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They were awarded as innovators for working with an international method that is a trend in the world. The Rosario construction company tells Negocios how artificial intelligence is used in a key sector of the economy.
Long before the GPT Chat explosion and artificial intelligence (AI) became on everyones lips, Nicolás Ruggiero was already looking closely at how these types of tools helped to promote building projects. Determined to learn more about this world, he made multiple trips abroad where he came into contact with innovative experiences that he later decided to apply to Edilizia, his Rosario construction company that just five years ago won the innovation award, granted by the Inter-American Council of Commerce and Production.
Although the distinction could have meant a point of arrival, it was rather the necessary impulse that made them fully immerse themselves in the universe of technologies and set a precedent in a sector that was somewhat lagging behind in trends. The commitment, however, is constant and they are currently testing new methodologies and computer systems to speed up the delivery of projects and offer a much wider range of new aesthetic and increasingly efficient options for the execution of developments.
“Edilizia was born in the first decade of the 2000s and is somewhat the consequence of what my grandparents were, both related to this business. We come from the heart of construction and we reached a point of continuous improvement in the processes from the works themselves, always thinking about things with a practical purpose. That made us start looking for ways to modernize ourselves, traveling and training in different technologies,” Ruggiero told Negocios, who, in addition to being CEO of the company, is today the director of the Rosario “Islas Malvinas” International Airport.
Looking to the future
The international method put into operation by the firm and which won it the prize for innovation, has its central axis in Building Information Modeling (BIM), the basis of digital transformation in the architecture and engineering. Precisely, Ruggiero is today president of the BIM Forum Argentina. Development consists of transferring a certain project to a cloud platform and working on it digitally throughout its entire life cycle. We talk about the different stages that intervene in the completion of a work, from planning and design to construction and operations.
“We cover the part of homes with our own developments and for third parties, but what we are looking for the most are medium- or large-sized projects with a certain complexity. Artificial Intelligence allows us to give information to the tools and thus obtain different designs of a work or the best distribution to take advantage of a space in minutes. Before, it took weeks or months, with engineers or architects working, now we solve it in days," explained Ruggiero.
The revolution that BIM brought to the sector was such that it ended up becoming the ISSO 19650 Standard and today there are even countries where it is mandatory to be able to bid for public works. Although this provision did not reach Argentina, progress is being made to promote its adoption in different areas.
In this sense, the CEO of Edilizia and a civil engineer maintained that, at first, it was thought that the irruption of AI threatened the jobs of workers and masons, but ended up imitating creative work, disputing the market with disciplines such as architecture, graphic design and decoration. "Instead of going through the door, he ended up going through the window," reflected the businessman.
In turn, the firm uses the Lean Construction philosophy, born in Japan with the Toyota company, which is based on the use of resources, prioritizing the continuous work flow and saving effort. As founders of the Lean Construction Institute Argentina, the construction group provides training and implementation services to third parties who want to start it up, mainly through the Last Planner System methodology.
Constant learning
Over the years, Edilizia came to form an economic group that includes different business units within it. In total, there are more than 100 professionals making up its staff, who are always in training, assuming the challenges that handling new tools implies and being attentive to technological developments that may appear and put into practice.
They have a specific technological area that is in charge of carrying out a firm improvement in the productive and creative processes. It is led by the industrial engineer María Ángeles Sandoz, who assured that many of the innovations are applied to the ideation stage of a project: “what these platforms allow us is to be able to present a greater range of options to the client, different designs of an environment, of a space, which will later decant in a stage where there will be greater participation of the people”.
Even a technical sheet with the specifications of the work can be developed with AI quickly and information can be obtained on the points to take into account to establish a trust. All these are variables that the company is putting into operation, testing its real incidence at the time of going to the market. Although the strong guarantee continues to be the human team behind it, which is in charge of reviewing the work, monitoring processes and adding added value to each venture that Edilizia undertakes.
Ruggiero also expressed that BIM drives sustainability by allowing you to make certain decisions in advance and anticipating possible expenses: “sometimes we get complicated thinking about what material to use, for example, in what refers to sunlight. Designing with this model, you will be able to rotate the entire project and realize that by locating the work in another way, you will take better advantage of it and avoid changes. It enables you to measure impacts at earlier stages, the energy impact, the carbon footprint, etc.”, explained the civil engineer.
Edilizias projects
Among its clients are important brands for which they have developed infrastructure works such as Vida Club de Campo de Rosetti Desarrollos Urbanos, Go Sanatorio Funes and Go Alto Rosario in the case of Grupo Oroño, the remodeling of La Gallega Supermarket on Av. Eva Perón and Circunvalación and the Puma service station, located in Pueyrredón and San Juan, among others. In addition, they are in front of the new similar Puerto Norte coastal promenade that the city of San Lorenzo will have, with towers for homes, commercial premises and an outdoor corridor. |
