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. The 2006 awards ceremony is to be held at London’s Grosvenor House Hotel, on Park Lane, on Tuesday 4 April.
BIW was short-listed in the “Entrepreneur” category in 2005, and decided to enter the 2006 competition on the strength of its achievements during its financial year ending 30 September 2005.
With an order book worth some £7m in future revenues, BIW grew its turnover to £4m (up 33% on 2004), and increased its staff numbers from 38 to 52. When BIW started in 2000, its core system, BIW Information Channel™, had just 1,000 users; it now has over 55,000 (and is adding more than 1100 every month). To date, these users have published over 1.6 million drawings and over 860,000 documents, and logged in 8.3 million times to work on over 4000 projects worth around £23 billion.
Its systems have had a profound impact on UK construction project teams, removing an estimated five million emails and their attachments from circulation within its user community annually.
“This is only the second time we have entered BIW for an industry award,” said BIW chief executive Colin Smith. “We have achieved a lot since 2000, taking a little known web-based technology and putting it firmly on both project team and boardroom agendas.”
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- 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, Gleeds, Bovis Lend Lease, Kajima and developers Land Securities and Garbe.
- BIW and BIW Information Channel are registered trademarks or trademarks of BIW Technologies Ltd.
