3 Reasons Agencies Shouldn’t Tie Their Digital Plan Review Future to a Single Permitting Platform

As agencies modernize their digital plan review workflows, they’re aiming for faster turnaround times, higher transparency, and a more predictable experience for applicants and reviewers.

As part of that transformation, it’s common for the permitting vendor to recommend a specific electronic plan review solution alongside their core solution. Although it may seem convenient to go with the permitting vendor’s recommendation, this raises a critical question for agencies: 

Should your permitting vendor decide how your agency handles plan review? This is a decision that falls directly under your purview—one that you’ll live with for the next decade and wields a significant impact on your customers.

For many jurisdictions, the best path forward is this: maintain your autonomy. The plan review system sits at the heart of daily development operations, and agencies are best set up for success when they own that decision. Below are the top three reasons why. 

1. Budget Consolidation Often Reduces Focus on Plan Review

When a vendor owns both the permitting platform and the plan review system, the two products often share a single investment and development budget. As a result, software companies frequently deal with:

• A single budget prioritizing the core product over the EPR system
• Plan review system receiving fewer product enhancements and de-prioritized development
• Roadmap trade-offs that favor the core product over the ERP system
  

Permitting systems tend to receive the majority of attention because they support a broader ecosystem. As a result, plan review—despite being one of the most hands-on, time-sensitive parts of the development process—gets demoted within the larger product portfolio. For agencies, this means the tools reviewers depend on daily may not evolve at the pace required to support rising volumes, more complex development, and evolving public expectations.

2. Vendor Lock-In Creates Expensive, Agency-Wide Replacement Scenarios

When plan review is tightly tied to the permitting system, agencies lose the ability to evolve components independently. This often results in:

• The need to replace both systems at once if one isn’t meeting the agency’s needs
  
• Roadmap changes from a single vendor triggering full-stack transitions
  
• Migrations that affect intake teams, reviewers, inspectors, IT administrators, and applicants—not just the permitting division
  

This increases total cost of ownership and makes upgrades far more complex than they need to be. Instead of replacing one component at the natural end of its lifecycle, agencies are often required to replace both—regardless of whether one tool was still serving them well.

As Jim MacLaggan, e-PlanSoft’s EVP of Growth, notes, “Permitting vendors know that replacing both the permitting and plan review systems will be incredibly disruptive. Vendors with bundled solutions bank on the fact that from a cost and internal disruption perspective, agencies might tolerate a subpar system rather than endure the pain to replace it.”

This is why separating permitting and plan review system acquisitions is important. Preserving choice protects operational stability and ensures agencies can improve or replace systems on their own terms, without being forced into disruptive, all-or-nothing transitions.

 

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3. Bundled Procurement Limits Best-of-Breed Selection

Many agencies enter procurement believing they can choose a permitting system and then independently select the plan review solution that best fits their reviewers’ workflows. But in practice:

• RFPs are often bundled, limiting what plan review systems can be considered
• CDP vendors promote only their preferred or partnered EPR tools
• Agencies may love the permitting platform but feel obligated to accept a plan review system that doesn’t meet their operational expectations
  

As Jim explains, “During the procurement process, both system integrators and permitting vendors make business decisions that serve their own best interests first and foremost over the client’s needs. Unfortunately, most agencies are unaware of the business arrangements happening in the background. I believe it’s in the agency’s best interest to select a vendor based on their business needs rather than the financial interests of the permitting vendor.” 

This isn’t a one-off issue. When systems are bundled, agencies often don’t get a full view of the available options, leading to trade-offs that affect reviewers, applicants, and internal operations over time.

e-PlanSoft: Built to Work With Every Permitting System

Modernizing your plan review process shouldn’t mean limiting your future options. Agencies deserve tools that evolve with them, integrate across a changing technology landscape, and adapt as workflows, regulations, and staffing needs shift.

Our work is centered on helping agencies build a plan review environment that:

• Works reliably for both reviewers and applicants
  
• Stays modern through continuous improvement
  
• Integrates with the permitting systems you use now and may use later
  
• Adapts as your processes grow or change
  
• Supports emerging AI capabilities without requiring platform changes
  

By designing our architecture to work across systems, we help agencies maintain control over how and when they modernize, whether that involves improving current workflows, adding AI features, or exploring new permitting solutions in the future.

With e-PlanSoft, agencies get the reliability they need today, the flexibility they’ll need tomorrow, and the innovation that will carry them into the next generation of digital plan review. If you're interested in learning more, let's talk.