OK, so the excitement may pale in comparison to some other new product announcements on your radar screen (anyone else been waiting for the iPhone 3G?), but within the circle of Newforma Project Center users, the support for RFI in the upcoming release of Project Center might just qualify as a “highly-anticipated event”. Put another way, I think I have heard the request (plea?) for a Newforma RFI solution from just about every Architectural user of Newforma Project Center. So it’s nice to be able (finally) to talk about it as a major enhancement to the upcoming release of Newforma Project Center Fifth Edition.
The Newforma CA Module
A little bit of background before I begin: In Fifth Edition, the RFI Activity Center has been bundled together with the Submittals Activity Center as Newforma’s CA Module. Only those Project Center users that need the ability to create, modify or respond to RFI or Submittals require the CA license. Project Center users who are not licensed for CA still gain “View” access to the information in these two activity centers.
The RFI Activity Center has a lot of great features so my goal with this article is to simply provide a high level overview:
Integrated with Microsoft Outlook
These days, you probably receive most of your contractor RFI and consultant’s answers via email regardless of what software the contractor is using (Prolog, Expedition, etc.). With each of these emails, you then have to open the Excel spreadsheet containing that project’s log and/or hunt through the network or paper file system to track down supporting documentation and carry out your next action. Sound familiar?
That’s why Fifth Edition now supports logging, assigning and answering RFI all from within Microsoft Outlook. Here is how it works:
1) When you receive an RFI via email, just click the File as New RFI option in Outlook (notice there is also an option to file emails directly as RFI answers):
2) Without leaving Outlook, you can log the RFI and then optionally assign it to a consultant using the “Next action” check option:
3) When you receive an answer from a consultant via email, you can log the answer and respond to the RFI Author, again, all without leaving Outlook:
Tracking RFI inside Newforma Project Center
Your CA staff can log and assign RFI, record RFI answers and respond to RFI authors all from within the RFI Activity Center. What’s really nice is that all Project Center users, regardless of whether they participate directly in the CA workflow, can gain access and insight into its critical activities and results. Here is how it works:
1) From the RFI Activity Center, all users can view and interact with project RFIs and their related transmittals, attachments, email and supporting documents. Users who have the CA license can do much more, including log and assign new RFI, log consultant’s answers and respond to RFI Authors, as depicted below:
2) You can filter, sort and re-arrange the contents of the RFI activity center, and then output a report to Excel, Word, PDF and other formats. If you enable the option to display details in the report formatting options, the RFI receive, assign, answer and response to author transactions get grouped beneath each RFI record, as shown in the RFI report exported to Excel below:
3) And integration with Newforma Markup Sessions allows you to easily incorporate PDF sketches created using the Newforma Markup application into your RFI responses. In the example below, I marked up two areas on a CAD drawing and selected the Send PDF option, which then provides the option of sending it as a response to an open RFI:
4) The user is then guided through the process of creating the response to the contractor, as depicted in the screen capture below:
Integrated with Newforma Info Exchange
Many of our customers also asked for a way to command greater accountability from their sub-consultants during CA transactions, so both RFI and Submittals have been integrated with Newforma Info Exchange in Fifth Edition. Here is how it works:
1) When you assign an RFI to a consultant and choose the “via Info Exchange” option, the consultant will get an email notification with a link that takes them to a view of the RFI on your Info Exchange web site:
Notice that the consultant can Send a Response to this RFI directly from this screen.
2) Each time this consultant returns to your Info Exchange web site, they will be reminded of all their their outstanding RFI, file transfers, action items and submittals across all the projects they are working with you on from the My Open Items screen:
3) Additionally, contractors who log into your Info Exchange web site can directly submit RFIs or Submittals:
That’s about all I have room for here. As you can see, the RFI process touches many different areas of Newforma, including Outlook, the RFI Activity Center, Markup and Info Exchange. Hopefully this has provided a useful introduction to its many capabilities.
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Pretty awesome! Being able to log new and answer existing RFIs without leaving Outlook is huge.
By SamE on 06/02/2008 - 4:14PM