Accela and DigEplan Announce New Partnership to Help Government Agencies Streamline Critical Plan Review Processes

New tech alliance simplifies access to rapidly deployed, cost-competitive, feature-rich electronic plan review to keep critical government services running remotely

News provided by

Accela

May 20, 2020, 06:00 ET

SAN RAMON, Calif., May 20, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Accela, the leading provider of cloud-based solutions for state and local government, today announced a new technology partnership with DigEplan, a global leader in electronic plan review, to create a streamlined, cost-effective end-to-end electronic plan review process to enhance government IT staff productivity and reduce manual processes. As part of the partnership, DigEplan is fully integrated into Accela's suite of digital applications and Accela's government customers will now be able to procure DigEplan's software through Accela. The collaboration underscores the increasing importance of leveraging cloud solutions to help agencies navigate modern governance, particularly throughout the growing challenges of the global coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.

"We are thrilled to be growing our partnership with DigEplan and expanding Accela's network of trusted technology alliances to help better serve our customers of all sizes and complexity," says Tom Nieto, Chief Operating Officer at Accela. "Technology's role in government is undergoing a momentous shift, and Accela is continuing to work with our partners to ensure that we can provide solutions to our clients to adapt to their changing landscape and provide essential services to their communities."

Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, state and local governments are accelerating their transitions to electronic processes to keep critical services running and manage an increasingly high level of citizen requests. These recent challenges have accelerated the need for tools to streamline complexities and reduce the heavy IT burden associated with permitting and plan review processes. DigEplan's integration into the Accela Civic Platform provides an efficient, flexible, and secure method for agencies to streamline electronic plan review and speed up permit application processes, removing the need for paper, workstation-based PDF mark-up tools or complex third-party standalone applications. The new partnership will increase access to this technology by allowing and facilitating procurement of DigEplan's software through Accela for its agency customers worldwide.

"We have been working closely with Accela for years and this formal partnership underlines our aligned vision to better equip governments with the solutions to deliver services from any location," says Jason Matthews, CEO at DigEplan. "Cloud-based DigEplan can be configured in days, providing robust tools for cities to continue their plan review processes, in their usual Accela environment and workflows – just as if they were physically in the office."

Amongst its many features, Accela and DigEplan simplify planning and permitting submissions for citizens and back-office reviews for agencies by removing the need to split plans. This enables a faster and easier planning review process— streamlining review activity, removing extraneous complexities, and opening up a rich set of features to complete review cycles with ease.

Packed with a wealth of functionality, DigEplan's core advantages for states, counties and cities are:

Fast deployment; be up and running in just weeks
Fully integrated to Accela screens, workflows and processes with no duplication
Commercially sensitive; cost-effective solution with full functionality

Available now, DigEplan Electronic Plan Review for Accela strengthens the government technology leaders' partnership to drive digital transformation in government. For the past five years, Accela and DigEplan have joined forces to help state and local government customers move to the cloud and improve outcomes for agencies and the communities they serve. Most recently, Accela and DigEplan helped the City of Palo Alto transition all permitting and plan review processes online in just three weeks, to support a fully remote workforce and safely address community needs during Bay Area's "shelter-in-place" mandate.

Today's announcement reinforces Accela's commitment to delivering modern digital tools to help build thriving communities, now and in the future. More than 80 percent of Accela's new customers purchased solutions in the cloud, and 66 percent of all Accela customers are now in the cloud. Accela recently launched its cloud-based COVID-19 Response Solutions to help cities and states respond to the biggest challenges of the current pandemic. These cloud-based solutions were developed to enable agencies to provide online citizen services while working remotely, including scheduling healthcare workers and volunteers, conducting mobile and virtual inspections to help field workers continue critical, timely inspections or construction projects as scheduled, and more.

To learn more about Accela Civic Solutions, please visit https://www.accela.com/solutions/.

About Accela
Accela provides market-leading cloud solutions that empower the most innovative state and local governments around the world to build thriving communities, grow businesses and protect citizens. More than 275 million citizens globally benefit from Accela's solutions, which are powered by Microsoft Azure, for permitting, licensing, code enforcement and service request management. Accela's fast-to-implement Civic Applications, built on its robust and extensible Civic Platform, help agencies address specific needs today, while ensuring they are prepared for any emerging or complex challenges in the future. Accela is headquartered in San Ramon, California, with additional offices around the world. For more information, visit www.accela.com.

About DigEplan
DigEplan is a feature-rich fully integrated electronic plan review tool, engineered to streamline the plan review process directly from Accela. Fully integrated to the Accela Civic Platform, DigEplan removes the need for plan triage, complex third-party integrations or duplication of the Accela document management, citizen portal and workflow. Trusted by more than 20 government technology platform providers and used in over 100 cities and municipalities across four countries, DigEplan's mission to complement government technology partners' solutions, providing high performance, engineering grade plan review at an affordable price is being realized. DigEplan is part of LCT Software, with locations in the Clearwater, FL and Bath, UK. More Information: www.DigEplan.com

Contact: Kate Helete, (805) 458-5093, [email protected]

SOURCE Accela