“These landmarks show how far we have progressed since launching our collaboration services to a largely sceptical industry in 2000,” says Colin Smith, BIW’s chief executive. “At the end of December that year, we were hosting just 30,000 drawings and 8,000 other documents. Now, just over three years later, we host over 610,000 drawings and more than 400,000 other documents. And these totals exclude more than 700,000 comments, and the hundreds of requests for information (RFIs), instructions and other processes and reports routinely generated by our user community every day. Including these would add around another two million items to the overall total.”
At 31 January 2004, the total number of BIW Information Channel users had reached 30,598, from 3310 different companies. Collectively, these users logged in 4,112,000 times, to work on 1665 projects with a total capital value estimated at around £13 billion. 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 Stanhope, Land Securities and Garbe.
“A big factor in our growth has been our ability to offer a robust, reliable and scalable infrastructure,” says Smith. “In 2003, we recorded more than 1.6 million user sessions – an increase of a third on the previous year – and despite the increased demands placed on our servers, we maintained our minimum 99.8% service availability throughout.”
Smith urges prospective customers and users of collaboration technology to look closely at the trade-off between cost and reliability. “BIW Information Channel has set high standards of performance and availability that its competitors struggle unsuccessfully to match,” he says. “Some competing systems (especially the cheapest ones) are considerably less reliable than BIW´s. This impacts directly on the efficiency of the supply chains involved. Worse still, it could destroy confidence in collaboration technology as a whole - which would be very sad.”
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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’s figures are based purely on drawings submitted to its system, not on the number of people on a distribution list. Once a drawing is published it is immediately available to other team members for viewing and comment.
- At the end of January 2004, the BIW system was using 828 Gbytes for project-related data and was growing at the rate of 10-12% per month.
- ´BIW´ and ´BIW Information Channel´ are registered trademarks or trademarks of BIW Technologies Ltd.
