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FD of Asite plc outlines how restructuring has provided them with strong position in market Full article published: 08/13/2002     CHARLES WOODS is the Finance Director at Asite plc


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TWST: Can you begin with a brief overview and historical sketch of Asite (LSE:ASE.L)?

Mr. Woods: Asite plc is listed on the Alternative Investment Market in London. It was originally a property services business with a number of businesses, such as architecture, mechanical and electrical businesses. In February 2000 it launched a new business Asite, which was designed at that stage to be a portal for the property and construction sector. I joined the group in September 2000 and it became apparent that some of the core businesses were not performing adequately. All those original core businesses have now been sold off within the last twelve months leaving Asite plc with just two businesses, Asite Solutions Limited and Asite Consulting Limited. Asite Solutions Limited is a platform for the construction and property sector. Its concentration at the moment is in the UK, though it does have plans to expand outside the UK in the future. It offers Internet based software solutions to the construction sector, together with services wrapped around those. The products it offers at the moment, are collaborative tools, tendering tools and procurement tools. In brief, collaborative tools are products such as the information channel provided by BIW and ProjectNet, which is a Citadon product. Citadon is one of the largest providers of collaborative tools in the US and also has a good foothold in the UK. A collaborative tool is basically a method for sharing documents on a construction project. So a typical example is an architect's drawing, where the architect will have a version in his office and the paper copy that may be on a project may not be the latest version, or it's prone to damage. What hosted tools allow you to do is to make sure that everyone has the latest version of a drawing, because that drawing is held as an electronic file in a centrally hosted environment. Asite provides that hosted environment and the architect, the people on the site, the client and anyone else who is involved in the project, accesses those documents through the Internet. We recognize that if you just provide a software solution, the utilization is not always there, because of the lack of training and lack of desire to use something new, so we sell all our products within a wraparound service and that includes training for everyone who uses it and ongoing management to ensure that all the efficiencies are driven by use of that tool. Tendering is again a document management tool to allow paper transactions to be eliminated. Where for instance a general contractor might go out to a subcontract to construct a certain part of a building, then instead of copying and mailing paper documents, electronic documents are hosted centrally and subcontractors submit their bids back through that hosted environment again using the Internet. Procurement is a catalogue based procurement system, based on Commerce One technology. Commerce One are well known worldwide for producing technology to allow portals to exist, the most well known are Covisint, which serves the US automotive industry, and Exostar, which serves the aerospace industry. It's tried and tested technology and what it allows the industry to do, is suppliers put their catalogue on the Asite portal. Buyers can then buy materials by searching those catalogues and can actually procure online. Delivery details are also communicated online. The Commerce One system and all the Asite architecture is very open, which means that they can be very easily integrated into companies back office accounting systems, so you can get a smooth process right through the procurement process. Again, that creates efficiencies and we have the same philosophy as we do on collaboration, which is that we provide the service that includes training and ongoing support to the users of those tools, we don't simply market software. Finally that takes me on to consulting, where we will help clients with the integration with their accounting systems and also with any business process re-engineering that results from changing from a manual system to a computer based system.


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This interview is a small excerpt from a comprehensive interview published in The Wall Street Transcript on 08/13/02. For more information call (212) 952 7400. The Wall Street Transcript does not endorse any of the comments made by interviewees, and does not make stock recommendations.

Copyright 2002, Wall Street Transcript Corp.

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