Ready, set, assemble!

Think of prefab as a click-together solution, the construction industry equivalent of flat-pack furniture on a factory-sized scale. GF engineers steer the design process from beginning to end to make sure the pieces – known as pipe spools, modules, or racks – fit in shipping containers, trucks, crates and pallets, and can be assembled at their destination. GF fabrication shops around the world assemble and weld the piping systems for an entire building in pieces that can be shipped locally, regionally and worldwide, and easily put together on a building site.

That doesn’t mean it’s easy. Engineers have to design a factory’s worth of piping systems, then make sure they can be built in shippable-sized chunks. Once loaded into containers and trucks, the components have to withstand the jolts and bumps of the shipping process itself, something James likens to “a 100-kilometer earthquake.”

For customers, the advantages are huge. Labor costs on site are reduced, and precision tasks like welding pipes can be done by experts on a factory floor, far from the dust and noise of an active construction site. It’s also more sustainable, because packaging for individual pipes can be eliminated or recycled at the fabrication shop and doesn’t get shipped to the job site.

Certain kinds of project, meanwhile, benefit most from a prefab approach. “Standardization is key,” James says. “If engineering work can be duplicated from project to project, or modified slightly to work in a new building, a small team of engineers can have a huge impact on costs.” Fortunately, “most buildings look very similar now.”

Some industries take that to an extreme. Semiconductor factories and data centers, for example, are nearly identical no matter where in the world they are built. “That really lends itself to what we do,” James says. On a recent data center project in Ireland, the first building pipework was supplied as loose product and took the local contractor six months to install. The second project utilized prefabricated pipe sticks and spools, and on the third the team designed and built the pipework racks and modules within six weeks.

The outlook is good. In the last five years alone, GF has opened five new fabrication centers, for a total of 16 fabrication shops around the world. Some of them have developed specialties based on local market demand: GF’s facility in Spain, for example, focuses on water treatment installations, while the shop in Irvine, California is oriented towards outfitting new-build microchip plants for Intel and others with the complex piping needed for semiconductor manufacturing.

The division has seen double-digit growth over the last five years. In the Asian market, where lower labor costs have traditionally kept demand for prefabrication approaches low, GF has achieved growth by pushing the engineering and quality-control aspect. “All this revenue generation is supported by a small team of engineers and fab shop employees,” James says. “The fabricators are the unsung heroes – they turn whatever we think is a good idea into reality.”