The CIPAce™ Platform serves as the common foundation for all business solutions offered by CIPPlanner Corporation. From public sector to private enterprises, from a traditional enterprise-hosted solution to software as a service (SaaS) deployment, the CIPAce™ Platform is the most comprehensive and configurable enterprise software product in the capital infrastructure solution marketplace. Coupled with our team’s in-depth domain expertise and insight into industry best practices, the platform has enabled us to design and develop numerous innovative yet practical life cycle management solutions that can be tailored to our customers’ unique needs and business processes with expansive real-world applications.
Our solutions are equipped with powerful configuration tools and templates for managing all aspects of an infrastructure project throughout its life cycle, from planning and procurement to execution, closeout, and maintenance. These solutions have been adopted by a wide spectrum of customers, which include cities, counties, utilities, transportation agencies, as well as fortune 500 companies and multi-national corporations.
Capital Planning and Budgeting
The CIPAce™ Capital Planning and Budgeting Solution provides powerful tools for optimizing an organization’s capital investment plans to fulfill the organization’s strategic vision. Supported by our innovative and field-proven best practices, the solution features sophisticated template-driven financial modeling and projection with the capabilities for both upfront project capital budgeting financial analysis and ongoing cash flow projections.
In addition to a flexible and user-defined planning horizon, the solution’s long-range planning has integrated spending curve support that enables cost distribution to multiple fiscal years based on pre-configured and user-defined spending curves. Multiple Scenario Analysis can also be used to conduct hypothetical scenario analysis from the entire portfolio down to the individual project level. Additionally, the solution is equipped with comprehensive budget management tools for directing the life cycle of budget records from initiation and authorization to augmentation, transfers, and retirement.
Capital Program and Project Management
CIPAce™ Capital Program and Project Management is a comprehensive enterprise solution for managing an infrastructure system’s development and life cycle at both the individual project level and the entire program perspective. The solution provides a series of effective functions and features to help manage all aspects of capital project and management needs from strategic planning, prioritization, budgeting, fund allocation, and procurement to all elements and activities throughout project design, construction and closeout processes, and post-construction phase, such as warranty monitoring and asset management. This tool helps organizations to streamline project and program management processes and to consolidate siloed business data and knowledge from various project phases into a central database.
The solution can bring internal and external stakeholders from multiple disciplines and functional units under a unified enterprise management framework. It serves as a management hub that facilitates communication and collaboration among project stakeholders to effectively navigate demanding and time-consuming processes, such as bidding and RFPs; design/construction submittals; RFIs, change requests, and change orders; meeting minutes, issue tracking, and document management; and so on. Designed according to industry best practices, the solution contains numerous pre-configured business templates and provides a solid yet adaptive foundation for business process standardization and optimization. With built-in and flexible configuration tools, our application systems can easily and consistently adapt to the rapidly changing business environment.
Though tailored to our customers’ specific needs, our application systems also contain a powerful Report Engine that enables the design of customized graphic reports, promoting effective and proactive management practices.
Contract Management
The CIPAce™ Contract Management Solution is one of the most comprehensive contract management tools in today’s market. It allows users to effectively manage all contract types throughout a project’s life cycle from contract initiation and execution to contract monitoring and closeout. The solution can also manage compliance and reporting on small, disadvantaged, veteran, minority- and woman-owned businesses by tracking goals and spending across all prime and sub-contractors under the contract.
The solution provides functionalities for managing all critical data elements, such as bid data and contract award, line items and schedule of values, fund allocation and argumentation, purchase orders and invoices, resource/timesheets and schedule, change management, as well as issue tracking and document management. With commonly used contract templates available, the solution also comes with flexible configuration tools for creating customized contracts and workflow processes.
Asset Maintenance Management
The CIPAce™ Asset Maintenance Management Solution enables our customers to effectively and systematically manage their infrastructure maintenance information and optimize maintenance and replacement processes for a wide range of asset classes including equipment. Built on the commonly accepted Asset Management principles and practices, the solution helps asset managers capture individual infrastructure components as well as their subsequent maintenance information in a centralized database. As the values of such assets change along with time and usages, asset managers can utilize the data to develop maintenance and replacement plans based on practices such as amortization and depreciation. The solution can also help to effectively manage not only the day-to-day utilization and performance of such assets, but more importantly the subsequent maintenance and replacement of these assets.
The CIPAce™ Asset Maintenance Management Solution empowers our customers with a new generation of cloud-based, highly mobile, and secure tools with the following key capabilities:
The CIPAce™ Asset Maintenance Management Solution provides the following key benefits:
Geospatial Project Coordination
The CIPAce™ Geospatial Project Coordination Solution is designed to proactively facilitate the scheduling and coordination of interdependent projects within the same area based on geospatial data. The solution can automatically identify conflicts as well as coordination opportunities with the integrated GIS capabilities, based on project geospatial data, project schedule, and restrictions tracked by the GIS component. It is also equipped with powerful tools for conflict resolution and scheduling optimization to minimize disruptions to nearby businesses and the public during project execution.
Enterprise Bid Management
The CIPAce™ Enterprise Bid Management Solution promotes comprehensive and effective bid management throughout the process from bid package preparation and bid advertisement to bid response submission, bid evaluation, and bid award. Internal stakeholders can work collaboratively during the development of bid packages as well as the subsequent bid evaluation processes via automated workflows. Once approved, bid advertisement can be published to solicit for bids, or a selected bidder can proceed to contract negotiations.
The solution not only manages the entire process following the procurement life cycle, but also provides a full spectrum of features to support all bidding related activities and milestones. The solution comes with an optional public bid portal that is accessible by vendors and contains many user-friendly features to facilitate various steps along the bid process, including vendor registrations, bidding opportunity search, subscription for bid notifications, requests-for-clarification, Q&A or addendum publication, as well as electronic bid submission.
Bid submissions can be reviewed by evaluators using the Bid Ranking feature that can accommodate both single and multi-phased ranking processes. This powerful and versatile solution has enabled numerous public agencies throughout the United States to streamline their complex and often cumbersome procurement processes with improved quality and efficiency as well as enhanced coordination and collaboration among departments and participants.
Procure to Pay Life Cycle Management
The CIPAce™ Procure to Pay Life Cycle Management Solution is one of the integrated suites of infrastructure development solutions powered by the CIPAce™ cloud platform. Developed with a flexible, extensible, and interoperable system architecture, this solution can help organizations effectively manage and automate key activities throughout the procurement life cycle. The solution can support all relevant activities, including intake requests, purchase order management, solicitation management, public bidding, vendor selection and award, contract execution, contract administration, change orders, electronic invoice processing, closeout process, and more. The solution is also equipped with powerful Project Financial Management features that keeps track of cost estimates, approved budgets, encumbrance, and actual expenditures by projects, funds, vendors, and any other breakdown statistics as needed. The solution comes with preconfigured industry standard forms, fields, and templates out-of-box as well as powerful configuration tools that can tailor features to customers’ specific needs, including customized forms, fields, data relationships, tables, workflows, access controls, automatic alerts, and various types of templates.
Public Bid Portal
Advertising and managing product and service related procurement processes is often a very challenging undertaking for public agencies in the United States where such a process is strictly governed by federal, state, and local laws and regulations. The lack of coordinated and readily retrievable information throughout the process has been an overwhelming burden to procurement professionals and relevant stakeholders, especially as the quantity and scope of procurement for products and services increase within an agency.
The CIPAce™ Public Bid Portal Solution is a simple yet effective solution developed specifically to manage bid and addendum publishing, bid opportunity search, bid subscription, vendor questions and responses, as well as any bid related communications throughout a solicitation process. The solution not only manages the electronic publishing of solicitation packages, but also provides a full spectrum of features in the vendor bid portal to facilitate various steps from vendor registrations to electronic bid submission.