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Friday, March 29, 2024

Structural engineer sees PH as global center of excellence

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One of the country’s leading structural engineers, who handled gargantuan projects such as SM Mall of Asia complex in Pasay City, the Philippine Sports Stadium in Bulacan province and other landmarks in the country and overseas, believes that digital technology can make the Philippines a global center of engineering excellence.

“I would like to see Filipino engineers become a recognized and respected global brand and the Philippines as a center of excellence for engineering services. We have a lot Filipino engineers.  We have the opportunity to train them so that they can be valuable to the construction industry,” says Dr. Ernesto de Castro, the 72-year-old founder, chairman and president of ESCA Inc., an engineering services company considered as a pioneer in the use and promotion of Building Information Modeling or BIM in the Philippines.

BIM refers to the digitization of building models representing the physical environment.  De Castro believes that BIM will transform the way engineers design, construct and manage structures. 

ESCA, an engineering services company named after de Castro that celebrated its 35th anniversary on Feb. 21 at the Manila House Private Club in Bonifacio Global City, offers structural design, civil engineering and project and construction management services.  It also has an academy that trains engineers on the use of BIM and has an international outsourcing division that provides engineering services to global clients.

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ESCA Inc. founder and chairman Dr. Ernesto de Castro and CEO Jean Jacquelyn Nathania de Castro lead the celebration of the company’s 35th anniversary at Manila House Private Club in Bonifacio Global City, Taguig. Sonny Espiritu

“BIM is the backbone and fundamental basis for digitizing the build environment,” says de Castro.  “We have to ride on and embrace this technology.”

De Castro believes that Filipino engineers, with proper training on BIM, are world-class.  “We have a lot of Filipino engineers working overseas and they are totally in demand overseas.  I visited Kuwait, Qatar, other parts of the Middle East, Singapore, Brunei.  If I talk to clients, they say like Filipino engineers better than the others. Filipinos are talented.  We should develop more our Filipino engineers,” he says.

ESCA has already outsourced engineering services to the United States and other countries.  “We are providing them engineering services from the Philippines. The work is done here, but the design is applied overseas.  That is outsourcing.  If we have thousands of engineers doing this, we will be getting a lot of overseas work here.  It will be a huge income for the Philippines,” says de Castro.

“At ESCA, we have seen the future and we have started a journey to where we have a digitized environment.  We are the first to have used BIM in project management. We are the first to have created a training center in BIM, on how to do the process of managing the information through the process.  We have already digitized 2 million square meters of buildings for our clients.  And we want to make that better.  And we want to be better and faster in modeling,” he says.

De Castro says with the use of BIM, “we can estimate a building project in a few hours.  We are working in the company to automate scheduling such that we can schedule your project in a few hours.  But we are not going to stop there.  In the next few months and within the year, we will be able to give you the 6D of BIM which is the performance level.  We will provide for you computational BIM.  If there is any area, shape, function or form that needs to be optimized, we can work with you using computational BIM.”

De Castro says while the Philippines has nearly half a million engineers, only a few have been trained on BIM.  He says the country has an opportunity to become the world’s leading engineering services provider through this digital technology.

“We have to digitize and start digitization with the use of technology.  Let us give the technology to our people, give the opportunity to train them, give the opportunity to work with them.  With the support of our industry partners, we can form together a big organization where we can have outstanding engineering services. Once we have a critical mass of Filipino of engineers, that can make us a center of engineering excellence in the world,” says de Castro, who also served as a dean, chancellor, professor, construction arbitrator and undersecretary in the Cabinet of the late President Corazon Aquino.

De Castro says tapping digital technology will help achieve the government’s ‘Build, Build, Build’ infrastructure program.  

“The World Economic Forum says we are behind in terms of infrastructure, the second to the last among 10 Asean countries in terms of the quality and number of our infrastructure.  We responded by coming up with P8-trillion projects in the next five years.  One year has gone and we are not close to a half a trillion pesos. But it can be done [faster] with technology… You can imagine if our structures are built in a few months, instead of several years, imagine the economic growth that we will be experiencing,” says de Castro, who has a PhD in Civil Engineering, Major in Structures from Lehigh University in the United States. 

He graduated with a BS degree in Civil Engineering from the University of the Philippines in Diliman in 1967 and an MS degree in Civil Engineering from the same university in 1968.  Jorge Consunji, president and chief executive of construction firm D.M. Consunji Inc., once described de Castro as an engineer ahead of his time.

“My father built our company from scratch and it has grown the past 35 years now with almost 200 employees,” says Jean Jacquelyn Nathania de Castro, a corporate lawyer and former host of Bloomberg TV Philippines who now serves as the chief executive of ESCA Inc.  Jean, 37, is married to fellow lawyer Alfredo Molo III, who studied in UP and Harvard University.

“The company has sustained itself crisis after crisis after crisis—the oil crisis in the 1970s, the dollar crisis in the 1980s, the 1997 Asian financial crisis and the 2007-2008 global financial crisis. I realized later on that this was how we survived—by innovating and by expanding into new uncharted territory beyond our core service,” says Jean, who was an Oblation scholar at UP-Diliman, where she graduated magna cum laude from the Political Science Program in 2001. She received her law degree from the same university in 2006.

“It is this legacy of innovation and being ahead of the curve that really allowed us to survive. Nothing was gonna stop him from going ahead.  He created not just a company but a movement to elevate the Filipino engineers to be the standard in the world,” Jean says of his father.

Ernesto de Castro, whose father was in the construction business, first worked as a design engineer in the 1970s at DCCD Engineering Corp. where he completed the structural design of the now defunct Hotel Intercontinental in Makati.

He was then recruited by his uncle, the man behind the firm C.C. Castro and Associates.  He became a structural engineer and project coordinator and handled a number of projects including the former ADB headquarters on Roxas Boulevard (now Department of Foreign Affairs Building) and Continental Cement Corp. complex in Bulacan.

He studied in Pennsylvania in 1979 for his doctorate degree and there met his late wife.  When he returned to Manila at 29 years old, he worked for Philippine Construction Consortium Corp. where he oversaw projects such as Palawan Power Plant and Metropolitan Hospital Building in Tondo.

He decided to establish his own company E.S. De Castro and Associates in 1982 with less than 10 people.  One of ESCA’s biggest projects was SM Mall of Asia.   ESCA is now considered the pioneer in using long span structures and high-strength concrete and innovative structural systems to meet project’s unique design requirements. It has provided structural engineering services to condominiums, malls, office buildings, resorts, schools, hotels, plants, roads, tunnels, bridges and places of worship. Among its clients are SM Prime, Megaworld Corp. and Makati Development Corp.

“As CEO, I stand by him and share his dream to make his vision a reality,” says Jean, who has three siblings who live abroad.

Jean says ESCA looks forward to the next 35 years.  “There is so much in store.  That is why we are very excited.  We want to change the traditional ways we are doing things.  We believe that with technology, we can do things better, faster and more efficient.  We are looking at transparency.  To this end, we will have good structures, great buildings that can help people and high-performance buildings.  That is our goal.  We just need to remember that technology is still a tool.  It is still the people who will have to drive that technology,” she says.

“My dad is always driving technology. My role is to keep the heart of it.  I think that is the human part.  We believe that it is really the Filipino engineering talent that we can promote and enhance,” says Jean, who joined ESCA as vice president in 2011 and became its CEO in 2017, “in essence to remove the headache from my dad and to allow him to pursue his advocacy.”

“His advocacy is not limited to just the company, it is for the entire industry and for Filipino engineers in general,” she says.

“I was telling my dad that if we were gonna teach competitors, we would be losing our edge at ESCA and he said we have no choice.  We have to share our knowledge,” Jean says, referring to her father.

ESCA is among the first Filipino engineering design companies to adopt BIM in design and project management.  The company established its BIM Department in January 2013 and ESCA Knowledge Academy in 2017 to provide BIM training to clients and industry players. A unit, ESCA International, also pioneered engineering services outsourcing in the Philippines. 

De Castro once chaired the board of civil engineering of the Professional Regulatory Commission and served as president of the Philippine Institute of Civil Engineers and Construction Project Management Association of the Philippines. De Castro’s feats as a structural engineer, father and visionary are included in the book ‘Fearless to be First’ which was launched during the company’s 35th anniversary.

De Castro says the use of BIM technology is expected to make the construction industry more efficient and transparent.  “Our statistics in the Philippines show that 100 percent of the projects are delayed, 100 percent of the projects are over the budget.  But we have the technology.  Why are we not using the technology. And that technology is to digitize,” he says.

“When advanced countries like the UK learned about BIM, they mandated BIM.  They said we are not going to pay for inefficiencies of contractors.  Many countries followed and mandated BIM for all projects.  Malaysia adopted it two years ago.  Last year, Vietnam was the latest country to adopt it.  How about the Philippines? We have to digitize,” says De Castro.

“If we have our model for BIM, then it is easy to take everything very efficient.  If you have information from feasibility planning in the model, information for the room alignment, from surveying in the design, schedules, estimate, earthworks, construction, maintenance and operation, we can make our construction very, very efficient.  When we say efficient, it means that the project has been delivered on time, at cost and in accordance to the performance requirements by which we have designed it for,” he says.

ESCA looks at BIM technology as the source of its expansion. “We can digitize our environment.  When we digitize our environment, that is the start of making our environment, our cities smart.  If we have enough people in the Philippines [with BIM skills], probably we can have a smart Philippines,” says de Castro.

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