Background

In 2016 a carpenter called Jason Cureton was wrestling with a familiar building problem: how to fit insulation boards between rafters in cramped loft spaces. Like many builders, Jason had found this a frustrating and time-consuming task for years. But after a particularly difficult session, he came up with the idea of a plastic sleeve to hold the insulation in place. This proved such a quick, simple and effective solution that he founded a company – Insulfix – to manufacture and market the product, calling it Insulfix Track. In 2020, Rob Warren joined the Insulfix team as Technical Consultant. “When I saw Insulfix Track for the first time, I thought it was a fantastic idea: one of the best things I’d seen in construction,” he says.

Customer need

After years in the construction industry, Jason and Rob were very aware of the problems with product traceability. Substitutions and changed applications can lead to poor-quality buildings, and confused or missing information adds to the problem.

“It doesn’t matter how good your information is – if people can’t find it, it’s useless,” says Rob. “We wanted our customers to be able to find all the information they need about our products at any time. And of course, that’s vital for everyone else involved in a project too.”

There was also another challenge. Jason and Rob were confident that Insulfix Track would improve their customers’ lives. But as a young company with a brand new product, they needed to convince customers that they were a serious business and would be around for the long term. They realised that the best way to build their reputation in the construction industry was to work with respected industry organizations.

The solution

Some years previously Rob was at a presentation. “I was looking into how companies can achieve BIM Level 2,” he explains “and it became clear that the most important letter in BIM is the ‘I’ – the information.” The presentation mentioned BSI Identify, a service being developed to provide unambiguous identification for products and the long-term persistent storage of associated product information. It worked by using a digital ID called a UPIN (Universal Persistent Identification Number).

And when I heard about the concept of Identify I just felt it was the missing piece of the jigsaw, because it’s a way for anyone to find information about a product when they want it – today, tomorrow, until the end of the project and beyond. That persistence of the data is absolutely key. To me it seems a fundamental requirement, because information is so important in the built environment.” Rob was so excited by the possibilities of BSI Identify that he volunteered to be part of the industry steering-group that was developing it. “I thought it was a great opportunity to make a difference in construction, and I really wanted to be part of it,” he explains. At his first meeting he sat down with representatives from across the whole of the supply chain, from specifiers to manufacturers to distributors and facilities managers. So on joining Insulfix in 2020, Rob was quick to recommend BSI Identify to its founder, Jason. “I could see it would be a very good fit for an innovative company like this,” he explains. “And because of Jason’s on-site experience, he immediately saw that it was a no-brainer. For example, different pieces of track can look very similar but a UPIN lets fitters scan and identify each one correctly; they can also scan a QR code to go straight to our video that shows how to install the boards quickly and easily.

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Next steps

Find out how BSI Identify is transforming product traceability to make construction safer.

Get in touch via the website or email BSI at identify.bsigroup.com