biscoPro is the result of a decade of research and development.

The genesis of what has become biscoPro was when Nick Clements was working for Carters, a building supplies business owned by Carter Holt Harvey a large New Zealand building products manufacturer.  Nick as Marketing Manager was responsible for negotiating pricing with several national building companies.  He used one frame and truss manufacturing operation to cost and price the standard building designs and consequently received complaints from the other 8 operations.

While trying to figure out why he found that each of them used completely different estimating approaches and therefore had completely different prices and often construction methods.  Worse than this even though at the time most of the buildings were unchanged standard plans the plants recreated the information about the project every time.  That didn't make sense to him, he thought that there must be a better way.

Skipping forward a few years yet another restructure had Nick at a loose end and he was given the chance to come back to this problem and do some more research into it.  He was able to develop a proposed solution and business case and the result was the Cubit project.

It was at this time that Nick Alexander joined Nick at CHH and they started developing a system based on ArchiCAD to manage the design to cost processes for residential hours within one system.  The development included included an integrated timber frame and truss design and engineering module and a 3D kitchen design and manufacturing system.

After just 12 months the team developed and released the first version of the system, the 3D kitchen design system, and were close to completing the house design and costing version.  Unfortunately CHH were not as patient and due to changes in strategic direction and the financial environment CHH decided not to continue investing in the project.

After taking a few months to have a good think about it, the Nick's decided that the real value was not the code that was cut, but what they learned about the process so decided to start again from a clean sheet of paper.

"While this was daunting at first after spending so many years developing the previous solution starting from the beginning again has proven to be very worthwhile as we obviously knew a lot more about the subject than what we did when we first started."  This knowledge that we gained has gone into our new product.

Even with this experience base it has still taken much longer than they'd hoped to develop biscoPro but they are very pleased with what they have created and are beginning to share it with the world.

A key learning they took from this was that it is very difficult to release a product and support customers in parallel with a heavy Research and Development load.  The result is upset customers as their needs aren't being met and delays to development time lines.

Securing research and development grants from Technology New Zealand has played an important part in solving this as it has given bisco the ability to invest heavily in the base technology and development framework without having to urgently rush a product to the market to survive.

To ensure that the technology developed meets the market needs bisco secured targeted (and patient) customers that have worked with closely them during the development.  This approach has resulting in a comprehensive and well developed framework with modules to suit the needs of the different segments of the building industry.

bisco are thankful for a large number research collaborations with New Zealand Universities that have been of great help in the advancement of their technology while it has also contributed to the development of skills within the student base, many of whom have gone on to employment with bisco or other NZ software companies.