KOBELCO

KOBELCO Construction Machinery USA offers crawler excavators in the 3,000-pound to 245,000-pound classes, including zero tail-swing, compact, standard, long-reach, mass excavation and demolition models. Their new 156,000-square-foot production facility and stand-alone office building, scheduled to open in December 2015, will allow the company to reduce production lead times for North American customers and better meet overall market needs. The expansion is expected to create 131 high-quality jobs.

Combining different scopes of work, this was a fun yet challenging project consisting of foundations, equipment pits, slab-on-grade, tilt panels (at the office building), slab-on-metal deck and concrete paving.

Having to work on all three buildings at once was especially challenging. The manufacturing building has several big equipment foundations that are oddly shaped. Building designs changed numerous times as we were actively working, causing the plan to constantly change. Coordination with equipment rental vendors was also tricky, since KOBELCO strongly prefers its brand. If the equipment was not KOBELCO, any branding had to be covered.

It was also difficult to properly man each task due to a lack of qualified craftspersons. At times, we ran five different crews on five different phases of work while new crews were simultaneously being built and co-workers getting used to one another. A joint effort from the entire team on planning the work was crucial.