When the Design Model Is the First Risk to Manage
Silvan Sanayi A.Ş., one of Turkey's most established steel casting companies, committed to a major greenfield investment: a 60,000 m² foundry and machining complex in Dilovası, Kocaeli, designed to process 50-ton large-part castings for global clients in cement, mining, rail, and heavy industry. The facility would include production buildings, administrative facilities, crane systems, MEP infrastructure, and specialized casting yard operations, all delivered across a compressed industrial schedule with multiple specialist contractors working in parallel.
Delivering a world-class foundry requires precise coordination across five simultaneous building disciplines: steel structure, concrete, MEP, electrical, and crane systems, each with its own contractor and schedule dependencies. The design model delivered by the architectural team contained over 35 critical BIM modeling errors including walls passing through structural columns, doors embedded in floor slabs, curtain walls incorrectly categorized, and inclined glazing connections entirely absent. Had these errors reached the site undetected, they would have produced structural clashes, quantity takeoff failures, and costly rework. Additionally, ground conditions required a specialized jet grout operation requiring its own cost and quantity tracking.
When the design model that is supposed to govern construction is itself unreliable, and when five specialist contractors are working in parallel on a 40,000 m² industrial footprint, how does the Owner retain control of quality, schedule, and cost before the damage becomes irreversible?
xPM served as Owner's Project Management & Integration Partner, authoring the BIM Specification that all contractors were contractually required to follow, conducting a pre-construction model audit that identified and documented over 35 critical errors, and operating a 5-group monthly progress reporting system tracking every discipline, building, contractor, and crane group against the Master Plan V01 baseline.
