Less than 10 months after being handed a hand-drawn sketch of its building requirements, McCrory Construction delivered a 102,000-sq-ft, $80-million manufacturing facility for Pregis Performance Flexibles, which will produce blown film for the food industry. The project broke ground in January 2021 and wrapped up in September of the same year.

Speed doesn’t come at the cost of quality, though, as the building had to be designed to eliminate any contamination points that included fixtures that could condensate or collect debris, and constructing 80-ft-high, custom-built concrete mezzanines for the blown film to keep the production floor cool. Lines are fed material from eight outdoor silos, additives are stored in vessels off the production floor and fed to lines as needed, while each line can accommodate up to 35 different materials to maximize formulation flexibility.

But the key to the accelerated schedule of less than 10 months from design to construction completion was the urgency applied to the design and the prepurchase of structural steel, which occurred in December 2020. The tight schedule was built around the steel delivery in three sequences, just before supply chain became a major issue in the wake of the pandemic. SteelFab delivered 780 tons of steel and completed erector work three weeks early.

McCrory’s Building Information Modeling (BIM) team was a critical factor to the project’s success, conducting weekly online meetings with major trades and the process engineer after the first six weeks of design. The BIM team was able to reduce rework in the field, to between 5% and 10%, compared to the historical industry standard of 30%, according to the McCrory Construction team. That, too, marks as a critical factor of the expedited schedule and improving the quality of the end product that helped Pregis produce saleable product on Sept. 1, 2021.

Photo courtesy McCrory Construction

The team also navigated the challenges of a tight site constrained by rail and power lines on one side and an existing structure on the other, requiring meticulous planning and coordination for the site’s single access point.

The resulting 102,000-sq-ft production floor is the most technologically advanced extrusion facility in North America, and was profitable in just four months, half of the standard eight-plus months.