Construction giant, EEI Corporation, has just celebrated 91 years of operation, with the theme of “Thriving in Adversity.”
The former Engineering Equipment and Supply Co. or EESCO, was first incorporated as a machinery and mills supply house on April 17, 1931.
At the time, EESCO pioneered the idea of a modern machine shop equipped to handle general machine work, steel fabrication, welding and sheet metal work, and gear cutting.
Nine decades after and several name changes in between, EEI also entered into shipbuilding, power plant development, recruitment of manpower, skills training, real estate, and overall infrastructure development for both local and overseas markets.
It likewise collaborated with foreign companies from the Middle East and Southeast Asia that enabled the company to provide construction services for power plants, petrochemical refineries, and industrial installations in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Algeria, New Caledonia, Singapore, Malaysia and Brunei.
Meanwhile, EEI adopted various digital technologies at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic to increase efficiency, starting with the provision of proper tools for both office-based employees to those with co-morbidities for an effective remote work-from-home set-up.
Among the key programs launched by EEI include the cloud-based Common Data Environment (CDE) and Reality Capture tools to enable virtual job site monitoring.
The CDE allowed project information and coordination related to specifications, resources requirements, and various issues that are encountered during the execution phase of construction to be made accessible in a single platform, effectively replacing traditional paper-based documents and a fragmented set of electronic information exchanges.
With economic activities picking up, EEI is now poised to participate in additional construction projects after recently raising P6-billion from a follow-on offering last December of Preferred Shares.
Right now, EEI has 12,615 employees across its different construction projects in the Philippines, with another 6,074 deployed overseas and 2,785 in its local subsidiaries. EEI continues to employ more people.