Details matter in steel fabrications. If you don’t pay attention to those details at the right time they can come with an eye-watering price tag.
Put a different way, if you’re commissioning a construction project that involves steel fabrication, when would you prefer to know there’s a problem? For example, a clash or some other design oversight that meant the project couldn’t proceed with an expensive or time-consuming rework?
Would you prefer to know this when the project exists in a CAD system, or when everyone and everything is on site and ready to erect or install the fabrication?
It’s a stark choice, if indeed there is a choice.
Opting for the time-honoured fragmented approach to steel fabrication design and delivery limits your choices and increases the risk of a substantial overspend.
Where surveying, scoping, option assessment, design, detailing, fabrication and installation are separate phases involving different organisations, steel fabrication and installation expertise comes late to the party.
That’s a shame. Problems and risks go undiscovered until they’re expensive to fix. Opportunities to simplify the design or future maintenance are forever missed.
What’s The Alternative To Fragmentation?
Logically, the alternative is integration. Or intelligent integration, to be precise. This approach treats the entire project as a seamless enterprise, rather than a collection of connected activities.
By adopting this approach we can bring practicalities and attention to detail into consideration from the very start of the project.
Does it make a difference? If you want to measure the benefits in purely financial terms FTE analysed 10 projects. For five of these, FTE was engaged in the project design and able to apply intelligent integration principles; five were where we were simply asked to fabricate and install structures to somebody else’s design.
For projects that used intelligent integration the average cost variance was under 5%. For those delivered with the fragmented approach it was 48%. Just think about that for a moment.
If you’re about to commission or bid for a project that involves substantial steel fabrication, talk to FTE first about how intelligent integration could help. You can find out more about how it works and how it could benefit your projects by accessing our free resource centre, or get in touch at info@fourtees.co.uk or call: 01489 885899
