“We're on one hell of a schedule,” echoes Dave Moses, business unit leader for Clayco's industrial segment. “The problem is, there's only so much time to spend funds once you receive them.”

For the Severstal project, a $200-million undertaking that included construction of a new pickling line, a tandem cold mill in an existing facility and a hot-dip coating line in a new facility, Barton Malow performed all civil, concrete, boilermaker and re-steel work as well as mechanical installation of all equipment on the 14-month project.

Construction began in 2008 but was halted because of poor economic conditions. To restart quickly, Barton Malow employed a building information modeling-based process to model prebuilt portions of the lines; further, the firm used the BIM-based process to work with subcontractors on modeling 6,000 drawings for the project's remaining portions. The approach shaved 10 weeks off the pickling line, according to Chris Horney, Barton Malow project engineer. “It's the first time we really brought all those capabilities to bear on one project and then magnified them,” Horney says.