Playing to win in Lucas Oil Stadium

Hunt Construction Group scores points and beats the clock with effective scheduling and safety practices

by Paul Markgraff

San Francisco 49ers Hall of Fame football coach Bill Walsh is widely recognized as the driving force behind the concept of scripting plays. Walsh would create a list of 15 plays for the beginning of each game in order to force his players to implement the tactics they practiced all week. The script also helped his 49ers focus on the strengths of their offense, rather than rely on potentially flawed and untested strategies.

“Scripting is planning; it’s contingency planning,” Walsh told a New York Times reporter during a 1996 interview. “The fewer decisions to be made during the game, the better. You don’t want to live by your instincts.”

Never truer words spoken.

Scripted plays help good coaches establish a lead and keep it. They’re designed to gain quick yards and move the offense into scoring position. Coaches use them to keep their offense on the field for as long as possible and keep the other team’s offense from scoring until as late as possible. Scripted plays help good teams win.

In construction, as in football, you need a plan. Skilled contract managers face blitzing opponents such as scheduling and safety on a daily basis. The fundamentals of good communication – the blocking and tackling of construction management – can keep a job on time and on budget. Managers who can read a plan’s effectiveness and react accordingly reap the rewards.

Scott Blanchard and Bob May, contract managers with Hunt Construction Group Inc., Indianapolis, have faced these challenges since September 2005. That’s when the Indiana Stadium and Convention Building Authority started building Lucas Oil Stadium, the projected $715 million mixed-used facility designed to house the Indianapolis Colts, national and regional conventions, NCAA basketball and numerous other state and local events. When completed, the stadium will be managed by the Capital Improvement Board of Marion County. Hunt Construction is construction manager on the project, assisted by local firms Smoot Construction and Mezzetta Construction.

“It’s a fast-track building, so when we were digging the hole, we didn’t know what the superstructure was going to be,” says Blanchard. “As with a lot of these jobs, we started before all the land was owned by the state. We had those challenges: trying to close the gaps between the different phases and disciplines of work.”

The $715 million Lucas Oil Stadium will seat about 70,000 fans. It features a unique two-paneled, gabled roof that opens sideline-to-sideline. It also features an operable window on its north end with a 21,472 sq. ft. view of downtown Indianapolis.

New challenges
Fast-track building implies exactly that: starting construction right after groundbreaking and immediately completing productive work. With the 2008 football season looming, a drop-dead completion date of mid-August 2008, and nowhere else for the 2006 World Champion Indianapolis Colts to play, Hunt Construction faced a steep uphill climb back in 2005.

When complete, the stadium will cover 1.8 million square feet on 35 acres. It contains 130,000 cu. yd. of cast-in-place concrete, 16,000 tons of steel, 700 pieces of structural precast concrete, 1,440 pieces of architectural precast and 9,100 pieces of exterior glass.

The stadium’s six levels will seat a maximum of approximately 70,000 fans. Its two-paneled, gabled roof opens sideline-to-sideline on five transverse trusses (a first of its kind in the United States) to expose 176,400 sq. ft. of sky.

“The roof panels are huge,” says May. “They roll on five rails simultaneously, all with power to each rail, so there’s quite a control mechanism in place to make sure they’re all running at the same speed and the roof doesn’t get ahead of itself in one corner or another.”

With a panoramic view of downtown Indianapolis, Lucas Oil Stadium’s movable window opens to 246' wide by 88' tall, creating an open-air feel.

The operable window on the north end of the stadium slides open for a 21,472-sq. ft. view of downtown Indianapolis. The window is comprised of six smaller, movable windows, each 88' tall by 41' wide. It’s the only window of its kind in North America.

“One pair of windows is on one track, with another pair of windows on another track, and a third pair of windows on a third track,” says May. “The mechanisms that operate those panels sit on wheels on railroad tracks, essentially. The wheels have power and controls to guide their movement. They slide open into a stack on one side. It’s a concept kind of like an airplane hangar door.”

To keep this massive, complex project on track, Hunt relied on flexible, accurate scheduling and a tight grip on jobsite safety. Without a flexible schedule for the 33-month project, the 90 interdependent contracts would likely collide, forcing delays and introducing waste into the system. Without an airtight safety plan, the owner could only cringe as insurance premiums skyrocketed and jobsite shutdowns and safety violations brought the project to a screeching halt.

But with the right plans in place, Hunt has avoided that fate. As of early spring, Hunt Construction completed 85 percent of slab on grade, 97 percent of structural precast, 89 percent of architectural precast, 90 percent of exterior glass, and 40 percent of seat installation, resulting in completion of $448.6 million of the total $570 million price tag.

Time doesn’t wait
Scheduling reared its ugly head as a potential stumbling block early in the construction process in numerous ways. Hunt began work on the stadium before the state finished purchasing the required land, which is not unusual for arena-type builds. Initially, Hunt had to resequence some of the starting points on the project because of land acquisition issues.

On top of that, the contractor was required by its steel erection contractor to pay a substantial deposit on two Manitowoc 18000 cranes that were critical to completing 20 critical lifts of between 200,000 lbs. and 230,000 lbs. throughout the project.

“When those cranes showed up, we had to make sure we had something for them to do,” says Blanchard. “We needed to keep them busy, because they are so expensive.”

The physical volume of the facility also caused scheduling problems. With a 260' tall building made of structural steel and concrete, numerous tradespeople are working in a stacked formation, with ironworkers on the roof, steel workers beneath them and concrete workers at the base.

“It changed every day, whether the ironworkers would be up top or not,” says Blanchard. “For safety reasons, we have to clear everyone underneath and keep them under structure and away from harm.”

Overhead work lasted 18 of the 33 months of the schedule. The mechanical and electrical contractors quickly tired of acquiescing to the steel contractors’ overhead priority.

“But they’re not going to get done unless the roof gets on, too,” says Blanchard. “Everyone’s important, but you have to prioritize the people and their roles. With 800 people out there, spending $22 million a month, you need to be sure you’re doing the right thing, or you’re going to get off track very quickly.”

In order to relieve that congestion, Hunt worked with its full-time scheduler and developed plans for staged work throughout the day. During the day, the steel contractors on the roof utilized the cranes. At night, the concrete contractors used the cranes to set the precast seating decks. This method reduced downtime, leaving the cranes idle for only six hours a day.

Hunt also called daily crane coordination meetings to plan the cranes’ movements, making sure they were in the right place for the night shift and configured correctly for the different trades. During those meetings, they also planned the cranes’ movements for the next day.

Hunt’s superintendents acted as real estate brokers on the jobsite. Contractors competed daily for space to complete their work. But due to safety concerns and overlap, only so much space was available from area to area.

“Everyone wants all kinds of room, then more room, but we had to evaluate what room they really needed and make them share the space because we all have to get along,” says Blanchard. “If there was some competing interest, we would make the decision who got what space and what was best for the project.”

Narrow focus
Real estate brokers aside, Hunt needed to maintain a clear view of the big-picture project scope to make sure milestones were set and met and keep everyone driving toward the same goal.

To this end, Hunt’s scheduler kept a master schedule with as many as 25,000 items on it, but it was of little practical use to anyone on the jobsite. So Hunt broke that schedule down into simple bar graphs and subschedules that quantified different contractors’ duties and progress.

For example, the block mason had a total of 800,000 blocks to set in place. That means the contractor needed to complete an average of 600 blocks a day to finish during its allotted time. The engineers on the ground can keep track of statistics like this, where the 25,000-item schedule could not.

“The mason knows that we are keeping track of him,” says Blanchard. “We ask how he did today, and he says 750 blocks. He had a good day. Then the snow comes and he gets 100 blocks completed. He shares his tallies with us and we share them back and we’re both keeping track of how much time he has left to get the job done.”

Hunt adjusts those mini-schedules on a daily or weekly basis, keeping rolling averages so the contractor knows where everyone is relative to the overall schedule, which is updated on a monthly basis.

“The overall schedule will get adjusted as many as 30 times during the project,” says Blanchard. “Within those 30 times, there will be hundreds of activities that will change based on delivery dates and times.”

Safety first
Take a second to zero in on one of those activities. There’s an ironworker sitting atop one of the roof sections, bolting steel into place. This worker accidentally loses his grip on one of the bolts he’s handling and it plummets to the stadium floor 260' below.

“If they drop one of those bolts from up there, and it falls and hits the concrete, it puts a spall in the concrete about 8" across,” says Blanchard.

Safety is top-of-mind for everyone on this jobsite. No one wants a falling iron bolt to literally tear an arm off. From the owner-provided insurance to Hunt’s orientation and badging system, Hunt Construction has emphasized jobsite safety from the start.

Hunt employs two full-time safety superintendents on site. Everyone goes through substance abuse screening and every worker attends a safety orientation before going on the jobsite. Each worker gets a badge with his or her picture, name and company on it.

“All of that is checked at the gate to make sure that someone doesn’t make it onsite who doesn’t know all of the rules and regulations,” says Blanchard. “We can keep track of folks, and if they aren’t behaving, we don’t hesitate to remove them from the job.”

Hunt also uses the badges to keep track of whether people have been through safety orientation. The stadium changes every day. Yesterday there wasn’t a wall there, and today there is.

“On jobs like this, you have to get someone oriented and familiar with the building in a hurry,” says Blanchard. “For accidents that do happen, it’s usually a person’s first or second day out here, when they are unaware of the surroundings.”

The program has been successful. It’s not unusual for workers that started with one company to move to another company and work the jobsite for 20 months.
“They know the rules, the routines, where everything is,” says Blanchard. “That’s one great thing about the system: You get a safe worker out here that enjoys working here and stays through the end.”

Published in the May/June 2008 issue of Contractor Tools and Supplies magazine.

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