Going Digital: A New Era of Efficiency for Local Governance
11 April 2023Bluebeam, GovernmentBluebeam Solutions, Collaboration, digital transformation, local government, municipal, permits, plan reviews

In recent years, many municipalities – local governance – have been moving towards digitizing their plan review process. By adopting digital solutions, government agencies can streamline their review processes, reduce costs, and increase efficiency. This eliminates the need for using paper-based plan reviews and streamlines communication across departments and applicants.

Streamlining the process
For any business or agency operating on paper-based plans, you can expect a trend of inefficiencies around manual workflows, siloed teams, and document oversight. Digital tools can streamline many steps involved in a review process, such as tracking progress across multiple departments and working on the most updated versions of approvals.
By implementing the right tools, departments that once operated using only one set of paper plans can now work collaboratively on the most current documents without waiting on each other. This eliminates the waiting period between revisions across the different divisions and participants.
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Making room for improvement
Eliminating paper submissions entails less printing, shipping, and travel costs associated with reviewers and applicants. With electronic reviews, you can ensure documents and information are submitted correctly. This can reduce the need for rework and resubmissions, saving time, money, and headaches for all parties involved.
Cities like Seattle and Las Vegas have led the path to transition from paper plans to electronic reviews and digital submissions with Bluebeam Solutions. One municipality saw a cost savings of at least $600,000 in printing costs alone, while also saving and freeing up valuable office space for archives and projects in progress.

Empowering teams to work more efficiently
A successful transition to implementing an electronic plan review and permitting process can lead to an increase in efficiency and collaboration, for example:
- Gain better cost control.
- Eliminate silos.
- Create a collaborative environment where divisions can work on plans from anywhere and anytime through collaborative software like Bluebeam.
- Record and track progress to keep visibility and communication streamlined across reviewers and participants.
Using Bluebeam, government agencies like yours can make their review process and communications more efficient and effective among municipalities, departments, and applicants.
To learn how Bluebeam Solutions can help your agency’s review processes, contact Applied Software, Graitec Group to get started today.