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ACase Study: Enhancement of Construction Collaboration and Viewing
Application at BIW Technologies, UK
AEC (Architectural, Construction and Engineering) ASP Industry |
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Executive summary
BIW Technologies Ltd provides supply chain integration services to
the global AEC (architectural, engineering and construction) community.
A leading application service provider (ASP), it deploys, hosts and
manages access to software applications from a centrally managed facility.
Its core services were developed in partnership with UK government
and several major construction industry clients, professionals and
contractors, with research inputs from Salford and Loughborough universities,
among others. At June 30, 2004, the total number of BIW technologies’
application users had reached 34,517, from 3,747 different companies.
Collectively, these users had logged in five million times, published
more than half a million drawings and documents in the year 2004 alone,
and have been working on around 2,000 projects with a total capital
value estimated at around £15 billion.
Challenges.
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Some of
the main challenges were:
- Dispersed environment
- Already developed legacy viewing application
was being used in the applications provided by BIW technologies.
The applications were to be enhanced using Web4’s viewing technology.
- Need to add support for more formats such as
DWF, PCL and PDF in the existing viewing application. Web4’s expertise
in viewing hundreds of formats is being applied in BIW technologies’
Information Channel application.
- A tighter integration with BIW technologies’
Information Channel application.
- Subsequently use Web4’s eReview technology to
provide seamless viewing and collaboration in the applications
provided by BIW technologies.
- Flexibility of customization to suit the regional
audience.
- Security of the content: Since the primary users
of BIW Technologies are using their applications from the Internet,
the security was of primary importance
- Need for online collaboration.
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Solution
Using Web4’s viewing expertise, BIW technologies’ Information Channel
application was enhanced to support more formats. The system was
initially developed on ActiveX platform. In addition to enhancing
the existing ActiveX viewers, Web4’s product eReview was also integrated
tightly with BIW Technologies’ Information Channel application.
Using this integration, now BIW Technologies’ users can view, find,
examine, manipulate, and mark-up diverse documents including more
than 450 types of 2D and 3D drawings/models, as well as conference/collaborate
with others. This combined offering has given a leadership position
to BIW technologies in UK and Europe.
Some of the actual tasks provided by Web4
include:
- Enhancement of a legacy viewing application based
on ActiveX.
- Customized the legacy application to add support
of more formats such as DWF, PCL and PDF.
- Integration of eReview with BIW Technologies
Information Channel application.
- Provide Application Programming Interfaces (API)
for online, real-time collaboration for BIW Technologies’ users.
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Advantages
and benefits of the solution to the customer
Users of BIW Technologies’ applications, now can not only view and
annotate hundreds of file formats natively, but also can collaborate
on the documents over the Internet. Some of the main advantages
that BIW Technologies’ users get from the combined solution are:
- View and Annotate documents that are stored in
a secured document repository.
- Totally web-based solution with no client installations.
This is in lines with the overall business strategy of BIW Technologies.
An affordable solution: Only Internet connection and web-browser
needed.
- Drawing on Web4’s expertise in developing eReview,
future releases of BIW’s visual interface will support a wider
range of file formats, deliver new online meeting, chat and messaging
features, and incorporate advanced voice and video technologies.
- End-users are able to collaborate in real-time,
using co-view, co-markup and conferencing features; such ‘design
review meetings’ are also capable of being saved, replayed and
archived into BIW Information Channel’s work environment.
- Reduce cost of transferring information - online
transfer and meetings through Internet.
- Reduce errors - easy to check latest information.
- Increase accountability - document control and
task follow-up.
- Achieve Better quality through alignment of processes
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