Blog

Construction Industry Seminar Welcome Address

4 October 2001

Welcome

Good morning!!

Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to our first Construction Industry Seminar!

I recently read a quotation from a certain software provider who said: "Our biggest competitor is the status quo"; it took me a moment to work it out ... I don't believe they were talking about the aging pop group; simply 'indifference'. By coming here today, you have each demonstrated that you want to hear about change in the construction industry and I am sure you are not going to be disappointed this morning.

Judging by the record attendance today, you seem to like the idea of our new format seminar which takes over from our highly successful Product User Forums which we have run since 1995.

We are very proud to be welcoming such a prestigious combination of audience and speakers. Thank you for coming!

I would particularly like to welcome Gil Briffa, the President of the Association of Planning Supervisors. I know many of will know Gil and for our part, we have been trying to achieve a better relationship with the APS since we all started together in 1995. I hope this is indeed the start of a new relationship for us; welcome Gil.

You will find a list of attendees in the pack we have given you, together with a feedback sheet. We do listen to what you have to say and will pass your comments or requests for information to the other speakers if it is relevant.

Please sit back and relax; this is your time, to listen, and to participate, informally, throughout the sessions. The speakers are allowed to pause for questions but they do have to end on time!

Agenda

Which brings me back to our agenda on the screen.

Coffee at 1100 and lunch at 1300, carriages at 1400!.

We have a very ambitious agenda covering both CDM and Asbestos.

The speakers are here to add value for all of us.

They represent the best in the industry and we are very grateful that they continue to give their time and energy to our cause freely.

Community

Our 'Community' started with the Product Forum for CDM ToolKit. It has grown to become an industry wide seminar with participants from many disciplines.

When Paul Ketteridge a former Ai Associate (is he here) and myself put our original ideas together for CDM ToolKit in 1993, we had little idea of where we were heading. We are now sitting amongst partners who are;

• a group of very successful people, all like minded Professionals,
• dedicated to improving communication
• wanting to bring to your desktop all the information you need to manage your environment, safely.

Our monthly Newsletter continues to reach more and more people by e-mail. The take up of 'technology' continues to accelerate rapidly, particularly in the past 18 months.

Our www.cdmuk.com web site continues top attract attention from an ever widening audience.

We are in the process of consolidating that experience with CDM to embrace 'asbestos' and all that that means in the new legislation. This in turn will provide links into an even bigger marketplace than CDM.

This is a community which has very wide boundaries with significant opportunities for improving communication.

We would like to think we all share one common theme - Improving Construction Health & Safety.

Our belief in Partners

I want to say a few words about our Partners.

We have met with many potential Partners this year. We have made it our business to get out there and find out who we should be working with. Our aim is to add value to what we do for all our customers. We have also learnt that our ambitious goals can only be achieved in partnership with others!

Our Agenda represents our Partnership Team for 2002. The only ones missing are;

• Microsoft and we are about to have a major presentation with them followed by some joint venture seminars with Pcubed. You will be hearing from them later on.
• Geo Instruments, based in the Nederland's; they were with us last week and we will be telling you about their contribution ourselves.
• The third is AsbesosRegister.com, Ross Udall's enterprise. We have met with Ross; we intend to provide an interface from our new product to his web site.

This list here is not exhaustive - although positively exhausting! - there may well be additions as we go into next year including for instance CHAS, a new local authority led endeavour registering contractor HAS assessments.

HSE

I have to tell you that we continue to enjoy strong links with HSE - although of course they cannot be seen to be recommending us! HSE do in fact continue to support and help us in many ways. We in turn try to support them in their crusade to spread the health & safety word to an industry which has proved to be at least a 'challenge' to control.

This started in 1994 with George Ventris Sec of CONIAC committee, Steve Williams a co-authors of CDM and Prof Don Bishop of the CIC H&S Task Force.

It continues today with HSE's Steve Wright responsible for the new CDM ACoP.

It continues with the HSE's Asbestos team - Brian Trevette here today and Ian Gooday, who has already attended one of our initial asbestos seminars to participate in our software development. We have already incorporated MDHS 100 information into our Asbestos Lite product (Mid Aug 01) and the new CDM ACoP will follow in step with the legislation.

Partners Presenting Today

But our partners go outside the confines of the HSE! We welcome here today;

1. Mouchel Consulting, represented by Mike Stokes their H&S Director will be briefing us in a moment. We have a longstanding relationship with Mouchel and thank them for that.
2. Casella Environmental Services are the largest provider in their field. They are intending to support us with our product development and testing.
3. Callsafe is a major consultancy for leading blue chip companies throughout UK including MOD, RailLink and Seeboard - represented here today. Seeboard, our largest customer, is now running our distributed product on 6 sites. Callsafe are helping us with our product development.
4. Pcubed is an international provider of project management services. In fact since they are supporting the European Space Station project, you could say they were 'out of this World'. Terrell will be giving you an insight into how we are linking Microsoft Project with our ToolKit 2002 product to bring the excellence of the 3 parties involved into one application.
5. Our interest in Microsoft in wide ranging. We are highly qualified in their products with 2 MCSEs on board. Few software houses have higher qualifications and we look forward to the launch of Microsoft Windows XP later this month and supporting you with their new products.
6. Our specific interest in this environment is Microsoft Project. Surprisingly, this is Microsoft's 5th largest revenue earner worldwide! We are witnessing an exponential increase in the use of this product and we at Ai Solutions intend to play our part in this.
7. Development Team - we have a small treat for those of you have followed our progress over the years! My colleagues, Theo Gray and Charles Hewett will be briefing you on our plans for the next 6 months and to show how we can help you with our new ToolKit™ 2002 products.

As you can see we have really strong list of Partners, all eager to support our cause in improving Health & Safety in Construction. We are very proud to offer the stage to them this morning.

Before I hand over to our first 'Partner', I would like to thank you again for taking the time out to see us today and say that my team is looking forward to finding out how we can help you with our Toolkit software and IT services; you will be learning a great deal more about these as we progress through the morning.

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