In 1984, following 12 years experience in the construction industry, Steven Wood decided to put to good use an interest in computers developed whilst studying Civil Engineering at college.
Having spent the last 9 years developing an in-house Project Management system for use on a main frame computer, the first commission undertaken, from a major construction company, was to provide a Project Management software system that would run on the recently introduced Personal Computers for use on a contract in Hong Kong.
This success was closely followed by a second commission to provide a fully integrated Accounts, Marketing, Production and Stock Control system for a small street furniture engineering company.
In 1988, following a request from a ex-colleague, an MS-DOS based computerised estimating system aimed at the construction industry was developed and released on the the market and the company began trading as Steven Wood Software.
InterEst, originally aimed at the small construction company, was soon adopted by some of the UK's major construction companies, and expanded into a suite of multi-user programs, providing the complete answer from tendering to successful completion of contract. This system has been discontinued.
The 90's saw the company return to it's roots and re-enter the project management software market with the release of ChainLink, a program for creating Time Location (Time Chainage) Diagrams from data produced by todays leading project management software systems. Version 2.0, developed in conjunction with Asta Developments in the UK and Mangement & Software im Bauwesen in Germany, added Power Project compatibility, version 3.0 improved the links with Primavera P3 and the current version,
4.5, incorporates an MPX and Primavera P4/5/6 XER file import facility, has improved graphics and is Windows Vista and 7 compatible. Version 5.0, which will be launched later this year takes ChainLink to the next level incorporating most of the improvements requested by the current users.
