Thursday, March 4, 2010

Our Goal - Rethinking AEC Collaboration



How can we leverage new software technologies into the singular AEC industry, and enhance improvements in the design and build process throughout the entire lifecycle of a project, whilst promoting comunication amongst the many stackholders involved, each with their own unique and variegated interests?

With the Ap4 Construction Platform, and the parallels between cloud computing, web 2.0, and SaaS models, we are rethinking the best practices towards promoting collaboration and project management achievements. We belief we need to change the business model of collaboration applications in the construction industry. Why?

To date the existing collaborative applications have required that the various actors in a project use a single general application to share data and communication, creating conflicts of interest inherent between the different stakeholders. The blunt reason in using such existing applications has been motivated almost solely by the bargaining power of large contractors or project firms (in small and medium enterprises these applicatios are harder to implement) or by virtue of a contractual obligation predefined by the construction owner or promoter.

How can one genuinely motivate all of the actors of a construction project to promote a true collaborative environment if one does not own the application or its data, or only sporadically using such software in larger projects?

We belief this is possible by finally providing a powerful set of ever growing number of project role based applications known as Ap4, accessible in value for every end-user, and where each member in a project owns their own application and data, yet maintaining the ability to integrate and communicate between themselves in a common project. Hence our goal, different applications sharing one or more projects.

Our Ap4 Construction Platform will offer several applications, specific for each actor in the construction industry, whereby companies can purchase an application for their particular need and now internally benefit from the provision of powerful management tools, and externally share what, when and with whom they need, on one or more projects they want.

We want to create a platform of diverse applications for the AEC sector, allowing the integration between Ap4 apps and different AEC software, bringing the best of each software into one phenomenally powerful and very specific tool for each particular project, acknowledging therefore that every new construction project is always different from the previous, requiring the right set of combination of resources and applications.

We want to empower our users, helping them in such a creative and technical problem-solving environment, so often dependent on 3rd parties and an uncountable number of external variables. There is also an opportunity to democratize the access for everyone and deliver our industry members the ability to, with day-to-day IT tools, resolve and deliver themselves successful projects.

We embark on this ambitious journey as an ongoing relationship with our industry and customers, challenging ourselves and our community to contribute fowardly.