZ so that it is accessible to the intended external users (transmittal recipients).
External users log in to the portal using their email address and a password that is sent to them when the are added to their first project. Once logged in to the portal, the user can acknowledge receipt of the package, download the package, then respond with comments. (The user must acknowledge that they have received the transmittal before they can download the package or respond to it.)
The downloaded transmittal package, which is a zip file, can then be redistributed within the receiving organization for review or input as needed. Once the review process is done, the external user (usually Document Controller or Project Manager) uploads their responses through the portal.
Users can send responses to individual documents one at a time, or they can send all their responses at once. When responding, they are provided with a list of response options to choose from, such as Approved, Approved with comments, or Rejected. They can also include comments and attach files to the response.
Response selections are saved automatically, so that if the user needs to navigate away from the page or log off before they send the response, their response selections are saved until the next time they log in.
All actions pertaining to the transmittal are stored in each transmittal's audit trail. The internal users have access to this information in ProjectWise Explorer as well.
As external users are acknowledging, downloading, and responding to transmittals in the portal, internal users (project participants) can track the status of those transmittals in ProjectWise Explorer.
A listing of a project's issued transmittals can be seen on the Transmittals node inside the project. To learn more about the status of an individual transmittal package, the user can open the transmittal properties dialog. For details on what responses have been received and what are still expected, the user can view the Recipients tab with an embedded color-coded dashboard. For more details on responses of any specific recipient, the user can click on links in the Responses column of the Recipients tab.
Information provided in the Recipients and Responses tab is primarily intended for users in a Document Controller and/or Project Manager role, as it is focused on what responses have been received or expected and from whom. This make it very easy for a Document Controller to find out the most urgent items and start resolving them.
CAD Designers may also find this information useful. For example, they may be more interested in what comments were received for their specific drawing from all external reviewers. Thus, the Documents tab aggregates responses from all external recipients per specific drawing and lists them for the CAD designer all in one view. CAD Designers have direct access to all external review comments as soon as they become available, helping to further compress the project schedule.