To boost production of their most profitable vehicles, General Motors launched the single largest building program in their history to modernize and expand several of their North American manufacturing facilities. Faced with an extremely aggressive schedule, they opted to run four major projects concurrently using the same design-build team consisting of Ghafari and general contractor Barton Malow.
The program encompassed over five million SF of body shop additions at four GM plants: Flint, Michigan; Fort Wayne, Indiana; Arlington, Texas; and Silao, Mexico. We developed a delivery strategy – a 3D-enabled, lean-inspired, co-located design-build process – that enabled us to stay on track with the program’s aggressive timeline.
As the design arm of the design-build team, we translated GM’s process requirements for each project into building layouts and footprints that fit well in the context of each site and its respective circulation needs. Construction was staged so as not to interfere with ongoing plant operations.
