It started with Nick Clements and Nick Alexander both worked for Carter Holt Harvey spending on a project based on ArchiCAD to manage the design to cost processes within one system.  It also included an integrated timber frame and truss design and engineering module.  The target audience for this system was large residential house builders and kitchen joinery manufacturers.  We developed the system to the point where we had a number of customers using the first release and were almost complete on a house design and costing version.  Due to a change in strategic direction, CHH decided not to continue investing in the project.

After having a good think about it, we decided that the real value was not the code that was cut, but what we learned about the process so we 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 we'd hoped to develop biscoPro but we are very pleased with what we have created.

Securing research and development grants from Technology New Zealand has played an important part in the development of biscoPro as it has given us the luxury of being able to invest heavily in our developing our base framework without having to urgently rush a product to the market to survive. This means our framework is highly developed and we have a rock solid foundation to build customer and market specific technology on.

We have also been able to establish a large number research collaborations with New Zealand Universities that have been of great help in the advancement of our technology and also contributed to the development of skills within the student base.

Over this time our team has grown from the two Nicks to 6 full time staff and a number of research assistants and contractors.

Based on our experience we have a clear idea of what we'd like to achieve and how we'd like to go about doing this.