Why Newforma?

In my first post I promised that I'd give a bit more background to who I am and who Newforma is. Well, you can see how Newforma started here.

I joined Newforma last October with the responsibility for all of our "sales and service related activities in Europe and the Middle East". (press release)

Quite a challenge - but one that I couldn't resist!

I had been aware of Newforma for some time and there were two main reasons why I was keen to join the firm.

Firstly, the people.

I've known several of the key people at Newforma for many years and was confident that it would be a great team to join.

I was lucky enough to first meet Vic Sanchez (my current boss and our VP for Sales, Service and Support) back in 2003 when he was Autodesk's VP for EMEA and I was asked to represent Autodesk's channel partners on their EMEA Advisory Board. We have remained in contact ever since and it was great to meet up with his family when he kindly invited me to stay over at their house when I was visiting our New Hampshire head office earlier this year.

I'd also previously met with other members of Newforma's executive team - Ian Howell and Bob Batcheler ("Batch") - through industry events and my involvement in beta testing for Autodesk ADT.

It also helped my decision making process that the investors in the company have a strong background in firms that have delivered key technologies to our industry such as Softdesk and Revit.

My confidence that it would be a great team to join proved to be well placed. No more so than at a recent "social" at our Manchester, New Hampshire location when we kicked off the third quarter of 2009 with an outing to Vertical Dreams, a local indoor climbing gym. Those of you who know me will not be surprised to hear that I quickly offered to "belay" which allowed me to keep both feet firmly on the ground! More photos here.




The second reason I was keen to join Newforma was the product.

In my previous role as Technical Director at Excitech I had visited HOK's London office many times to discuss CAD and BIM implementations (such as their use of Autodesk ADT on the Barts and the London hospitals project). Often during my visits they would be keen to sing the praises of Newforma Project Center. HOK have been using Newforma software since 2006, soon after it was first released. A year later they decided to deploy Newforma firm-wide across all of their 26 offices.

Their experience and the feedback I'd received from other users convinced me that Newforma had something to offer which was a bit different to the traditional document management systems or project extranets that I had worked with previously.

Newforma Project Center has what I believe is a unique approach to managing project information - and I mean real, live, day to day information that is in a constant state of flux. Our main focus is on managing the typical work in progress project information "in situ" in standard Windows folders (the top right "WIP" quadrant for those of you who are familiar with the BS1192:2007 and Avanti process diagrams!). This includes managing emails as key project documents - and making their content searchable as well as that of Office documents, CAD files, PDFs and DWFs - even if these files are buried in attachments to emails.

It has been said that none of the technology used in Newforma Project Center is rocket science - however the difference lies in the approach and the provision of an integrated set of tools for addressing the real challenges that project teams come up against on a daily basis.

We can also claim to have invented a new category - and the inevitable acronym - in PIM (Project Information Management).

Although Newforma Project Center has been in the UK for some time in UK based offices of our US customers, it has only been since the middle of last year that the software has been sold directly in the UK by our partner Océ. There is now an increasing user base here and a Newforma UK User Community has already started regular meetings.

Although this blog will undeniably have a Newforma flavour, in future posts I also want to address some of the wider issues that relate to managing construction projects better so that we can reduce errors and unnecessary waste and ultimately learn how to generate a better, more sustainable end product.

Watch this space!