The manufacturer needed seven separate electrical substations upgraded in a portion of the facility where production would need to continue in each of the areas being powered by the separate substations. The original project plans called for installation of conduit for each of the different substation conductors, which would have prolonged the downtime of each substation and phase of work.

Elm was able to design a cable tray system at each substation location that allowed cables to be installed and waiting at the substation, prior to the start of an outage period. In addition, Elm pre-terminated and pre-tested all of the medium voltage cables before completing the upgrades. Both of these steps dramatically reduced the amount of downtime necessary to make the electrical upgrades, and therefore, the customer’s production process remained completely unaffected.

In addition, Elm’s team realized that by performing entire loop changes and switch replacements at once, instead of changing out each of the substations individually, the customer would receive a finished product quicker, and would have a stronger sense of assuredness with the new conductors and switches being online earlier than scheduled. Therefore, Elm opted to change out three, then four substations during two consecutive weekends, in spite of it being lower risk to change each of the seven substations individually.

Thinking creatively paid off big for Elm and the manufacturer in the end. The customer was extremely pleased with the on-time, within budget upgrades that were completed correctly, and Elm exemplified its design/build capabilities to a leading manufacturer.