How One Engineering Team Across Two Continents Delivers Complex Projects Faster

As projects become more complex, engineering teams need a delivery model that keeps collaboration, quality, and accountability consistent, wherever the team is based.

Over the past three years, we have built an integrated engineering team across Ireland and the Philippines, expanding capability, improving collaboration and creating a delivery model that allows technically complex projects to move faster while maintaining the same engineering standards.

A recent project, a mobile data centre designed to be constructed in six months and deployed into demanding environments including remote locations, reflects the significance of this. Our team designs the mechanical and electrical systems, including the power infrastructure, that enable rapid deployment.

It's the kind of project that sounds ambitious until you understand the principle behind it.

Physics is physics

Physics! That’s why we built an engineering office in the Philippines three years ago, creating a strategic engineering hub that supports the delivery of increasingly complex infrastructure projects across Europe, North America, and the ASEAN region.

Aeron Jordan de Leon is Metec's Technical Operations Manager in Manila has spent more than a decade designing power systems and building services for data centres across multiple continents. When he explains why the Manila office exists he talks about engineering: "Physics is physics, and it’s the same all over the world".

Aeron continues: "The same laws apply - no matter where you are - the classic example is gravity. We have 9.81 metres per second squared in Europe and 9.81 here in the Philippines. It's just a matter of reference for each respective country."

Yes, compliance shifts with geography. Many European projects reference IEC-based standards, while North American projects often incorporate IEEE standards alongside local requirements. Voltage frequencies differ, 50Hz in Ireland, 60Hz in the US. Regulatory requirements vary by jurisdiction. But the underlying engineering doesn't change.

Ohm's Law remains the same whether you're designing a data centre in Frankfurt or Manila.

The engineering doesn't change and the approach to delivery is more efficient.

The Manila office exists to solve a challenge: access to qualified engineering graduates.

It is estimated that up to 9,000 engineering students graduate each year in Ireland. While the Philippines produces tens of thousands annually. With a population size of over 100 million people, the Philippines generates a talent pool of trained, educated, English-speaking engineers at a scale we can't match.

"We're working with the cream of the crop," Aeron says. "Only the top academic performers get into engineering in the Philippines, just like in Ireland. The difference is the size of the talent pool."

Three years later, the Manila office has grown from a single engineer to a team of 13, with plans to expand to 20 in the coming months. Today the team supports European projects, North American data centre deployments and increasingly complex infrastructure across the ASEAN region.

Accelerated delivery of designs

There's an eight-hour gap between Manila and Dublin. And Metec has operationalised this into a delivery framework.

As one office finishes its working day, the other can pick up the work, allowing drawings, designs and coordination to continue across a longer part of the day. So, drawings continue to develop, BIM models are refined and design queries are resolved. When the Irish team starts work the following morning, projects have already moved forward.

"We can proceed on preliminary designs and production," Aeron explains, "and then the continuity of work will be continued by the Ireland office. So we can support over 16 hours of working on projects without creating shift work or burning out either team."

It directly accelerates delivery. For clients, that means drawing packages move faster, coordination happens earlier and design iterations happen sooner, all while maintaining the same engineering approach across both offices.

And the consistency of approach, the same engineering discipline, the same design philosophy, means quality doesn't degrade across time zones.

Inside the day-to-day of building performance

Gene Aira Alicda is a BIM Technician and qualified Architect. Her day-to-day work includes monitoring contractor progress on retrofit projects, coordinating design queries, collaborating with engineers across multiple disciplines and producing detailed BIM models.

She's currently supporting Steven's Court, a major green retrofit for Irish Life Investment Managers on Dublin's St Stephen's Green. A redesign of the building's mechanical and electrical systems to improve long-term performance.

"I'm monitoring the daily status of the contractors as well. We do daily collaboration meetings with the designers and consultants," she describes.

Gene is also working alongside Mercury Engineering on European data centre projects, where the Manila team provides BIM support by reviewing contractor designs and identifying constructability risks.

This kind of work can often go unnoticed when everything runs smoothly but becomes critical when projects become increasingly complex.

Aeron approaches those same projects from a different perspective. His focus is singular: ensuring there is no downtime, no power failure, and no operational interruption. Over the past decade, he's worked on data centre projects across Frankfurt, Helsinki, the United States and Australia.

His expertise centres on two things that sound separate but are fundamentally interdependent: designing for resilience and designing for maintainability.

Resilience and maintainability

"If you design a system that's resilient but can't be maintained, you've created a future problem," Aeron explains. "If you design for maintenance but don't plan for redundancy, you've built in failure points. They have to work together."

For mission-critical projects, resilience and maintainability have to be considered together from the beginning. A system needs to continue operating when it matters most, while also being practical for engineers to inspect, service and maintain throughout its lifecycle.

That thought process guides the work across Metec's Dublin and Manila teams. The same viewpoint is applied whether the project is a data centre in Europe, a retrofit in Ireland, or infrastructure being delivered in another market.

The big picture scheme

Today, the Manila office primarily supports projects across Ireland, Europe, and North America. Which is already providing clients access to greater engineering capacity and a delivery model that makes better use of time zones.

As data centre investment and critical infrastructure development continue across Southeast Asia, "we're primarily focused on supporting European projects," Aeron says. "But the infrastructure is already in place and we're building the track record now."

Our integrated engineering model is built around shared outcomes: Shared engineering standards, consistent technical rigour, and one collaborative team allow projects to move continuously across time zones while maintaining the same level of quality and accountability.

For architects, developers, project managers, and cost consultants, that means access to a larger engineering capability without sacrificing consistency. Every project benefits from the same processes, technical expertise, and engineering discipline, regardless of where individual team members are based.

Interested in discussing how Metec can support your next complex project? Get in touch: Metec.ie