In the early 2000’s, Owen Group, Inc., an award-winning architectural and engineering firm based in Los Angeles, California. commonly had forklifts beep their way through the double door entrance of their offices, bringing in large plan sets by the pallet load from different agencies and private companies for compliance review projects including the new World Trade Center in New York, Los Angeles Unified School District, San Diego International Airport and Metro Rail Stations, to name a few.

Owen Group endeavored to find a better way to manage the plan sets and perform collaborative plan reviews. It was a waste of time, money, space, and paper. After searching and finding that a solution meeting their needs did not exist, Owen Group, together with other industry experts, began the development of software that would allow multiple users to review drawings electronically together, in real-time from multiple locations, over the internet.

e-PlanSoft products are revolutionary technology for conducting compliance reviews in the construction industry. The successful launch of this software within Owen Group led the United States Patent Office to grant several patents. The original patent, entitled “System and Method for Dynamic Linking between Graphic Documents and Comment Databases,” protects e-Plan’s proprietary method for the dynamic linking of a comment database storing mark-ups, plan corrections, and/or other comments to graphic documents such as construction plans and was filed in 2007.

*Patent No. US 7,975,222 B1, “System and Method for Dynamic Linking between Graphic Documents and Comment Databases” (Issued July 5, 2011; Serial number 11/900479, Filing Date: Sept. 11, 2007)

This technology is the foundation of e-Plan, Inc.’s web-based e-PlanReview® and e-PlanCheck® software that provides owners, the A/E/C (construction) industry, and code compliance agencies with the ability to perform electronic plan review.

Since they already had an amazing product, the Owen Group principals decided they should start their own software firm and thus e-PlanSoft was born and started selling e-PlanCHECK® (ePC).  The legacy product was an electronic plan review application for city, county, and state permitting agencies, whose feature set was greatly influenced by significant input from former building officials, architects, and engineers.

The first order of business to help the company succeed was partnering with Accela.

e-PlanSoft continued to update its software and protect it by filing its second Patent.

*Patent No. US 8,595,617 B2, “System and Method for Dynamic Linking between Graphic Documents and Comment Databases” (Issued Nov. 26, 2013; Serial number: 13/173844, Filing Date: June 30, 2011)

In July of 2012, e-Plan, Inc. was awarded a registered trademark for e-PlanCheck® (Int. Cl.: 9 Reg No. 4,200,225), online plan review software that was developed specifically to assist public agencies in reviewing, commenting on, and organizing documentation throughout multiple departments at once.  e-PlanSoft also filed for its third Patent.

Patent No. US 9,135,602, “Management of Building Plan Documents Utilizing Comments and a Correction List” (Issued Sept. 15, 2015; Serial number: 13/557612, Filing Date: July 25, 2012)

The integrity of our products speak for themselves and we’ll back it up. In 2013 e-PlanSoft filed e-PlanREVIEW® as a registered trademark and an additional patent.

• Patent No. US 9,720,886, “System and Method for Dynamic Linking Between Graphic Documents and Comment Data Bases” (Issued August 1, 2017; Serial number: 14/084323; Filing Date: November 19, 2013)

2 more Patents were filed this year.

• Patent No. US 9,792,024 B2, “Systems and Methods for Management and Processing of Electronic Documents using Video Annotations” (Issued October 17, 2017; Serial number: 14/828361; Filing Date: Aug. 17, 2015)
• Patent No. US 9,684,643 “Management of Building Plan Documents Utilizing Comments and a Correction List” (Issued June 20, 2017; Serial number: 14/842598; Filing Date: September 1, 2015)

We filed 2 additional patents in 2017, bringing our total to 8.

• Patent No. US 10,114,806 B2, “Management of Building Plan Documents Utilizing Comments and A Correction List” (Issued October 30, 2018; Serial number 15/612,704, Filing Date: Jun. 2, 2017)
• Patent No. US 10,198,407, “Systems and Methods for Forr Dynamic Linking Between Graphic Documents and Comment Data Bases” (Issued February 5, 2019; Serial number: 15/655787; Filing Date: July 20, 2017)

e-PlanSoft has expanded on its success in serving governmental code enforcement agencies with its 2018 release of e-PlanREVIEW® (EPR). Deployed in e-PlanSoft’s Amazon Cloud, and running entirely in the browser, our next generation of electronic plan review, e-PlanREVIEW®, was released with strong electronic versioning that tracks plans through the entire submittal lifecycle and creates an audit trail viewable by administrators of the system.  Concurrent plan reviews on the same document at the same time, with workflow assignments and strong versioning, break down silos between agency departments as well as outside consultants by eliminating the need to make copies of plans, merge comments from multiple sources or check-in and out documents from individuals to review.

e-PlanREVIEW was also issued another patent:

• Patent #10,650,189, ” Management of Building Plan Documents Utilizing Comments and a Correction List” (serial number 15/612704; filed 6/2/2017)

While our next generation of electronic plan review was gaining tons of attention, our developers were hard at work updating features, and our product was granted an additional patent:

• Patent No. US 10,198,407, “System And Method For Dynamic Linking Between Graphic Documents And Comment Data Bases” (Issued February 5, 2019; Serial number 15/655787, Filing Date: July 20, 2017)

History books have already started to speak about the massive pandemic of COVID-19 that was felt worldwide causing everything to shut down and the world to mass quarantine with stay-in-place orders, remote work and learning environments, and so much more. This is the year many realized how much Technology was needed so that our economy doesn’t crash. Those agencies already using digital products were a step ahead of those that were still on paper.  Our team quickly put together a plan to help get multiple municipalities online faster than they’ve been before.

Our development team was busy updating and adding new features as well such as our REVIEWSessions™, which launched in June 2020.  With REVIEWSessions, agencies had the ability to do a “virtual counter” visit via EPR for any pending items on projects to help close plan reviews faster.

The following Patents were also issued, updating our portfolio to include 10 total patents issued and 3 pending applications:

• Patent #10,650,189, ” Management of Building Plan Documents Utilizing Comments and a Correction List” (serial number 15/612704; filed 6/2/2017; Issued 5/12/2020)
• Patent #10,657,314, “System and Method for Dynamic Linking between Graphic Documents and Comment Data Bases” (Serial number 16/506138; filed 7/9/2019; Issued 5/19/2020)

Our products, team, and service continue to make headlines as our company expands.  2021 marks the start of our “Educational Webinar’s Series” where every 3 weeks we bring you an hour of packed information from tips, tricks and trends to specific use cases and more. That’s 17 hours of free information you don’t want to miss.

As our client list grows we found a need for dedicated Account Managers and extending our product training by offering a new quarterly brush up for EPR users we like to call “Raising the Bar on EPR,” and so far we’ve heard nothing but praises from our clients on this added touch of service.

As our client list grows we found a need for dedicated Account Managers and extending our product training by offering a new quarterly brush up for EPR users we like to call “Raising the Bar on EPR,” and so far we’ve heard nothing but praises from our clients on this added touch of service.

Lastly, you know our developers are the best part of our team as they continue to bring the best features to our products and we continue to file the patents needed to protect those fabulous features. Here’s our 2021 approved patents so far:

• Patent No. US 10,897,490 B2, “Systems and Methods for Augmenting Electronic Content” (Serial number 15/730581, Filing Date: 10/11/2017; Issued date: 1/19/2021)
• Patent No. US 10,956,668 B2, “Management of Building Plan Documents Utilizing Comments and a Correction List” (Serial number 16/860,993, Filing Date: 4/28/2020; Issued date: 3/23/2021)