Kildrummy’s founders met in the mid 1980’s, helping BP Engineering develop and implement a new generation of project controls software based on the personal computer. Their aim, then as now, was to help managers control their costs.

In November, 1992 Ken Beer, Simon Nuttall-Smith, Jim Robertson and Dave Ross formed Kildrummy Technologies Limited to bring their accumulated knowledge and experience to the wider market. From the beginning the founders have been committed to global operations with a highly-skilled, motivated and observant work force.

Kildrummy’s purposeful research and innovation resulted in a new generation of graphical project management tools in the ‘90s, exemplified by the widely-adopted Kildrummy® JobPROMS, whilst the founders’ background in solution-provision led to a growth in their clients’ use of Kildrummy’s in-house expertise. In this decade the release of Kildrummy® CostMANAGER signaled a third generation of ultra-flexible and intuitive tools for the project team and the enterprise alike.

Over the years, Kildrummy’s knowledge and experience has grown alongside its global reputation for excellence allied to helpfulness. Founders Simon Nuttall-Smith and Ken Beer continue to play an active role in company direction, and the company looks forward to continued and accelerating growth throughout the world as the decade progresses. Now in its twelfth year of operation, Kildrummy’s staff can look back on a career of continuous success against what many would consider daunting odds.

For the first two years, everyone in Kildrummy worked from their homes -- many of them in the distant Shetland Islands where Kildrummy’s head office and R&D teams are located. The company’s first office opened in Putney in southwest London in late 1994, but it was not until January, 1998 that Kildrummy’s first head office opened in Lerwick, Shetland. By then, Kildrummy was already operating in the USA from offices off Westheimer in Houston, Texas.

Kildrummy’s first modern software product was the 1994 one-off for the nuclear industry, Kildrummy® COSMOS, but a parallel development resulted in the general-purpose Kildrummy® JobPROMS for Windows, which the company released in early 1995. Early adopters included, BP, Yokogawa, Raytheon, and ICI. Kildrummy’s ® JobPROMS was designed to monitor project costs continuously, highlighting any deviation from budget, helping project engineers to make decisions informed by reliable expenditure forecasts.

During the mid 1990’s founder Simon Nuttall-Smith regularly traveled the globe for Kildrummy, and the company was soon supporting clients throughout Europe, the former Soviet Union, North & South America and Australia. To meet the increasing demand, Kildrummy recruited a mixture of seasoned professionals and intelligent, ambitious trainees, moved into new office in southwest London and began to plan a permanent presence in the United States of America.

In 1997 the company launched Kildrummy® MicroDOC, a graphical project documentation control system. MicroDOC was originally created and developed in the late 1980’s by founder Jim Robertson to improve document tracking and control on major oil projects. Kildrummy® MicroDOC continues to be popular with engineers concerned to monitor and control the flow of documents in and out of the project offices.

In July 1998 the company set up Kildrummy Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary in Houston, Texas, and the new company began trading just after Thanksgiving in that year. The establishment of Kildrummy Inc. signaled Kildrummy’s commitment to provide expertise as well as software to our clients in the Americas and elsewhere. From the parent company’s point of view, Kildrummy Inc. has been an encouraging success, and Kildrummy will replicate the process in other parts of the world in the next few years.

In 1999, after two years R&D, the company released Kildrummy® WinCERTS, the project completion system. Originally designed in the late 1980’s, Kildrummy® WinCERTS is a complete rethink of the problems facing a company which routinely completes projects. The system not only enables project engineers to record and monitor key engineering inspection and certification tests and to track their progress throughout the lifetime of a project, it does so in a way that enables information to be compared across projects with vastly different engineering content.

It was during the design phase of Kildrummy® WinCERTS that a guiding principle of Kildrummy’s design philosophy was first enunciated clearly – approach total flexibility whilst maintaining uniformity in information handling and output. Kildrummy’s clients not only run major projects: they strive to learn from the experience.

The release on November 11, 2002, Kildrummy’s 10th birthday, of Kildrummy® CostMANAGER, was the culmination of over fifteen years experience designing, developing and delivering the world’s leading project control solutions. Kildrummy® CostMANAGER enables project engineers to control budgets, control changes, make forecasts, list commitment and expenditure, measure progress, report earned value and more for both costs and time, no matter what kind or scale or complexity of project workload. (BP, ChevronTexaco and Enterprise Oil provided beta test sites for Kildrummy® CostMANAGER, and the company’s technical team would like to record its gratitude.)

Demand in the energy industry for Kildrummy® CostMANAGER was strong at launch and it has been gratifying to see Kildrummy® solutions grow, alongside the idea that it IS actually possible to control expenditure. The latest development, Kildrummy® CostMANAGER Express, is a tool that helps us penetrate smaller projects as well as a host of new industries and even government itself.