2003

Koivu, Tapio; Laine, Tuomo; Iivonen, Veijo; Gonzales, Dan

This report describes results of a project executed cooperatively by Technical Research Center of Finland (VTT) and the Finland Trade Center (Finpro). The aim of the study has been to find out the opportunities for a group of Finnish Facility Management, Architectural, Engineering and Construction (FM/AEC) industry software vendors to launch business in the United States. The report gives an overview of the industry, discusses the roles of different disciplines and value chains. It identifies high-tech offices and manufacturing facilities, pulp, paper and power plants, concept construction and public sector facility owners as potential market segments and discusses their maturity and readiness to partner with the Finnish vendors. An overview of the U.S. vendor market is also given as well as descriptions of major competitors and their products. A suggestion of how the Finnish software products can interoperate is also given in the report. The basic argument is that competitive advantage can be built on openness of the Finnish products. The Finnish products, Tocoman's TCM-software for quantity take-off, cost estimating and control, DynaProject for scheduling by DSS, EcoProp by VTT, xEngineer by Tekla, Optimize.net by Rapal, ModelServer by Eurostep and ModelChecker by Solibri can be made to support the business processes of U.S. customers in open, modular and interoperable way. Finnish references of how these software packages can add value together exist today. The conclusion states that the market is not mature yet and that technology is not completely mature either, the most likely option to succeed is to form a combination of consulting service and software sales. The customers are not IT-savvy and they will be requiring education, training and consulting in order to exploit the potential. At this point, the breakthrough still awaits itself. The consulting offers a step that does not exclude the formation of a more traditional software vendor business later. The consulting also allows a time frame for the much-needed further development of the software, especially interoperability features and model server concept as well as for producing actual proof in real construction projects.