Me (@bimguy)
My name is Aaron Phillips and I am an Associate and the Director of Technology & BIM Services at SHP Leading Design. I have been working at SHP for 11 years now. I started on the Architectural teams helping to design, document, and manage building projects. When I first started at SHP we were using a drafting software called PowerCADD. It was a completely Mac based software. When we decided to convert to Architectural Desktop (Autocad for Architects) I volunteered to lead the effort and I became the CAD Manager for the firm.
In 2005 we started to look at Revit and finally took a leap of faith and converted our entire office, Architects and MEP engineers in the middle of 13 projects, across 3 offices at the time. We also helped convert all our consultants. As we were living through the implementation process, Blake Sabo who is my original partner in crime, became my first power user/BIM project guy. He has done some really cool projects through our 2enCompass project delivery model. Our entire firm was converted to 100% Revit, including all of the work our consultants were doing on our projects in 10 months. This was just the start of our implementation, we had gotten through the software part of the implementation and had moved on to rethinking how we designed, documented, and lived in a BIM world.
It was during those first few years while we were implementing Revit and a BIM Process across our firm, that we started to develop a lot of manufacturer’s content to fill our models. Blake and I had over 8,000 hours of content development to bring better, leaner, and more robust content to our project models to support the transition. Other skill sets developed during this time also. Our training and consulting capabilities really started to show value and show us how we could positively impact a project’s success.
Vern Hendrickson
In June of 2009, I had the chance to add a member to our team. Vern Hendrickson was hired to be our BIM Manager and take over our BIM support and process development. Vern came with a strong background in a variety of project types and had even be working with contractors in Navisworks. Around this same time we started to expand our service offerings and get into some really unique and fun opportunities. I got the chance to write the BIM Guidelines and Standards for Indiana University and the BIM Standards for United States Central Command (USCENTCOM). We started writing programs outside of Revit and started to develop a higher level of expertise in BIM content development, based on years of experience creating content for our firm. Contractors started to come to use and ask for use to teach them how to operate in a BIM process and Vern started to train and consult those contractors and others outside of our firm.
To help support our growing project diversification, we create SHAPE Environments. SHAPE is an LLC that provides non-traditional design and BIM services to a variety of client types. It allows us to re-frame our expertise in content creation, training and consulting, digital design, and programming and take a fresh look at how we apply those skill sets to different project types. SHAPE has continued to open up new opportunities and project types that allow us to show off all of our skills.