Organised by “Building” magazine, the Building Awards are the UK construction industry´s premier awards, with the best in the business being rewarded for outstanding performances at a glittering ceremony. The 2005 event is to be held at London’s Grosvenor House Hotel on 26 April.
When it submitted its entry in November 2004, BIW could claim some impressive achievements. It had an order book worth over £7m in future revenues, it turned over £3m in the year to 30 September 2004, and employed 38 staff. Its order book and turnover continue to grow, and BIW now has more than 40 staff.
When BIW started in 2000, its core system, BIW Information Channel™, had just 1,000 users; it now has over 41,500 (and is adding more than 900 a month). To date, these users have now published over 1.2 million drawings and almost 600,000 documents, and logged in six million times to work on over 2500 projects worth around £17 billion. BIW commands over a quarter of the UK market for web-based construction collaboration systems (according to independent market research by Compagnia).
“This is the first time we have submitted an entry for any construction industry award,” said BIW chief executive Colin Smith. “We are proud of what we have achieved in the past five years and I hope the judges look closely at these measures when it comes to making their assessment.
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Notes to editors:
- Project collaboration services from BIW Technologies (www.biwtech.com) were first employed in 1999 on UK construction projects for Sainsbury’s. BIW believes it is the European leader in web-based collaboration systems for the construction and property industry, measured by numbers of users, usage and volume of data.
- BIW Information Channel is a sophisticated web-based supply chain integration technology, designed specifically for construction projects or programmes. Each client is provided with a unique, project or programme-specific website created around a knowledge database. With this, data can be made available securely to every team member – from the earliest concepts, through detailed design, buildability studies, pre-fabrication, construction, maintenance, operation and improvement to the eventual demolition or dismantling of the facility.
- BIW customers include United Utilities, Sainsbury’s, BAA, housebuilders Crest Nicholson and the Peabody Trust, Marks & Spencer, the Ministry of Defence, the Wellcome Trust, O2, Mace, Bovis Lend Lease, Kajima and developers Land Securities and Garbe.
- BIW’s figures are based purely on drawings submitted to its system, not on the number of people on a distribution list. It estimates that, on average, there are around eight people on the distribution list for a typical drawing. By publishing files to the Channel, its 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.
- BIW and BIW Information Channel are registered trademarks or trademarks of BIW Technologies Ltd.
