FabriTec has had a great year of impressive projects that have been awarded to us, like the LA Stadium in Inglewood, CA, and completed construction like the translucent, silver PTFE facade on Allianz Field. With an increase in large projects, one of which reaching over 3 million square feet, more production volume was needed to maintain their high standards for production quality and efficiency.
New space was needed for their in-house steel and fabric fabrication plants. Another reason for the expansion was that FabriTec didn’t have the capacity to handle an excessively heavy product and needed to increase its capacity to handle the weight of a 10-ton crane so they could do “bigger, larger, heavier pieces.” At the beginning of this year, critical moves were made to obtain the space quickly.
Fortunately, a conveniently located distribution warehouse was found less than 500ft down the road from their Dallas office and was swiftly leased to be their new fabric and construction department.
With the building originally being used for electricity distribution, renovations had to be made in order to make it functional for their daily operations. “We rebuilt all the offices, we built a big conference room; redid all the flooring, lighting, heating and air conditioning. Everything was redone,” said FabriTec Structure’s CEO and Chairman, Basil Haymann. “We also took all the demising walls so that we’d have a clear open span area to lay the fabric down.”
The original fabric shop area was expanding from an area that was only about 80 feet wide to a new building with 25,000 square feet of production space. The former area for fabric production has now been converted into additional steel production space, expanding FabriTec’s steel shop from 35,000 to 40,000 square feet.
“In the former fabric shop, we had to put all the overhead cranes, which was a lot of work. And we had to add another 20 weld stations, all electrical. We brought independent power in. We upgraded the lighting, we did everything,” said Haymann.
With nearly double the space, the new fabric plant and other renovations will not only keep FabriTec operating at optimal capacity but is also expected to increase productivity by about 62%. These improvements to the fabric and steel fabrication plants will also further their initiative for superior quality management that was marked at the beginning of this year with FabriTec obtaining ISO 9001:2015 certification.
