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BIW SAVES A PILE OF DRAWINGS ONE KILOMETRE HIGH Construction professionals could have generated enough construction drawings to create a tower more than a kilometre high if they had not been using the BIW Information Channel collaboration system, says BIW. Using web-based technology to distribute, manage and collaborate on drawings and documents generates huge paper and efficiency savings for their companies and the industry as a whole, says BIW. In September 2004, the BIW Information Channel collaboration service registered its one millionth CAD drawing file (the total of non-drawing items has also passed the 500,000 mark). Environmental and financial savings “We estimate that, on average, there are around eight people on the distribution list for a typical drawing,” says BIW chief executive Colin Smith. “By publishing their CAD files once to BIW Information Channel and letting the system notify recipients of their availability, our users have immediately removed over eight million copies from alternative distribution channels.” If these drawings and copies were physically piled on top of each other, the pile created would be more than 1100 metres high and would weigh around 450 tonnes; spread out side by side, they would cover an area of 4.5 square kilometres – enough to cover London’s Regent’s Park more than twice over, or the equivalent of 900 football pitches. Producing that much paper would require around 9000 trees. “As well as environmental benefits, there are also significant cost and time savings,” Smith continues. “Thousands of companies are reducing courier, postage, printing and copying costs, and they are communicating much more quickly and efficiently with their fellow team members. Email systems and corporate networks are not swamped by huge email attachments; recipients can quickly identify which drawings or other items require rapid attention and can then issue context-specific feedback at the press of a button.” At 31 October 2004, users had published 1,060,000 million drawings and 513,000 documents via BIW Information Channel. These totals exclude the thousands of comments, requests for information (RFIs), instructions and other process-related forms and reports routinely produced by users every day. Including these and other system-generated items would add at least a further four million items to the overall total. The real UK market leader BIW Information Channel is Europe’s most intensively used collaboration platform for the construction and property sectors; in July, the system recorded its five millionth user log-in since 1999, with another half a million logins being recorded in the last three months alone. On current trends, BIW should record around 1.9 million user sessions in 2004. The total number of BIW Information Channel registered users on 31 October 2004 was 38,327, from 4167 different companies. Collectively, these users had logged in 5,552,000 times, to work on some 2300 projects with a total capital value estimated at around £16 billion. Total storage exceeded 1.2 terabytes of data. “We have published system usage statistics regularly since 2000, believing them to be a much more realistic benchmark of the take-up and success of a collaboration system,” says Smith. “We reject claims by BuildOnline to be the ‘UK’s undisputed leader in the field of collaboration’. According to its most recent audited accounts, BuildOnline (UK) Ltd produced revenues of £2.46m in the year to 31 March 2004 (BIW’s turnover to 30 September 2003, by comparison, was £2.69m). Furthermore, the BuildOnline group made a substantial pre-tax loss of €1.13m on a European turnover of €5.77m.” - ends - Notes to editors: |
