This project was not really about steel. It was about a business decision that needed steel to happen.
Our client malts grain for brewers. For most of its history it could only ship that malt one way, in bulk, by truck or by rail. That works when your customers are large breweries with silos to receive it. It does not work at all for a craft brewery that wants a pallet of bagged malt.
The craft market was growing and the client could not sell into it. The fix was a bagging facility, and the missing link was a way to get malt from the existing production plant across to it.
The scope
We installed the equipment that carries malt from the existing plant to the new bagging building, along with a bin and a cleaner. Crew peaked at fourteen. The contract was a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and the work ran from December 2018 into April 2019.
We estimated the job and were awarded it, then worked through the design alongside our own engineering people and the client’s engineering team. That joint stage is where a project like this is won or lost, because the route the product takes determines almost everything about the install.
Phasing around a plant that could not stop
The single hardest constraint was that existing production had to keep running. A maltster cannot pause. Grain is in process on a timetable measured in days and the plant has customers waiting on it.
So we planned the work in phases designed to disturb as little as possible. We built the work breakdown around those phases rather than around what would have been convenient for our crew. Some of the sequence was awkward and slow as a result. That was the point.
Getting there meant working closely with the plant manager, the operations team, the maintenance team, and the engineers. Those four groups do not always want the same thing. Operations wants the line running. Maintenance wants access. Engineering wants it built to the drawing. Our job was to find the sequence that gave each of them enough.
The bin
The largest single item was a bin, and it went in through the side of the building. There is a photograph from that day taken from inside, looking out through the opening, with the bin hanging on the crane against an open prairie sky and a rigger watching it come in.
That lift took months of preparation. Structural checks, the opening itself, crane positioning, ground bearing, and a weather window in an Alberta winter. The photograph makes it look effortless, which is the correct outcome and a misleading one.
Change orders, handled properly
The job produced change orders. Most projects of this kind do, especially when you are tying new equipment into a plant built in a different era.
We identified variances, reported them in status reports, and issued change orders as they came up. What we did not do was absorb them silently and then present a surprise at the end, or stop work while they were argued about. A change order raised the week it is found is a conversation. The same one raised at handover is a dispute.
What came out of it
The facility went in and the client could ship bagged malt. That opened a customer base that had simply been unavailable to them before.
Conditions were difficult throughout. Winter, a live plant, an old building, and a tight sequence. We recorded lessons learned at the end for the next phase, which is a habit rather than a formality. We were back on this site again in later years, and having written down what we learned the first time made the return cheaper for everyone.
What we would tell an owner
Design the route first. In a plant like this, the path the product takes through the building drives the equipment, the structure, and the schedule. Choosing it late means redoing all three.
Phase around production and accept the cost. Every phased plan looks inefficient on paper next to a shutdown plan. Compare it against the value of the product you would not have made.
Raise variances the week you find them. Nobody enjoys a change order. Everybody prefers it to a surprise.
Write down the lessons. This client got a cheaper second phase because we had a record of what went wrong in the first one, and so did we.
One last thought, because it is the part of this job we find ourselves repeating to other owners. The steel we installed was ordinary. Nothing about a bin, a cleaner, or a length of conveying equipment is remarkable on its own. What made this project worth doing was that it let a company sell to customers it had never been able to reach. Ask any contractor what they built and you will get a list of equipment. Ask what it was for, and whether they can tell you, and you will learn a great deal about how they will treat your schedule when something goes wrong at two in the morning.
Project Photos
