Above: Broadcasting House, London
The CIBSE Building Performance Awards recognise, reward and celebrate the best performance, innovation and practice in design, commissioning, construction, installation and operation of sustainable buildings, and the manufacturers whose technologies enable energy efficiency.
Join the best of the industry talent and be there on the night to see who will scoop the awards. The glittering event, taking place on 5 February at London’s Grosvenor House Hotel, will see the industry come together in a night celebrating the achievements across the building services chain. Don’t miss your chance to be there. To book a table, visit
www.cibseawards.org or call 020 7324 2771.
consider when choosing an air conditioning system; the key factors associated with that type of system; and key projects where the system has been used. It also includes web- based design tools, such as the Renewable Energy Toolkit, which helps designers establish the most appropriate type of renewables for a project. There is also software to enable standard solutions for plantrooms and risers to be produced quickly. The senior engineer in each discipline is responsible for ensuring Adapt is kept up to date for their specialism. ‘Aecom has invested considerable resources in the Adapt tool to enable engineers globally to use a common design platform to increase productivity, accuracy and quality,’ says Burton. Aecom is also investing in staff training
to grow the business in new and emerging markets by up-skilling staff so that they can focus on new areas, such as waste-to-energy and renewables. ‘The size of the company allows us to put the funds in place to focus on these sectors,’ Burton explains. Another way the company has evolved from
the Oscar Faber that Burton joined 20 years ago is Aecom’s growing number of specialists. ‘At Oscar Faber we were general engineers that worked on different types of building; now there are lots of specialist engineers for you to call upon to help with the design of a building,’ he says. These specialists include bomb-blast
34 CIBSE Journal January 2013
experts, security, fire engineers or even IT. ‘For a global firm with 45,000 employees, it makes economic sense to employ experts in different disciplines,’ he adds. The Halley VI research base in Antarctica
for the British Antarctic Survey is one scheme where Aecom’s global knowledge base and engineering specialisms came into its own. The competition for project was announced on OJEU. Aecom put together a team with Hugh Broughton Architects. Before developing a solution, the design team used the company intranet to find out if anybody at Aecom had experience of working in extreme climates. The responses included one from Aecom’s Canadian arm. They had worked on a similar project for the USA in the Arctic. ‘If we hadn’t had their expertise there is no way we’d have been shortlisted for this project,’ explains Burton. While the drive for profit is as fundamental
to the business now as it was 20 years ago, commercially a key change has been to focus the business on the different market sectors. Aecom now has groups of experts focused on education, commercial, high-end residential, hotels and healthcare sectors. ‘It is different to the generic approach of Oscar Faber, now that we not only have specialists, but specialists focused on a specific sector,’ he says. Significantly, these sectors are not confined to the UK but exist globally, which allows the
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