Issue link: https://nebusinessmedia.uberflip.com/i/812736
190 NE W HAMPSHIRE: First in the Nation • Profiles in Excellence e team talked to AECO pros and developed a plan. en, with Chief Executive Officer Ian Howell, they pursued venture capital funding. "We secured our Series A funding before we had written a line of code," CEO Howell said. "We had a business plan, a storyboard and a set of prospective customers who wanted us to solve challenges in design and construction project delivery that, until then, had been neglected." Aer extensive testing on live projects at participating architecture and engineering companies, the company's flagship product, Newforma® Project Center, became commercially available in June of 2006. e company enjoyed steady growth from the outset. And as customers realized their suggestions were being heard, they spread the word – and requested more help. For a fast-changing industry was creating new challenges barely perceived at Newforma's inception. One of the challenges has been to recognize the differ- ence between the project information management needs of a project's design stage compared to its construction stage. To complicate things, design firms (architects and engineers) manage construction differently from the ways construction companies manage construction. Newforma has responded accordingly. Architects and engineers prefer Newforma's enter- prise product to manage construction. It runs on the company's own computer networks (either on-premise or as a private cloud) to capture and control informa- tion in-house for the long-term good of the company. Construction companies and owners prefer to emphasize the collaboration needs of the project, which wants to share information transparently among all players (within limits of security settings and other protections). To that end, in 2012 Newforma acquired the technology to provide web-hosted construction management, which optimizes collaboration for the project. is allows contractors, subcontractors, consultants, and the owner to be tied into a smooth- running workflow for the construction phase of a project. Another project information management challenge centers around the industry's adoption of building information modeling. BIM shakes up established work processes by moving away from traditional document- based workflow to designs based on databases and three-dimensional, digital models. In 2011, Newforma launched a product to help customers manage newly evolving, model-based design work processes. Recently, a tectonic shi in people's expectations has been imposed by mobile apps on tablets and smartphones. Whether in conference rooms or on job sites, project team members now demand online access to email, plans, and other project information. A few examples: • ey need to shoot pictures on the jobsite and attach those pictures to reports and action items assigned to other team members. • ey need to find project-related emails from "We secured our Series A funding before we had written a line of code." The Safran Aerospace Composites facility in Rochester, N.H., is a product of the design-build company Haskell, which uses Newforma software because it provides one system to meet the differing needs of its design and construction teams. A N T O N I O VA L D I V I A NEWFORMA continued from previous page >>