Sensing a New Direction – Meridian’s Bold Bet on Proliance

Since its founding in 1993, Meridian’s industry play began with a goal to become the system of record for combining capital expansion budgets, integrated project workflow, and schedules, and all of that in a single integrated system. While Meridian initially carved out its identity within the PPM market space (via the classic planning and building spectrum), the company has since introduced advanced Business Intelligence (BI) capabilities to provide senior executives and mid-level managers visibility into the entire portfolio of projects, programs, and facilities through pertinent role-based key performance indicators (KPI), dashboards, scorecards, alerts, trends analyses, and roll-up reporting.

Since the early 2000s, with Proliance, Meridian has expanded on its initial PPM solution footprint by bringing together the complete “Plan, Build, and Operate” spectrum for “Project-Based Organizations”–- hence its self-applied label of “PBO squared.” By adding Business Process Management (BPM) capabilities and taking an early bet on Microsoft .NET Framework technologies (Meridian is a Microsoft Gold Partner), the vendor has assembled a set of best practices to

* prevent schedule/cost overruns;
* gain global project spend management advantages;
* leverage/optimize/plan around multiple projects;
* reduce costs by consolidating multiple information technology (IT) solutions;
* centralize documentation to establish or refute vendor claims;
* optimize investments in building reconfiguration and retooling;
* improve time to market for new goods/services; and
* respond more quickly to competitive trends and market opportunities.

The Proliance solution aggressively targets the ILM buyer category by adding the “Operate” category to the classic “Plan” and “Build” ones, which it has enriched as well. The Operate capabilities extend Proliance into the following areas: Asset Management, Preventative Maintenance, Predictive Maintenance, and Service Requests. The full combination is suitable for several verticals, such as: A/E/C, Energy, Healthcare, Real Estate, Retail, Education, Government, Transportation, etc.

Why Do the Competitors Largely Miss the ILM Game

Despite recent market consolidation like Oracle’s acquisition of Primavera, the combination of PPM and enterprise resource planning (ERP) still misses key ILM market needs and falls short of a tightly integrated, web-based PBO triple-solution combination. Specifically, Proliance has a substantial edge over most of its competitors in this category in its combination of the following three areas:

1. It is a native, built from the ground-up service oriented architecture (SOA)-based platform application that already integrates PPM, scheduling, and facilities management on the same platform;
2. It has a well-developed Microsoft Office Business Application (OBA) strategy; and
3. It has made an early bet on Building Information Modeling (BIM).

While the first two advantages are debatable (i.e., many competitors can claim similar traits and strategies), it is the latter one that is truly differentiating. Namely, designing buildings and facilities using data-rich BIM is taking hold in the marketplace. BIM can be described as a design methodology that results in a digital three-dimensional (3D) model.

This model represents the following three key facets: 1) a facility’s geometrical and spatial relationships, 2) building systems and components, and 3) properties of specified equipment and materials. To visualize BIM as part of a technology solution, imagine a 3D visual interface that sits on top of a database of information that describes all of the elements within a building.

In other words, BIM is the new digitized way to gather necessary models. It starts with the conceptual design, iterative designs, architectural BIM, structural BIM and mechanical, engineering & plumbing (MEP) BIM in the “Plan” phase, to end with the as-built model, as-built equipment, and the complete virtual building in the “Operate” phase.

Still, BIM also provides value on the “Build” phase in PBO – and brings a host of analytic, reporting, view (visualization), and modeling capabilities (e.g., construction sequencing, 4D modeling, clash detection, fabrication BIM, spatial BIM installation, etc.). This allows companies to view potential problems, issues, challenges, and plan for unique circumstances before building any infrastructure.