DBIA_All Aboard

The Journal of the Design-Build Institute of America

April 2008

ALL Aboard

Structural Steel and Design-Build 2008

Steel Fabricator Boards the Design-Build Train

By Larry Flynn

F

rom his home office in Grants Pass, Ore., Eric Henderson fondly recalls the epiphany he had during one in a string of seminars he attended several years ago on design-build structural steel frame delivery. A light bulb turned on that day for the president of American Institute of Steel Construction (AISC)-member Pacific Ironworks Inc., a small structural steel fabrication company in the southwestern Oregon town. As Henderson recounts it, in his remarks that day, John Cross, vice president of marketing for the Chicago-based AISC, told the attendees that “the design-build train has left the station. You’re either on the train or you’re sitting at the station.”

“Well, I didn’t want to be sitting at the station,” Henderson says. He embraced

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the concept then and there. “I felt like I was riding in the caboose,” he says, “but I was on board.”

Henderson and Pacific Ironworks aren’t alone. Structural steel fabricators large and small across the country are stepping onto the design-build locomotive and bringing value to large projects, but smaller projects as well, in the form of faster schedules and significant cost savings that they might not otherwise be able to offer in a typical design-bid-build delivery method.

Henderson and Pacific Ironworks leapt on the train with both feet, purchasing a copy of RAM structural steel frame analysis software with the CIS/2 export module, which enables the structural engineering drawings to be directly im-

ported into the fabricator’s SDS2 design detailing software. This saves voluminous amounts of time in that the structural engineer’s drawings don’t have to be replicated all over again using the SDS2 software. “We don’t have to reconstruct the model,” Henderson says. “It’s already done for you.”

Pacific Ironworks’ entrée into design-build framing system delivery was not without its stops along the way. The structural analysis software eventually was shelved for a time because the 35person fabricator’s head draftsman — the primary user of the software — needed to focus his energies on detailing.

Design-Build DATELINE — April 2008

All Aboard The train started chugging again when Pacific partnered with Culp & Tanner Structural Engineers, a Chico, Calif., firm with experience in participating in the design-build delivery of the steel package using Building Information Modeling technology and 3-D model sharing.

With the steel team established, the design-build train hit its stride and Pacific went to work making presentations of model projects to clients around southern Oregon and working with Culp & Tanner to develop proposals using the structural analysis and detailing software. The presentations were warmly received, Henderson says, but to some, the degree to which a project’s schedule and cost could be reduced was almost too good to be true.

“About half of the people were so blown away by it that they couldn’t really believe it,” Henderson says. “The other half said, ‘Hey, I’m onboard.’”

Retail Opportunity Knocks

Then one day in Grants Pass, Henderson passed a site where a sign stood that said it would soon be the home of a new retail development. Henderson called the locally based owner/developer, Terry Stegemiller, and arranged to make a proposal to him and the project’s local architect, Scott Pigman, to deliver the project’s complete structural package, including structural design for the concrete, masonry and structural steel, and to provide the structural steel fabrication, detailing and erection. The Pacific/Culp & Tanner team based their proposal on the architectural footprint of the 70,000-square-foot Parkway Village retail development.

Pacific presented Stegemiller a budget with point-of-purchase steel pricing and no guaranteed price due to the volatility of structural steel prices at that time.

Upon being awarded the job, Culp & Tanner met with the owner and the architect to discuss the project. Afterwards, the steel fabricator and the structural engineer worked at fitting the fabricator’s equipment to the design and construction methodology of the project. A plan was agreed upon at a meeting prior to the final connection drawings, says Pacific’s Henderson. The team developed its “global standards, and the model was accurately processed.”

The design-build process enabled the fabricator to bring value to the project

Design-Build DATELINE — April 2008

early on. From the start, Henderson urged that gravity columns be used at the perimeter of the building, enabling the structural steel to be erected before the masonry block wall, which would typically be constructed first and support part of the lateral load of the structure. But because CMU block masonry wall construction is often impacted by weather and inaccuracies inherent with its components, delays can result in disputes and back charges.

Erecting the steel first “really got the project on schedule,” Henderson says.

He says the owner/developer and the architect demonstrated a great deal of foresight in approving the use of the gravity columns at the perimeter. Additional costs are involved up front related to the requirement for pouring of additional footings. The owner paid for footings with four anchor bolts in addition to the column, Henderson says. But once the foundations were in, the job progressed rapidly.

Henderson points out that this kind of value-added expertise from the fabricator often is lost in a typical design-bid-build process. “There’s no added value because the fabricator comes along later in the job,” he says.

To provide added protection to the owner and to reduce disputes on its design-build projects, Pacific insists on conducting a pre-pour anchor bolt inspection.

“The concrete guys make any corrections that are necessary,” Henderson says. “This way we can make any changes to the base plates in the fabrication process.” This

Parkway Village Installing gravity columns at the perimeter (top) reduced the schedule significantly. Prime Space Parkway Village (middle) covers 70,000 square feet. Against Odds The entire project, from beginning to end, took only seven months.

practice has been so successful for Pacific, according to Henderson, that contractors now ask the company to inspect anchor bolts on projects in which the company isn’t even involved.

Cautious Buy-In

Although the owner/developer bought into Pacific’s design-build proposal from the start, being a former tilt-up concrete contractor from the San Francisco Bay Area who had never worked with a structural steel framing system such as this before,

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All Aboard

Early

Collaboration

An Architect’s Perspective Pacific Ironworks’ design-build structural delivery projects in Grants Pass, Ore. — the Parkway Village retail development and a Toyota dealership — posed different structural and architectural challenges, but they also shared many similarities, including the same local architect, Scott Pigman of Scott M. Pigman Architect.

Pigman’s experience working on the projects with Pacific’s structural delivery teams was that both projects went through the design, construction documents and construction process quite smoothly. The reason?

“Each part of the team — the steel fabricator, owner, architect and engineer — knew their place in the process and did not disregard the other team members to facilitate their own ends,” Pigman says.

Past design-build projects with other contractors have not been as successful, in Pigman’s opinion, because some team members had only their own interest at heart.

With both projects, Pacific Ironworks and the structural engineer were onboard early in the design phase and made many helpful suggestions which were critical to the construction cost and schedule, Pigman says.

“The steel fabricator and structural engineer having a direct line of contact throughout the design and construction process was very helpful and brought solutions forward quite quickly,” he adds.

The steel fabricator and structural engineer were also enthusiastic in developing a cost-effective method of building elements critical to the design, which Pigman says is critical to the structural and architectural success of a project.

“Knowing when to simplify the design for cost and when to modify the construction method to maintain the integrity of the design is critical in the design-build process,” he says.

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Car Makers Pacific Ironworks teamed with Portland structural engineer, Catena Engineering, to provide design-build delivery of the structural package for this 60,000-square foot Toyota dealership.

Stegemiller admits he was a bit apprehensive. “After we got to working with it, it was a fairly comfortable process,” he says.

Stegemiller “was a little suspicious of me because I would not commit to a price,” Henderson says. “It bothered him, but he could understand what I was doing, and he trusted me.” Trust, Henderson says, is by far the most important ingredient in the design-build process.

“It can’t be an adversarial relationship as you might have with a design-bid-build project.”

Construction on the project was started and completed quickly. “People thought I was crazy when I said the project would be completed and that we’d open a store in seven months,” says Stegemiller, who owned the Sears franchise within the development. The project was completed and the store opened in June 2005, seven months after the start of construction.

In terms of cost, “Pacific came in well within the budget,” Stegemiller says. In fact, Pacific beat its budget to the tune of returning $20,000 to the owner. “I was stoked when the numbers came back,” says Henderson, emphasizing that the major part of the saving was the timeliness of the purchase of the steel.

Communication breeds trust and the design-build process dictates more and closer communication among the project team’s partners. The lines of communication on the Parkway Village project were simplified for the owner/developer who had just a single point of contact for the structural package: engineering services, masonry and steel. In this instance, the owner/developer also acted as the general

contractor on the project through the formation of Hallmark Construction LLC. “Early on, I identified the general contractor as the essential member of the team who would have to keep the crew running straight and true,” Henderson says. The concept was new to all involved in the project, but Henderson says it worked.

The owner “just had to talk to me.”

With Parkway Village under its belt, in 2006 Pacific teamed up with an Oregon structural engineer, Catena Engineering in Portland, to deliver the structural package for a two-story, 60,000-square-foot Toyota dealership in Grants Pass, which included a large service bay and showroom. On this project, the fabricator and the SE acted as a team, but contractually were independent of each other. The architect on the project again was Scott Pigman.

As with Parkway Village, no price was guaranteed for the Toyota dealership.

And although no rebate was given to the owner on the project, Henderson says the project successfully met the owner’s objectives. With experience to buoy them, Henderson and Pacific Ironworks are no longer riding in the caboose of the designbuild train. Instead they are tearing up the tracks, with future projects pending. And Pacific Ironworks’ experience in designbuild delivery of the structural package underscores that design-build isn’t strictly the domain of large firms and large project teams designing and building mega projects; it also works for small companies working with a tight-knit team on small and medium-size projects.

Larry Flynn is Industry Marketing Manger with the American Institute of Steel Construction in Chicago.

Design-Build DATELINE — April 2008