Over 500 projects in more than 90 cities in over 50 countries ranging from corporate offices to commercial centers, industrial complexes, residential buildings and leisure facilities
Over 160 highly professional architects, interior designers, planners and graphics designers
Four integrated services: architecture, planning, interior design and graphic environment
Aidea Philippines is one of the leading global design practices, ranked at number 86 by World Architecture 100, the best-read architecture title in the market. Aidea Philippines has completed more than 500 projects, in 90 cities, in 50 countries.
What distinguishes Aidea is their comprehensive Integrated Design Service. At Aidea, Integrated Design combines architecture, planning, interior design and a graphics environment in a unified service offering that is based totally on BIM. Established in 1995, Aidea Philippines growth has skyrocketed. A key business driver has been the need to change, identifying the need, and taking decisive and bold action in transforming the company DNA.
Transforming an Architectural Business
In the beginning of the 21st century Aidea was faced with a business challenge. The company had grown rapidly. It seemed that growing would require continuously hiring more employees. Collaboration on projects was becoming harder, as the number and the size of projects increased, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain quality in design and coordination and still ensuring flawless site execution. At the same time Aidea, like any other professional service company, experienced increasing price pressure when bidding design services.
How to meet these challenges? At that time, BIM adaptation was just beginning to take place in a handful of advanced organizations globally. Aidea management considered their options seriously. Continuously hiring more employees hardly seemed to be an alternative.
Aidea took business seriously and have been innovative from the very beginning. The solution that Aidea came up with was combining the existing culture of continuous innovation with leveraging BIM technology. This would help Aidea meet the drivers of change. Aidea would be more productive and cost effective. Collaboration would be more efficient, and quality would be improved. BIM, technology and integrated design would make Aidea leaner and create competitive advantage. This would require a major change in the corporate mindset, as well as organizational restructuring and establishing a new BIM process.
Aidea management made a bold business decision. A date was set. On a specific day, at a certain time Aidea would start using BIM only. All 2D CAD tools would be removed. All ongoing projects would be redone, using BIM, and all new projects would be using BIM. There would be no going back. This is often referred to as Big Bang Adoption.
How Aidea works today
A major company transformation is mostly about changing the company mindset, acquiring new capabilities and implementing the new way, the internal process. Therefore Aidea has had to alter both the company organizational structure and the project organizational structure, create the company way – or the process – and document the process in the Aidea BIM manual. The Manual is a summary of Aidea BIM Principles and Guidelines, BIM standards and BIM Audits.
From the organizational point of view, the biggest change has been to break Aidea into six design studios, each with its own BIM Manager. In addition, there is a corporate Quality Assurance and Innovations Unit with a corporate level Office BIM Manager. In a typical project the studio BIM Manager audits the project for correct execution of BIM processes and compliance to BIM standards, monitor compliance to BIM processes and standards, and assists the project in BIM/CAD concerns.
The Aidea design process consists of Concept Design, Schematic Design, Design Development and Integrated Construction Document Phases. After the project kick-off, a BIM strategy meeting is held for every project. Modeling is already started during the Concept Design phase.
Each project stage has predetermined BIM Audit points. Quality Assurance and Quality Control using Solibri Model Checker is detailed in the Design Development stage and very detailed in the Contract Document stage. When Construction Documents are produced QA/QC with Solibri is done mostly on revisions.
A major transformation has of course been the human side. In addition to extensive technical training, the change relied on continuous innovation, learning and mentoring, and carefully planned human resource management. HR has been responsible for assessing proficiencies and determining skill gaps, and designing training curricula to address the gaps and create advanced capabilities. One key aspect has been the internal collection of best practices and lessons learned, documented in the Architips system accessible to all company employees through intranet. Aidea has become a true learning organization. All employees are encouraged to contribute to Architips. Studio BIM Managers report lessons learned and suggestions to the Office BIM Manager on how to improve the application of BIM.
The Benefits
The benefits brought by the bold move to transform Aidea into a pure BIM company are not limited to the low hanging fruit. The benefits arise from comprehensive BIM process implementation throughout the company and using BIM BIG Time.
Aidea has taken a very mature approach to business development with careful assessment of the results. Since BIM is deeply rooted in the Integrated Design process and the results are carefully monitored Aidea has also been able to verify benefits by design phase. BIM-based design is slightly more efficient in the concept design phase, and vice versa in the schematic design phase. This is because Aidea puts great effort into the schematic design phase. The real benefits are captured in the design development and contract document phases. Both phases are roughly twice as fast with BIM.
In terms of productivity, BIM has reduced the total manpower required to complete a project by 45 percent. In spite of Aidea following a strict process, putting more effort into design, doing more detailed design analysis and performing strict quality audits. Thus Aidea has been able to double the workload in terms of square meters per employee.
Exploiting technology has also made it possible to improve communications while reducing the time required to communicate. And, the Integrated BIM Design environment makes it possible to work on the same project in different global locations, and the customers have real-time access to design documents.
Last but not least, BIM and technology have allowed Aidea to expand services from the traditional architectural design scope to a full end-to-end integrated BIM service offering.
Interview with Sir Jojo
“Aidea Philippines has implemented a comprehensive Integrated Design process, with strict quality control and BIM audits across the process, and an end-to-end BIM solution for Integrated Design. As a firm, Aidea is one of the most technologically leveraged design practices globally” says Mr. Abelardo M. Tolentino Jr., the President and founder of Aidea Philippines, or Sir Jojo as he is called at the company.
“Aidea has been able to achieve targets set for the company transformation and answer the demands set by external trends“ says Mr. Tolentino. “Our productivity has doubled, allowing us to produce higher quality designs cost effectively, collaboration on projects has improved significantly, and the accuracy of design coordination and the BIM quality in all project stages has improved significantly. Leveraging technology has enabled us to become lean and to create a competitive advantage in the international context.” Mr. Tolentino continues.
“The most important factor in our business is that Aidea provides a unique service offering and design quality. In this respect Solibri Model Checker is the right tool for Aidea BIM quality assurance” concludes Mr. Abelardo Tolentino.
