Design-Build for Industrial Construction projects

Construction isn’t your business. Your business is your business. Choosing Design-Build delivery keeps you from getting bogged down in meetings and contract negotiations with multiple designers and contractors. Instead, the simplicity of a design-build contract lets you focus on what you do best, while the design-build firm handles the rest from concept to completion.

Example: An internationally owned food ingredient client in Iowa hired Carl A. Nelson & Company (CANCO) to be its general contractor on construction of a new production facility. During preparation for construction, our Project Team identified a number of deficiencies and issues in the schematic design, including code study errors and omissions. Had our initial contract included oversight of schematic design, these costly errors and resulting project delays could have been avoided. Since that experience, the client has moved away from its preference for hard-bid construction and has engaged CANCO as its design-builder on multiple projects.

“A single point responsibility for complete design enables projects to develop and be constructed faster,” said Jamie Stanley, vice president of operations in CANCO’s Cedar Falls office. “It also enables the design-builder to use their innovation and experience to develop the design to a constructable and cost-efficient solution while never losing track of the Owner and the project needs.”

On Design-Build projects, the design-builder frequently partners with architects, engineers and other consultants to form a single team working together to design and build a project to meet the client’s goals. As design-builder, CANCO collaborates with the design team, leads the design process and resolves disagreements among team members without any need to involve the Owner. Based on experience, we are able to engage designers that possess strengths that are best suited to a particular project type or scope of work.

Example: “A consistent team providing consistent results proves our value to clients,” Stanley said, citing CANCO’s eight-year, multi-phase design-build project for a client in the pet food industry. Throughout design and construction, CANCO worked with the same lead design partner.

Multiple studies by Penn State University have shown the efficacy of design-build delivery in providing faster completion of complex construction projects than other delivery methods. According to the Penn State data, use of Design-Build resulted in project delivery that was 33.5% faster compared to traditional design-bid-build construction.

CANCO’s experience on Design-Build projects supports those results.

Example: In helping the previously referenced industrial food ingredient client make the move to Design-Build, our Project Team touted speed of delivery as an important benefit. Our proposal included sample schedules comparing Design-Build to design-bid-build for the project being considered. Due to team continuity, Design-Build sped the project by almost three months through shortening the design window and streamlining the bid process.

In hard-bid construction, value engineering is an idea that often only comes into play when a project is over budget and costs need to be cut. But this misrepresents the true potential of value engineering, which is best delivered during pre-construction. Done right, the result is a value-added process that considers quality, Owner goals and cost, as well as long-term efficiency, to produce a satisfactory finished project.

Example: As design-build bridging consultant on a pet food plant project in Nebraska, CANCO designed a system to capture water heated during production to provide environmental heating throughout the plant and reduce energy costs.

In addition to proven advantages in speed of completion, evidence also shows Design-Build delivery results in the happiest clients. According to research by the Design-Build Institute of America, 76% of Owners report very good or excellent experiences, higher than any other delivery method.

Customer satisfaction on design-build projects also is evident from CANCO’s own clients, who routinely offer praise for the process on end-of-project surveys. Another proof of this level of satisfaction is that approximately 85 percent of our design-build projects are for repeat customers.

Example: Our website is loaded with examples of successful Design-Build projects for clients in the industrial, laboratory and other market segments. Visit the Knowledge Base to learn more about project delivery and to see examples of our design-build projects.