Aidea

For the team at Aidea, the focus has been very clear since its genesis - to leverage the latest technology so they can continue to provide cutting edge solutions in the field of large scale commercial, residential and industrial development. The journey to become Aidea, a design and technology firm, started 25 years ago in Manila, Philippines with a less than 10-member team. Even at the time of the 1997 Asian financial crisis, the team at Aidea continued growing the business and in 2001, won a major design competition for a high-rise residential project from the biggest developer in the country, Ayala Land. “The accolade we received really boosted the growth of the company and pushed us from small to a medium sized company thus helping us expand,” says Jojo Tolentino, President and CEO at Aidea.

As time passed, Aidea expanded further but the constant need to grow smarter impelled it to find technology that could give it a competitive advantage. Soon, the team at Aidea were introduced to Building Information Modeling (BIM), an intelligent 3D model-based process that gives professionals the tools and insight to efficiently design, construct, and manage infrastructure. After careful evaluation of BIM, the team at Aidea decided to go ahead with the same; and by 2005, the transition from 2D to 3D was initiated.

“It was chaotic,” says Tolentino “but we stood by the decision and migrated everything to BIM. Our productivity took a hit for the first 3 months; but 6 months later, we knew we had made the right decision.” BIM gave Aidea a competitive advantage helping it deliver quality work. It also optimized Aidea’s workflow and created more income streams to benefit from. Since Aidea was the first to take the leap and move to BIM’s 3D model, it gained international recognition as a reputed architectural firm that is BIM-based and this helped it secure more projects globally and locally. “Because of the knowledge we had of BIM, many firms wanted to work with us and understand how to use BIM efficiently, so we spun off a subsidiary called Aidea Technologies provide custom-designed solutions for BIM migration, integration, and automation,” says Tolentino.

The team at Aidea then went on a joint venture with its Danish partners and started a Computer Automated Virtual Environment (CAVE) technology-based company called Epiito in 2014. With CAVE, designers, owners, and users could walk through a BIM model in virtual reality to experience the design of a building, a room, a park, and even a township. It is an accurate communication tool that allows stakeholders without technical training to become co-creators of their projects.

Expanding further in 2020 through its subsidiary, Aidea Technologies, Aidea continuous to push for the potential for automating processes for the AEC industry. From an in-house initiative to improve efficiency and productivity as a response to demand from its global clients and partners, its automation solutions now serve as a new service and product for the firm to diversify. “Our plug-ins enable architects, engineers, and contractors to indulge in solving strategic and higher-order challenges, as well as generate overall savings in time and money,” adds Tolentino. Through Aidea’s advances in digital delivery, it provides solutions that encompass the entire building lifecycle. Appreciating Aidea’s automation solutions, Graphisoft, said, “Aidea has been pushing Archicad’s capabilities to its limits and automating the most tedious workflows that can save them the most time in delivering projects. Their level of documentation optimization makes it possible to deliver a project in a fraction of the time needed with conventional workflows. Of course, to do that, they are very strict in terms of modeling compliance, because everything from scheduling to automatically arranged and published layouts come from the model. This is how they create a competitive advantage.” Aidea’s add-ons automate repetitive tasks that liberate designers from the tedium of repetition and allow them to spend more time designing. The company aims to provide automation such that designers can creatively deep-dive as a rule, not a luxury.

Describing a challenging project that Aidea had to complete, Tolentino said that they had to create a stadium with a design build contractor for the Southeast Asian Games in 2019 within 18 months. Aidea was called upon early in the design stage to assess the feasibility of the structural system. Aidea built a BIM model of the proposed design as a tool for testing and validating the concept for performance and constructability. Since none of the other project team members or stakeholders were BIM users, the model helped to visualize and define the project for all involved and allowed for full appreciation for the project mission. The model was also used for early fabrication of various construction components, fast-tracking the delivery process. Tolentino believes that with the BIM model as the central repository where all contributions were consolidated, coordinated, and aligned, the efforts among the architects and engineers crystallized in a design that remained true to the original intent. The project was completed ahead of time and generated overall project savings for all the stakeholders.

As for the future of Aidea, “we would like to focus on high impact technology that addresses the needs of the construction and design industry by creating more solutions and tools.” says Tolentino. The team at Aidea is also venturing into AI and generative design to create more responsive design solutions, and are working to integrate IoT and other emerging technologies. Lastly, Aidea is also developing its own facilities management platform to take BIM all the way to building management sites. “The goal is to be relevant on all the stages of a building life cycle,” he concludes.