MWH Soft Enters Pipeline Design Market with Best-in-Class Geocentric Technology

Revolutionary New PipePlan Delivers Considerable Productivity Gains and Cost Savings for Detailed Pipeline Design Production and Rapid Return on Investment

Broomfield, Colorado USA, December 3, 2008 — Once again taking waterworks industry innovation to a new level, MWH Soft, a leading global provider of environmental and water resources applications software, today announced the worldwide release of its highly anticipated PipePlan for InfoWater. The state of the art for detailed pipeline design production, PipePlan gives civil engineers the unprecedented ability to quickly and accurately design, plot and complete final drafting of water distribution and transmission pipes in both plan and section views.

The engineering design of pressurized pipelines is a complex, time-consuming task. It requires compliance with a daunting number of design criteria, including pipeline minimum slope, maximum spacing between air release valves, intersection with existing utilities, and pipe cover. Meeting these criteria, while also achieving quality assurance standards, requires repetitive iterations based on sound engineering experience.

The unrivaled productivity and user friendliness of PipePlan will quickly change the way pipelines are engineered and designed. It provides all the capabilities needed to streamline engineering design processes, optimize detailed pipeline design (both horizontal and vertical alignments), increase productivity and accuracy, and significantly shorten project schedules. PipePlan also features a comprehensive set of automated drawing tools that allow users to interactively design pipeline plans and profiles in minutes and generate complete, high quality shop drawings in seconds. (Using disparate hydraulic modeling, CAD and GIS packages with spreadsheets and macros, finished detailed pipeline CAD drawings in plan and profile usually take several days.) These advances in detailed pipeline design production deliver substantial cost savings and productivity gains.

PipePlan has already played a crucial role in automating detailed pipeline designs at Khatib & Alami (K&A), a leading engineering consulting firm in the Middle East and North Africa. “In view of the dramatic success and widespread industry adoption of MWH Soft InfoWater, the most advanced water distribution modeling solution in the market today, the next logical step is streamlining and automating pipeline engineering design,” reports Adel AbouJaoude, Ph.D, K&A Associate and Environmental Engineering Department Manager. “The intuitive PipePlan interface and advanced, fully-automated engineering design tools are enabling us to complete and validate detailed pipeline design projects faster and more accurately than ever before. That allows us to work smarter and faster — delivering better design projects within budget, time and resource limits and ensuring predictable production at the lowest sustainable cost.”

PipePlan greatly extends the functionality of MWH Soft’s InfoWater, a comprehensive geospatial environment for water network analysis and design and the industry-leading GIS-centric water modeling software for ArcGIS (ESRI, Redlands, CA). Users can now leverage their work in building detailed hydraulic network models to produce highly professional distribution and transmission line designs in record time and at minimal cost. They can also preserve their “best practice” design information for reuse on future projects, increasing engineering productivity, ensuring quality designs, and preserving corporate knowledge.

Among many benefits, PipePlan will help users quickly design pipelines within a flexible, easy-to-use graphical interface; directly access and display node (station) information, including slope, angle, pressure, etc.; automatically generate comprehensive pipeline plans and profiles in CAD format along with high quality plan and profile deliverable sheets; and configure graphical presentation of CAD drawings. The software automatically creates all intermediate stations (stakes) and calculates their natural terrain elevations and pipe slopes; defines the location of pipe ancillary fittings such as air valves, blowoffs (washouts), bends and tees; reports interference with existing and proposed utility networks; instantly updates profiles for horizontal alignment changes; and visually checks compliance with design criteria. With these advanced capabilities, PipePlan meets the broader design and documentation challenges faced by EPCs, consulting engineering firms and water utilities, optimizing pipeline design and construction costs and significantly increasing their productivities.

“We are convinced that the water industry simply deserves better solutions than the outdated, inefficient tools still being used today,” said Paul F. Boulos, Ph.D, President and COO of MWH Soft. “PipePlan is a giant step forward for the productivity of the industry. By giving mainstream design engineers easy access to a host of new and unique tools and capabilities for detailed pipeline design, we can help them consistently generate higher-quality designs much faster and at a lower cost. PipePlan sustains MWH Soft’s record for being first — a distinction that is important only because it extends our customers’ competitive advantage. It will influence design engineering for years to come.”

Pricing and Availability
PipePlan for InfoWater is now available by subscription worldwide. Prices start at $12,000. For the latest information on the MWH Soft Subscription Program, including availability and purchase requirements, visit www.mwhsoft.com or contact your local MWH Soft Certified Representative.

About MWH Soft
MWH Soft is a leading global provider of technical and infrastructure software and professional solutions designed to meet the technological needs of utilities, government industries, and engineering organizations worldwide. Its clients include major water and wastewater utilities on every continent, the majority of the largest North American cities, and ENR top design firms. The multifaceted, state-of-the-art CAD, GIS and Internet enabled products created by MWH Soft empower thousands of engineers across the globe to competitively plan, manage, design, protect, maintain and operate highly efficient and reliable infrastructure systems. For more information, call MWH Soft at (626) 568-6868, or visit www.mwhsoft.com.

MWH Soft Contact
Adam J. Simonsen
Director of Marketing
Adam.Simonsen@mwhsoft.com