News & Blog

Long-time customers Kane County, Illinois and Manheim Township, Pennsylvania, have recently added CityView Electronic Plans Review (EPR) to their existing suite of community development solutions. Customers since 2001, they each sought out a digital review process in order to improve departmental efficiencies.

As with many other municipalities around the country, Kane and Manheim found that they had lengthy plan review times, along with too much paper to handle and store. Looking to go digital, reduce their carbon footprints and shorten plan review turn-around, CityView’s paperless solution helped revolutionize their review process.

CityView Electronic Plans Review compliments Kane County’s existing CityView solutions, which includes Permits & Inspections, Planning, Code Enforcement, Business Licensing and Animal Licensing. Kane will also be implementing CityView Portal, which will improve access to county services for citizens while also providing an opportunity for businesses and contractors to self-serve online.

Manheim Township has been using CityView Portal since 2019 along with Permits & Inspections, Planning, Code Enforcement and Rental Housing. At first, the portal was used to replace simple over-the-counter paper permit applications with the convenience of online submissions and tracking.

Until March of 2019, the state of Pennsylvania didn’t allow municipal records to be archived digitally. Once electronic file archiving became an allowable method to archive plans and permit documents, Manheim moved forward. “With that last hurdle removed, we have been working toward a fully electronic model to facilitate permit submission, plan review, permit issuance and permit archiving,” explained Andy Bowman, director of code compliance for the Township. CityView Electronic Plans Review is a natural progression of Manheim’s desire to offer advanced digital solutions to its businesses and residents.

Adopting a paperless plan review process has many benefits that go beyond modernizing municipal services. Cities and counties can increase the speed and ease of submission, track documents from submission to approval, and optimize service offerings to citizens, designers and contractors. Here’s how it works:

• Documents are stored in a central document repository within the CityView system.
• Once verified, they can easily be shared, reviewed and marked up with Bluebeam Revu, an award-winning PDF creation, editing, markup and collaboration technology.
• This integration facilitates a completely paperless workflow from application to issuance and ultimately to the final certificate of occupancy.

For many local governments, the process of managing traditional hard-copy submitted plans and utilizing a dated plan review workflow causes delays, errors and inefficiencies. Concurrent digital mark-ups with other reviewers, designers or contractors allow for a faster, more consistent review cycle. That’s the power of CityView Electronic Plans Review and Bluebeam Revu.

Are you ready to go digital? Discover how your municipality can accelerate and simplify plan review with CityView’s Electronic Plans Review solution.