2019 Metal Construction Hall of Fame
Beginning in the early 1980s, new software implementations established the groundwork for the development of greater customization in the metal building industry, and a key figure in that effort was Robert D. Carr, PE.
The Dawn of an Age
After Carr graduated from Kansas State University in the late 1970s with a degree in structural engineering, he took a job with Star Building Systems as a design engineer, practicing his trade as an engineer and learning the ropes of the pre-engineered metal building world. At that time, the nascent software industry hadn’t impacted the metal building industry much at all. Everything from orders to estimating to engineering was still handled on paper.
That started to change in 1980. Carr was frustrated. “We were complaining a lot because all the analysis programs had their own separate entry forms, and we were duplicating data,” he says. “It would be nice to have a database of what a building looked like, and use that to feed all the design programs.” Called BPS, it was the first program he wrote for Star.
It would be nice to have a database of what a building looked like and use that to feed all the design programs.
Robert D. Carr, PE, Robertson-Ceco Corp.
After that was in place, Star recognized the opportunity to price buildings once it had all the structural members in a database. So Carr put together some pricing programs. By that point, the company had a design pricing program, and understood the value of it would be even greater if it could get it in the hands of its builders. When the personal computer came along, they had a method to put that process in the hands of the contractor. Using Tandy TRS 80 Model II personal computers, Star rolled out a pricing program to all its dealers that allowed them to estimate and submit pricing electronically, rather than by individual forms.
Converting the program from the mainframe computer to the personal computer meant changing the language from Fortran to Basic. Carr had learned general programming concepts while serving as the basketball manager in high school. “I got tired of doing the stats for the team manually, so I wrote a program on the calculator in the computer lab in high school.” In college, he picked up Fortran, but it was while he worked at Star and to make the translation to the TRS 80 Model II, he had to learn BASIC.
That programming bug followed him to Star. “I wrote a program on an HP 65 calculator that allowed me to put in the length and the load, and it would give me the moments and shears and reaction. It was me doing that just because I was lazy and wanted to get things done quicker.” That caught the attention of his supervisor, and when Star came out with the standing seam Star Shield roof panel and needed a modification to the analysis program, Carr made the modification to the Fortran program to support a revised bracing system.
A Move to Complexity
Those initial programs in the early ‘80s were simple compared to the much more complex programs Carr and his team developed in the early ‘90s. After Star merged with Robertson Building Systems and Ceco Metal Building Systems and became known as Robertson-Ceco Corp. (RCC), the company invested heavily in a new program called Design++ from Design Power, which aimed to take complex manufacturing processes and simplify them. Design Power founder and CEO, Tapio Karras says of Carr and his team introducing knowledge-based engineering (KBE) to the metal building industry, “It was a seminal event. We provided a method to capture the design intent, and all of a sudden, you have a software application that applies the knowledge of the most experienced engineers.”
Design was no longer based on rules of thumb or design rules, but on a database founded on the best principles of the experts. The new program, called XDS, used half the code and automated 90 percent of the product, and could support any shape of building. It allowed RCC to double sales while increasing the drafting staff only 20 percent. “The bottom line,” says Carr, “is that instead of taking six months to detail a building, we were able to detail it in a couple of days, and do it much more accurately and with a lot less human error.”
Roger Burlingame is the retired president of Ceco and was responsible for bringing in Design Power as a partner. Speaking of the initial pricing systems, he says, “[Carr] was integral to setting that up, and he saw much greater potential for bigger and better things.” The bigger and better turned out to be XDS, which was, according to Burlingame, “one of the most expensive projects ever undertaken at RCC.”
“One of the things that caught my attention,” he says, “was that we had all these competitors and we had to figure out how to differentiate ourselves. When you get a purlin out in the field, you can’t tell the difference. When you can produce a building faster and make fewer mistakes, that translates into something you can use.”
When NCI Corp. purchased RCC, a major factor in the acquisition was the XDS system that raised the value of the company and established RCC as a technological leader, driven in large part by Carr’s devotion to finding easier and less complicated ways to handle complex tasks.
