Caterpillar Inc. Breaks Ground on New Manufacturing Facility

Caterpillar Inc., a Gray Construction customer, broke ground on a new 850,000 s.f. state-of-the-art  LEED Certified manufacturing facility in Winston-Salem, N.C. on November 12, 2010. The new facility will be used for the machining, assembly, test and painting of axle assemblies for large mining machines.

Gray Construction, ranked 6th among U.S. Top Manufacturing Contractors, has responsibility for the oversight of the manufacturing plant construction for the Caterpillar facility and anticipates that many of the jobs created by the construction project will come largely from North Carolina-based companies. The first local company added to the Gray team is Cavanaugh & Associates, a Winston-Salem based site development firm.

If you have manufacturing plant construction needs, please contact Phil Seale, Vice President, Manufacturing Market, at pseale@gray.com.  If you would like more information on the Caterpillar Project, please contact David Florence, Director, Pre-Construction Services, at dflorence@gray.com .

Please see below for an article that appeared in the Winston-Salem Journal website on November 12, 2010.

Caterpillar Era Under Way in Winston-Salem

By Richard Craver

The Caterpillar Inc. era in Forsyth County began today with a groundbreaking ceremony for the 850,000-square-foot plant off Temple School Road in Winston-Salem.

Gov, Bev Perdue, along with company officials and local and state dignitaries, touted the economic effect of the $426 million plant. She bragged that North Carolina would gain traction globally with Caterpillar here because of the company’s reputation.

Caterpillar is projected to have 392 full-time and 118 contract workers at its peak production capacity.

Gray Construction, the general contractor for the plant, which will make lower power trains, has said it plans to hire as many local companies as feasible to help during construction.

Potential subcontractors, suppliers and vendors will be judged on five key criteria, said Jill Wilson, the vice president of communications and marketing for the Lexington, Ky., company.

Those are: their most competitive price; the complete scope of their work and experience; references; safety record; and financial performance and stability, she said.

Gray has selected Cavanaugh & Associates of Winston-Salem to help with the site development.

“The award of other packages will start within the next 30 to 45 days and will be phased throughout the construction process,”

Wilson said. Wilson said that the grading subcontractor will begin work next week.

The main reason why Caterpillar is building the plant here is to help ease a customer backlog more than a year deep through new-generation machinery.

That backlog, along with surging global need for raw materials, has convinced Caterpillar to increase production capacity for the mining trucks by as much as 40 percent by 2014.

That’s why Caterpillar wants to start production by the end of 2011 rather than the first quarter of 2012 it projected when announcing plans for the plant on July 30.

“The need for this plant is customer driven, market driven,” said Hans Haefeli, the company’s vice president of advanced components and systems division. “We’re pretty much booked solid for all of 2011. If we were to stop producing those trucks, it would have a huge impact globally.”

“We just know that if we have the capacity, we could sell a lot more off-highway trucks. But we can’t do that without the components. So without the work we’re going to be doing in North Carolina that cycle could come to an end,” he said.