McCarl's
Talent Advantage Company
We are a talent advantage company. We value our people, their focus, and their discipline around project delivery excellence. Our clients value our solutions and reward us for our commitment and technical competence.
McCarl's
Talent Advantage Company
We are a talent advantage company. We value our people, their focus, and their discipline around project delivery excellence. Our clients value our solutions and reward us for our commitment and technical competence.
We Understand Your Business
Founded over 70 years ago, McCarl's is a full-service integrated EPC and maintenance leader throughout Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia and the Northeast. We specialize in complex heavy industrial processes and pipe fabrication for the Oil and Gas, Chemical, Power, Steel, Environmental, Heavy Industrial, Manufacturing, Water Treatment, and Cryogenic Processing Industries. Our experience, expertise, and commitment to excellence have earned the trust of our customer/partners. As a company headquartered in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania with an Eastern HQ and Fab shop in Muncy, PA, McCarl's is a home-grown company intimately woven into the community fabric as well as the local labor market. With fabrication shops strategically located near our customers (Beaver Falls, and Muncy, PA), our team of local craft workers and managers understands the importance of being an integrated team. Through consistent performance, we have developed long-lasting relationships with top companies such as BASF, Dupont, NOVA, Mark West/Marathon and Valvoline/Ashland.
Our Core Competencies
Estimating: We have a vision for our work and know what things cost.
Planning: We set the stage for success with detailed execution plans.
Change Management: We deal with dynamic situations proactively and manage risk by engaging our client AND all our people.
We deliver for our customers by practicing our Core Competencies. Through consistent performance, we have developed long-lasting relationships with top companies in the Tri-State region including Dupont, BASF, NOVA, MarkWest/Marathon, and Valvoline/Ashland.
We Have the People to Perform the Work
McCarl's is a Talent-Advantage model company. Simply put, McCarl's attracts and retains the best employees.
By partnering with McCarl's, our clients get access to consistent, top talent labor. Not all union craft labor is created equal, and it takes an inside-man to navigate the waters of the union halls. Our General Superintendent, Bruce Bennett, received a national award for the work he managed at the Hopedale Fractionation plant. He is a model of success for our talent-advantage company and is McCarl's Lead Craft Superintendent. He is charged with picking the top-talent from the union halls and aligning our craft workforce by bringing best practices to our clients.
McCarl's is one of the largest employers of union pipefitters in the Tri-State area, and our relationships with the unions are second to none. People WANT to work at McCarl's, and our clients RARELY experience a labor shortage of talented people.
Our craft supervision knows what employees are on a job, before they arrive on site. They understand each person's strengths and weaknesses as well as what work best suits their unique talent set.
Safety
At McCarl’s, safety is not a “priority”, because priorities change. Safety is the bedrock of our foundation. Safety is our culture. It is ingrained in our DNA. Our Target Zero program is the driver behind our industry-low incident rates.
Our commitment to safety maintains our client’s reputations, protects our workers, and saves our client’s time and money. Our safety culture is not just a generic message and some talking points. We believe the numbers speak for themselves.
On-Time
McCarl’s has a reputation for completing work on schedule. We achieve this by focusing on three core areas: Local Presence, Fabrication Facilities, and Planning.
Local Presence
McCarl’s is actively working on jobs throughout the tri-state area. Most of the time, job sites are located within minutes of one another, giving us the ability to float employees between them. As work ebbs and flows, craft and management can float in-and-out of the site. This rotation ensures our clients have the labor they need while avoiding overtime. These nearby job sites also help when our clients want us to remain on-call. Additionally, most of our project managers and steady craft employees live within an hour of their job sites, making them able to quickly respond to our client’s needs.
Fabrication Facilities
McCarl’s operates three fabrication facilities in the heart of the tri-state region. Our Beaver Falls fab shop, a 60,000+ square foot facility, handles the bulk of our Western work. Our 60,000 ft2 Eastern HQ fab shop in Lycoming County, PA allows us to maintain a local presence to support our customers. These fabrication shops allow us to identify constructability issues and leverage pre-fabrications to shorten turnaround times. McCarl’s has realized overnight turnarounds to get our client’s operations back online in half the time that a field fabrication replacement would require. The fabrication shops can be thought of as surge tanks: as workload in the field increases, much of the work can be shifted into the shop to alleviate the load at the job site. During construction or maintenance emergencies, our shops minimize our client’s downtime by prioritizing their work. These fab shops are a game changer that allow us to maintain our schedule and complete the job on time.
Meticulous Planning
At McCarl’s, we carefully plan our work. For productivity tracking, McCarl’s uses Viewpoint as the integrated enterprise software package allowing us to link cost structures, purchase orders, vendor tracking, bid logging and the submittal/transmittal process. An example of a best practice that has shown success at other sites is building subassemblies. We plan ahead and prefabricate piping whenever possible for planned outages (or other work) prior to on-site installation. When planned correctly, this can avoid costly weekend overtime. Planning for contingencies are the most effective ways of staying on schedule and eliminating unnecessary overtime. We use our BIM scanning technologies to make exact replacements which minimize field/position. This technology increases our ability to plan ahead and leverage the experience of our craft supervisors.
Advanced Technology
Though in business for over 70 years, McCarl’s continuously invests and uses the latest advanced technology tools and techniques. Unlike our competitors, our tech is union-craft-lead. You won’t see the IT guy walking around location. Instead, it is our craft labor that uses field tablets, smartphones, robotics, drones and digital tools such as BlueBeam, Navisworks, Bentley Apps, and Trimble Total Stations.
Bluebeam
In addition to cost tracking, McCarl’s uses field tablets to create weld maps. This allows QC inspectors to log weld data as soon as the weld inspection is completed. The tablets contain all the drawings and building models, keeping the information at the field personnel’s fingertips.
The video-link below was made with Bluebeam to showcase our workflow innovation:
McCarl's Bluebeam Workflow Innovation
BIM (Building Information Modeling)
McCarl’s leverages Building Information Modeling (BIM) technology to increase productivity. We’ve heavily invested in three-dimensional (3D) laser scanning within existing facilities to help our client partners. Along with the scanning equipment, McCarl’s has four robotic Trimble Total Stations that takes information from owner models/.dwg files and allows for highly accurate layouts of new construction. At a recent job, McCarl’s was experiencing a bottleneck in the process for the installation of piping and hangers. Using the .dwg file from the Engineering Company, McCarl’s was able to decouple the hanger installation and pipe installation. We saw a 20% improvement in the installation factors for hangers and piping because instead of installing temporary rigging to hold the pipe then bringing the hanger to the pipe, the hangers were installed, and the pipe set on it.
NDE (Non-Destruction Evaluation)
We work with NDE technology suppliers to provide nondestructive inspection of existing vessels and piping, without having to remove insulation. To increase efficiency during the NDE process, McCarl’s has successfully used Phased Array instead of Radiography at our clients’ plants (including MarkWest, Williams, and AEP). This allows the evaluation to occur while craft remains in the vicinity, removing the necessity of performing the tests during a back shift. The results from the NDE are digitally storage and accessible remotely.
Bluetooth-enabled Wireless Torque Wrenches
We are piloting Bluetooth-enabled, wireless torque wrench technology. These wrenches communicate directly to our field tablets and allow craft to improve bolt tightening consistency, efficiency, and productivity. This new technology ensures that each flange bolt is optimally tightened to prevent leaks and damage, as well as automatically logging the bolt-up and integrating it into the QC turnover package.
Drone and Robots
We avoid using rope access specialists whenever possible. Many hard-to-reach areas that were only reachable by a rope technician, are now readily accessible using video-enabled drones. Drones avoid the cost and safety hazards associated with rope access specialists, erecting scaffolding, scissor lifts, and crane operations. The drone video is available via our onsite tablets and the high definition video is retained for further examination. The drones allow for qualitative analysis of structural coatings and integrity of insulation on vessels and piping. As this technology advances, McCarl’s will partner with NDE firms to augment our asset management capabilities for our client partners. We are also looking into the use of robots that can access vertical surfaces to provide ultrasonic thickness readings, work that has historically been performed by rope access professionals.
Performance Alignment
Value, not price, is the driving factor behind our client’s bottom line. The seemingly “cheaper” contractor ends up costing the client considerably more in change orders, incompetency, overtime, work stoppages, safety incidents, and schedule setbacks. We are not here to offer contract “tripwires” or fancy language that works in our favor. We believe in transparency and open books. We are confident in our abilities to provide total job satisfaction to our clients. We are solely interested in a win-win situation and are willing to put our money where our mouth is. Our profits are tied to performance via our critical success factors and are self-funded by our continuous improvement efforts and accomplishments.
Risk. "Caring for People and Target Zero" include achieving a zero recordable-incident rate. This is our ultimate measure of success. IN addition, we will include leading indicators that further demonstrate full safety engagement from all our people.
Quality. Job-specific, client-driven quailty metrics define this critical success factor. Examples include a zero-weld defect rate objective or making all piping connection without having to refab. We will work together to define objectives that correlate with current activity for a respective period.
Productivity. We strive to maximize uptime and minimize downtime. We plan our work and develop schedules around work packages with the client’s team.
Financial. Delivering our work cost-effectively and efficiently will be measured against budgets. We develop plans and budgets for work planned and executed on a quarterly basis.
Value Added. We will implement a McCarl’s Value Added program customized for the site, that engages all people on location. Quantifiable Client-Satisfaction surveys will be one performance basis for this factor.