In June AECnews introduced Newforma Project Center, a new product based on three years of R&D by a team of AEC software industry veterans. At the time I wrote, “after seeing a demo and talking with the management team, I think Newforma has a hit on its hands.” I recently touched bases with Newforma team to see how things are going. In short, business is better than expected.
Newforma has signed up 16 customers since the June release, certainly a respectable start. The feedback, according to the company, is that their clients want to roll out Project Center on a companywide basis sooner than Newforma anticipated. “We thought it would move from one project team to another,” says Marni Hoyle, Newforma vice president of marketing. “Now we have the challenges of being there to help with training and support for a companywide installation—a good problem to have.”
Bob Batcheler, Newforma’s vice president for industry marketing and product management, says Product Center is about process focus, which he defines as “relentless attention to how inputs to a process are transformed into the desired outputs.” As I reported in June, Batcheler criticizes the existing generation of AEC project extranets as forcing users to adopt new work processes and IT requirements. The pitch he makes is that AEC firms should analyze their existing incoming sources of information (inputs), their processes, and their outgoing information (outputs). Batcheler says using this simple analysis most firms will quickly recognize email as their most important information repository. Newforma Project Center builds on this recognition, as we described in the June article.
“Industry software generally focuses on a specific task, such as designing a structure or running spreadsheet calculations,” says Batcheler. Most firms are using dozens of programs, which means “you soon have multiple, independent islands of information—with no bridge between them but the brains and time of the engineers themselves.”
I will be moderating a panel discussion on project management in AEC at the upcoming AEC-ST Federal Conference, December 4-7 in Washington DC, and I have invited Batcheler to participate. There are several great industry events co-locating with AEC-ST Federal, including AUGI CAD Camp, FEDcon 2006 from the National Institute of Building Sciences, EcoBuild Federal, the Facility Information Council annual meeting, and the AECnews presentation of the 2006 recipient of the Ed Forrest Award.
--RSN