The Australian scaffolder won the Best Developer project category at Tekla Global BIM Awards 2022. The jury credited the ScaffPlan team for the complete and globally applicable solution.
ScaffPlan is a 3D software package for scaffolding design and engineering, built as a plug-in that leverages the powerful platform capabilities of Tekla Structures.
Developed by scaffolders for scaffolders, the software brings the benefits of Building Information Modeling to the global scaffolding industry – making projects quicker, safer and less costly.
“Scaffolding is a necessary means to an end,” says ScaffPlan Founder and Managing Director, Simon Boyes. “It’s a cost and time burden that nobody wants, but you often need to have it when you fix something old or build something new. If you do it wrong, then people can get injured – or worse. There’s a scaffolding collapse somewhere in the world almost every day.”
“We saw that the industry needed a way to quickly design and build scaffolding that’s safe to work from. This was our starting point for creating ScaffPlan as a 3D program on top of Tekla Structures,” he says.
Boyes grew up in Townsville in northeast Australia. It’s a major processing hub and the only city in the world that refines three different base metals: copper, nickel and zinc. Townsville is also an important defense location and home to Australia’s biggest military base.
With so much specialist infrastructure in the city, there’s high demand for expert scaffolders like Boyes. Starting out as a scaffold-yard laborer, he began doing his own projects on residential buildings in 2010, soon moving on to more complex work on Townsville’s bridges, refineries and 100-meter-high chimney stacks.
Boyes now runs crews of hundreds of scaffolders who work on some of the industry’s most complex and high-risk projects. Having performed almost every scaffolding task that exists, he has a deep understanding of the field’s challenges and where opportunities for improvement lie.
