Structural steel fabricators prepare for change

Structural steel fabricators are about to see more industry changes in the coming years than they’ve seen in recent decades. Advanced technology and new fabrication practices promise to shake it up. Getty Images

If you follow professional football in the U.S., and statistics suggest that you probably do, you know that the Oakland Raiders are moving the franchise to Las Vegas. It’s kind of a big deal as the 65,000-seat domed stadium is expected to cost $1.8 billion.

With a targeted completion date of July 31, 2020, the facility designers, structural steel fabricators, and construction team are under a lot of pressure to keep to schedules. The last thing Oakland Raiders management needs to do is scramble to find alternative arrangements for a 2020 home opener; they won’t exactly be welcomed back to the Bay Area with open arms after jilting local fans and elected officials.

So when a member of the Las Vegas Stadium Co. admitted in the Las Vegas Review-Journal this summer that the project was already experiencing delays in the fabrication, delivery, and assembly of structural steel, it probably set off some alarms. It was suggested that structural steel wasn’t fabricated as it should have been and these pieces—part of 185,000 individual pieces of structural steel for the project—had to be reworked.

The interesting part is that the management company for the stadium was able to move the schedule around to accommodate the rework. They had enough experience to expect something like this might happen.

Now, building a stadium is not something that just anyone can do. That’s understandable. But these types of delays are not unique to structural steel fabrication. They are a byproduct of poor communication and parties in the construction supply chain failing to embrace advanced technology.

That’s going to be changing, however. Structural steel fabricators may not have a choice.

The most obvious reason is that these fabricating companies aren’t finding skilled labor as easily as they might have in the past. Younger people don’t show great interest in occupations such as welding. As a result, manufacturers are scrambling to get new blood into their shops and train them up to become more valuable contributors. When they can’t find them, they invest in technology to expand capacity without needing additional labor.

Consider the increasing number of shops that are adopting automated welding systems. They can produce simple beam fabrications in a very streamlined manner, making them competitive with small shops that used to live off that type of work. Imagine the number of structural steel members like this that are needed to produce an Amazon fulfillment center, and you realize the impact that such automation can have.

Competitors aren’t going to allow shops to sit idle without investment in new technology, even if it may not be automated welding lines. Going back to the Las Vegas stadium example, a structural steel fabricator can save a lot of pain and suffering by properly marking parts before they leave the shop, giving erectors a better idea of how things fit up on the job site. That information is made even more accurate if it’s taken directly from the building information model, a scenario that also greatly improves the chance that the right structural steel parts are being delivered to keep the project on track.

That’s just the beginning. What are shops doing to streamline machine programming to turn around jobs more quickly? How much manual material movement is taking place on the shop floor, adding time to jobs and increasing the potential for employee injury? What kind of value-added activities, such as painting, can be added to keep customers happy and attract new ones?

For structural steel fabricators, investment in new fabricating technology doesn’t guarantee future success, but it certainly helps to avoid present-day failure.