AAAS Archive
AAAS Archive’s scope of the project seemed simple from the initial drawings. However, there were a few challenges once work began on site that, as a team, we had to overcome to deliver the product to our client, Chapman Construction.
The first challenge was the delivery plan. Originally, we had planned to deliver the entire job on a single trailer, deck included. Upon visiting the site, with Carl Geisel and Randy Piona, we decided it would have to be separated and sent on the BES Ryder truck. Unfortunately, this was less than a week prior to the scheduled delivery, meaning the shop had to hustle and unload/reload the steel to meet the deadline. This also turned the job into three separate deliveries instead of 1. We addressed this added cost of loading/unloading steel with our client and were able to recuperate the additional project expense with a change order to the initial contract.
The second challenge on site was an incorrect elevation at a pier located in the center of the building footprint. The pier was over 1 foot too high, causing the structure not to tie in properly. Randy, BES site foreman, conveyed this issue to the site supervisor (Chapman Construction) and Zack Whitehouse, BES project manager, and jointly decided that cutting the column on a Time & Material (“T&M”) slip was the most efficient solution to the challenge. Randy kept great track of his time, including all tools and downtime associated with the fix, and BES was paid for the extra work performed.
The third, and luckily final, challenge on this job was the result of another concrete bust. The building has a pit that required steel reinforcement at the top to be structurally sound. The engineered plans called for embeds to be cast in place on either side of the pit for the steel to be tied into. The pit had been poured out of the square, resulting in 6 beams being too short. To resolve this issue, larger clips were rushed through the fabrication shop by Mike Mirra and his team and sent to the project site the following day. Randy, Jeff Small (BES project manager), and Zack met on-site to review the fix. Again, Randy did a great job documenting all time involved in remedying these issues on T&M slips and executed them quickly by the client. This third challenge was overcome by the input from multiple team members of BES working collaboratively to address the problem!
This project is a great example of how a small job can still be very complicated. Both the BES field crew and shop fabrication teams did a fantastic job in executing these fixes in a timely manner to keep the project on schedule and delivered to our client.