In August, SDCI announced that it will implement a new plan review process using the Bluebeam software application. We will stop sending standard letter-based corrections for plan reviews and begin providing marked-up documents created with Bluebeam. This transition will align our plan review process with many of our neighboring jurisdictions’ process.
Here are a few updates on this effort:
- We expect to launch the new review process some time in November. We are currently conducting functionality, usability, and quality assurance tests and will determine a final launch date based on those results. We will announce the final launch date on our website, in our Building Connections newsletter, and via email notifications.
- Our short video, SDCI New Review Process, provides an overview of the new process.
- Under the new process, you will still:
- Receive notifications that a review has been completed
- Find review summary reports by discipline in the Seattle Services Portal as they are completed
- Submit updated plan sets after we have completed all our reviews
- What changes under this process:
- When all reviews are completed, you will receive a marked-up plan set which contains the comments from ALL the review disciplines.
- Instead of preparing responses to each individual correction letter as you do today, you will be asked to reply to the comments directly in the marked-up plan set using either Bluebeam (requires a license) or Adobe Acrobat (free).
- As we transition to delivering marked-up plan sets, you may receive both letters and marked-up plan sets with our corrections documented. As a rule, please respond to any letter you receive with a letter and any marked-up plan set by embedding your responses in the marked-up plan set.
Help us perform reviews more efficiently! As we have worked on this transition, many of our reviewers indicated that they rely on bookmarks to navigate the (sometimes lengthy) plan sets that we receive from applicants. Please follow the requirements for submitting pdf documents, outlined in Tip 106, General Standards for Plans and Drawings, to include a good set of bookmarks in every plan set you submit. This helps us review your plan set more quickly. Â For information on how to add bookmarks to your pdf documents, please refer to the following links for Bluebeam documents and Adobe documents.