Most case studies cover one job. This one covers three, at the same plant, for the same client, across eight years. That is the more honest picture of how this work actually goes. You do not win a food plant once. You win it, you deliver, and then years later the phone rings again.
The client makes snack food and runs a production plant in Calgary. We have replaced their product handling equipment twice and installed a robotic palletising cell. The plant never stopped making product for long in any of it.
Phase one, and a deadline nobody believed
Our first job here ran from January to April 2018. Crew peaked at thirty six people and the contract was worth six hundred thousand dollars. Scope was the replacement of most of the existing product handling line. Old equipment and old platforms came out. New equipment and new platforms went in.
Nobody thought the schedule was achievable. Not the client’s own planning team, and not the company that built the equipment. Both said so before we started.
A food plant is not a warehouse. There is no clean empty floor. You are working above and around production lines, in a space that gets washed down, with ceiling heights and access routes that were never designed for the machine you are carrying. Every lift is tight. Every piece has to come apart to get through a door and go back together on the other side.
We broke the job into work packages, built a risk register, and stayed very close to the client’s engineers and the equipment maker on delivery dates. When a package proved harder than planned we redesigned it rather than pushing the crew through it. Manpower moved to whichever face was ready.
We finished one full day ahead of the deadline that nobody believed.
The president of the company sent a commendation. The plant went further and turned the job into an internal case study of its own, on how to run a project. That is the outcome we are proudest of anywhere in our portfolio, and it is not because of the compliment. It is because a client who documents your sequence and teaches it internally is a client who watched it closely.
Phase two, seven years later
We came back in February 2025 for the rest of the line. Twelve people this time, just under three hundred thousand dollars, and a schedule measured in weeks rather than months.
Phase two carried a constraint phase one did not. By 2025 the plant had been running the equipment we installed in 2018 for seven years, and the new work had to tie into it cleanly. Demolition came first. Old platforms and old equipment out, floor cleared, then the offload and the install.
Working next to your own earlier work is a strange kind of audit. Every shortcut you might have taken in 2018 would have shown up in 2025. Ours held, which is the only reason a return visit like this stays profitable.
We hired extra project management support for this one rather than stretching the existing team. On a short schedule inside a live plant, the coordination is the job.
The robotic cell
Later in 2025 we installed a robotic palletising cell at the same plant. The robot picks finished cases off the line and builds pallets.
A robot install is a different discipline from conveyor work. The mechanical tolerance is tighter, the base frame has to be dead level, and the safety enclosure around it is not optional or adjustable. We fabricated the steel base, set the robot, ran the infeed and outfeed conveyor, and built the guarding and the interlocked gates.
There is a photograph from that job of a digital level reading zero point zero zero degrees on a conveyor frame. It is not a dramatic image. It is the whole standard in one frame.
What eight years at one plant taught us
Live plants pay for sequence, not speed. Every hour the line is down has a cost the client can calculate exactly. A plan that takes a week longer and never stops production is usually the cheaper plan, and food manufacturers are very good at doing that arithmetic themselves.
Redesign the package when it fights you. We changed several work packages mid job in 2018 because the original method was going to take longer or put people in a worse position. Pushing on regardless is how schedules and people both get broken.
Assume you will be back. We build to a standard that survives being looked at seven years later by the same client, because on this account that is exactly what happened, twice.
Keep one crew lead across the phases where you can. The person who set the original line knows where the awkward tie in points are and which door the big pieces fit through. That knowledge is worth more than any drawing set, and it walks out of the building when a contractor rotates their whole team between jobs. We deliberately kept continuity here, and it shortened the 2025 planning stage by weeks.
The plant is still running. We expect the phone again.
Project Photos
