Founded in 1919 by Colonel John Reid, the firm is still family owned and occupies a 4 acre site at Christchurch in Dorset

John Reid & Sons (Strucsteel) Ltd (AKA REIDsteel) is a structural steel engineering company which has been manufacturing and erecting large commercial buildings, aircraft hangars, grandstands, bridges, process plants, car parks and many other steel structures worldwide for over 90 years. The key to our success is that we design, manufacture and erect all the elements of our buildings; from the steel structure, the roof and the cladding, to the windows and doors.

Computers are used so widely nowadays that they are hardly remarkable, but what is remarkable is the software that they run.

We first started storing non-variable data on magnetic card eons ago to improve our design and estimating service.

When micro computers first became available in the 1970s we searched for suitable software - finding none to suit our requirements, our engineers worked for some years to produce their own, with the result that we can now produce optimised structural designs and quotations in minutes rather than days, in most cases.

What we have today is a system which is unique not only in the U.K. and Europe but in the whole world.