Bentley Systems has announced that the city of Franklin, Tennessee, has joined Bentley's Municipal License Subscription (MLS) program. Bentley's MLS offers municipalities all the software they need to design and manage all their infrastructure for a fixed annual fee based on population. The breakthrough program enables them to improve productivity and reduce administrative costs by outfitting their entire mapping and engineering organisations with fully integrated software for GIS and engineering workflows.

This leads to improved services and more efficient government.

Franklin, a fast-growing city in Tennessee just south of Nashville, serves a population of 48,000.

The city uses Bentley's WaterGEMS water modeling product in its engineering and water departments and is expanding its use of WaterGEMS through Bentley's MLS.

In addition, in the near future, Franklin will deploy MicroStation, StormCAD, and Bentley fibre - with other Bentley software to follow.

Said Mike Proctor, IT manager for Franklin, 'A key benefit of our new MLS is the ability to provide improved services to our citizens.

Take, for example, water and wastewater services, which are always a challenge in cities experiencing rapid population growth.

Our expanded use of WaterGEMS will enhance our ability to continually remodel our water network to account for the city's many new subdivisions and, thus, maintain the required capacities.

'In terms of our internal organisation, the biggest benefits of the MLS will result from our ability to share data more effectively across departments and to quickly and easily access a wide array of software to support our infrastructure projects.

For starters, our use of MicroStation will enable us to more effectively collaborate with the Tennessee Department of Transportation, which also relies on MicroStation for many of its projects.