How Brevard company landed big Amazon project

BRPH, a Melbourne-based architecture, engineering and construction company, is at the helm of one of this year's big projects.

When Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN) announced on July 21 plans to build a 100,000-square-foot-plus satellite processing facility at Kennedy Space Center's Launch and Landing Facility in Brevard County, few knew work had already been underway since January of 2023 and that BRPH was the full-service firm behind it.

“Space Florida was instrumental, working with us and Amazon to get this project at the site where we're building,” said Matt Tyler, president of construction services at BRPH.

One of the reasons Amazon decided to build the $120 million project on Florida's Space Coast is Brevard County's infrastructure investment that allows for an expedited construction timeline, according to Amazon Vice President Steve Metayer.

The project is for Amazon’s Project Kuiper, a telecommunications division of the e-commerce giant that plans to put a constellation of 3,236 satellites in low Earth orbit to increase global high-speed broadband access.

Tyler said he is not at liberty to describe the RFP process, but did share that his firm demonstrated for the Amazon team how its integrated services would “make the project go faster and better.”

Integrated services keep design, procurement and construction under one roof, whereas the design-build model typically involves more than one company contributing to a project. Tyler said BRPH has seen steady growth in part as a result of adopting the integrated services approach. The company is on track to keep growing, with a projection of 10% to 15% overall revenue growth for 2024, he said.

“A few years ago, we started to see a need for fully integrated services. With the supply chain issues that were happening because of the pandemic and with inflation going crazy, we saw we could improve speed to market on projects and that we could make a really good business model out of construction as well,” said Tyler. “It has exploded and clients are reaping the rewards from it.”

A study by Salford Centre for Research and Innovation showed that in construction, integration boosts certainty and information exchange and decreases costs and distrust.

BRPH leads with architecture and engineering, and doesn’t build all the projects it designs. “We only get involved with construction when it’s a highly technical project like this one. It's a 120-foot-tall building, it's got vertical payload processing capability, it's got integration capabilities, it's got clean rooms. It’s the kind of thing we build,” said Tyler.

He mentioned current and past BRPH projects that serve the aerospace industry: a payload processing facility and launch complex in Wallops Island, Virginia; a confidential processing facility now underway on the West Coast; the Eastern Processing Facility in Cape Canaveral.

“We’ve done a lot of those and other vertical assembly buildings. We'll do about $200 million this year and about 75% of that is in aerospace,” Tyler said. "The other 25%, we're doing education, entertainment and hospitality work as well."

The Amazon project uses NASA-owned land, said Space Florida CEO and President Frank DiBello, and Amazon is the first to build there.

"It's going strong," said Tyler of the build-out. "Our completion date will be right around the end of 2024."

BRPH

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