Better structural fabrication starts with good information

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When can we get the shop drawings? Kerri Olsen has heard that question countless times during the first meeting of the fabricator, steel detailer, and client (usually a representative from the general contractor). She's founder and principal of Steel Advice, an estimating and project management firm in Shelton, Wash., and she's also the current acting president of the National Institute of Steel Detailing (NISD). To Olsen, that's the wrong question for a fabricator to ask—especially at an initial meeting.

"In my mind, the first question should always be, ‘What information is yet needed to enable the start of steel detailing?’ If that's the first time they’ve heard the question, don't let it be the last time."

Olsen said this during a March 2022 seminar at NASCC: The Steel Conference, hosted in Denver by the American Institute of Steel Construction (AISC). Her presentation delved into one of the most time-consuming elements of a construction project: requests for information, or RFIs.

Olsen offers both estimating and project management services. When she receives a job, she first thoroughly reviews contract drawings, specifications, and anticipated delivery dates. "The next thing I do is mark the contract drawings where I see missing information," she said. "If I’m the estimator on the job, I already have an idea of what was not included in the scope-of-work items. I’m able to hit the ground running. But if I’m coming in blind, I’ll go through page by page and mark up what I’m going to need to get started."

She then writes an introductory letter detailing the missing elements and holds a meeting with the fabricator. This all happens before meeting with the steel detailer.

"Fabricator project managers should do what they can to completely know a job," she said. "They should preview the job with the estimators, people who’ve had their heads in the job and know what the problem areas are. [The estimator and project manager] should work together in identifying all critical elevations and dimensions that are shown and are missing. And they need to completely review the scope of the work and talk about specific items and quantities. Just because it's only shown as a detail once doesn't mean there aren't 50,000 of them in a job."

Once the project manager and estimator are on the same page, they bring detailing into the picture. After the initial detailer bid—which, again, involves all expected items, the complete scope of the work, and timelines—steel detailing is brought into the project and the meetings commence.

At this first meeting, the estimator, project manager, and steel detailer start developing a list of missing information—all before the formal RFI process begins. The idea is to uncover most missing information as early as possible, abiding by best practices as defined by AISC and NISD codes.

Specifics matter here. Yes, job contracts say all parties abide by AISC and NISD best practices, but what do these standards actually say? Olsen pointed to a section in the NISD standard that states, "The structural design documents shall clearly show or note the work that is to be performed and shall give the following information with sufficient dimensions to accurately convey the quantity and complexity of the structural steel to be fabricated." The standard follows with a long list of details, the first one being "the size, section, material grade, and location of all members."

She also said that just scaling up CAD drawings to determine dimensions "is not an accepted practice for detailing the approval documents," adding that this has to do with information responsibility and accountability. Per best practice, as-received design documents must contain all required dimensions.

"Everything we do when we start a job has to keep pointing back to the root cause," Olsen explained, "and the root cause of most of our problems is that the design was incomplete. The reality is that contract drawings almost always aren't workable, and many feel, ‘Well, why not just go ahead and detail the job, and put clouds [in the PDF markup] with questions on the shop detail and erection drawings, and then send them for approval?’ That's not a good process."

Doing that shifts information responsibility. Best practice assumes that detailers release drawings that are shop-ready, with all expected problems addressed and questions answered. Olsen's message to detailers: "When you submit drawings for approval, you’ve admitted to the world that these drawings are workable. Now, you’ve made yourself responsible for whatever timeline is involved. Ideally, you should never submit drawings for approval until they are complete, when you have all questions answered and you’re good to go. Even though you’re just in the approval stage, you could fabricate off these drawings now because they’re that complete. That's what we want."

Of course, detailers can't simply state, "These drawings are unworkable, now fix them," then just leave it at that until someone notices nothing is moving forward. Fabricators need to order the steel, after all, and projects still have expected completion dates. Here's where Olsen's weekly project information notices come into play.

"I send a descriptive letter," she said, "not pages and pages of data. I condense everything into short, informative sentences. If I have to use a spreadsheet, I will, but I try not to. The weekly letters describe the current job status, what's been resolved, and what is needed to continue."

With these letters, sent as a PDF attached to an email (which provides a date and time stamp), Olsen attaches RFIs with enough detail to provide clarity to anyone who needs to read them. The letter also requests that answers be returned by a specific date, not just as soon as possible. After all, ASAP is subjective. It could be tomorrow for one person or next week (or month) for someone else.

She also describes in the letter any previous meetings, the time and date of the Zoom or Teams call, issues discussed, and new details added. "Dates and times are important," she said, adding that one recent project involved a meeting where it was discovered that the drawings weren't current.

"A good detailer and project manager always asks if the drawings on file are current," Olsen said. Also, revisions should include clouds (PDF markups) that show the changes from the previous drawings. New drawings without marked changes (or a date and revision number) open the door to uncertainty: Is this really the latest? Were all the necessary changes really made? What conflicts, if any, do those changes create?

To the end of the letter, Olsen adds a firm but courteous statement: "Our work on this project is at a standstill until we have received the requested information on our RFI. Your immediate attention to this is greatly appreciated."

Finally, she closes with something that resembles the following statement: "We do ask that you review the above information for accuracy. If we do not receive written corrections from you within three business days from the date of this letter, this document will stand as a matter of record. Thank you very much for your time and attention."

Such letters provide a paper trail, and, because they’re sent weekly, they keep people engaged and (ideally, at least) spur action. The documentation also maintains accountability for information, which has become a bit more complicated with advancing software technology.

Project management and tracking software has streamlined operations for many in construction. "For instance, document tracking with Tekla EPM or other software to document approval submittals and shop release dates is very helpful," she said.

Companies run into trouble when they use software to pass on responsibility for finding needed information. For instance, Olsen described incidences of GCs misusing project management software, "telling the subcontractor to just go into [that web-based software] to figure out what's needed."

She added that while such software can streamline information-gathering, certain people are still responsible for retrieving and communicating that information. "The GC project manager should be sending to the fabricator what's needed, in the form of changes to drawings and specifications. They need to be updating the schedule specific to the trade. Then the [fabricator project manager] forwards that information to the steel detailer."

The letters and continual contact also keep the project moving forward. This can be especially critical when materials need to be ordered, considering the supply chain challenges of recent years. She referred again to that recent experience when an online meeting revealed the fabricator had out-of-date drawings. The project manager at the GC had thought the most recent drawings would answer the questions the RFI addressed—but still, the drawings weren't shop-ready.

"I had this whole new set of structural drawings with most of the dimensions," she said, "but I also had new steel, and the location of the new steel wasn't dimensioned. Still, I had my material lengths, so now I could at least purchase the steel. Timing was important because these were big beams. We’re in the Pacific Northwest, and we were purchasing them from back East, so we had to factor in delivery time."

Olsen described one recent RFI discussing "a drawing revision that included added transfer-post locations, which required more stiffener beams and connections. And now we had a clash problem between the stiffener location and the beam-splice locations."

During a subsequent phone call, the GC project manager wanted to resort to field welding, a change that, of course, would increase cost. Eventually a solution was found—but the key, Olsen said, is that the problem was caught early, well before shop drawings were released and fabrication began, and the interaction was all documented in that weekly information notice.

This again points to the virtue of the weekly information letter. "These weekly letters provide the list of the week's events. Even when nothing is happening, I continue to communicate with weekly letters. We might be still waiting for this or that approval, we might be proceeding, or we might be at a standstill. The letters also let people know the impact of leaving questions unanswered, including delays to the schedule.

"All this work avoids overtime, change orders, and crisis-management behavior," Olsen continued, adding that "the worst of all is crisis-management behavior," where finger-pointing runs rampant and complaints (and, eventually, lawsuits) abound.

Today, shop fabrication itself might be extraordinarily streamlined and automated. A beam line scribes layout marks; a robot line welds and even manipulates beams as required, without waiting for a crane; conveyors move beams from one end of the shop to the other with no overhead cranes required.

That immense throughput, though, won't help if everyone's fabricating based on incorrect information. This, Olsen said, is why effective RFI management—and project management in general—will remain critical. A job with excessive crane use might require an extra hour or day to complete, but an unaddressed RFI, sitting in someone's inbox for weeks, can cost many times more.