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Case Studies
Eclipse Solutions Empower Client Challenges
Chicago Tube and Iron, Inc.
Founded in 1914, CT&I is one of the largest steel service centers in the United States with eleven subsidiaries throughout the Midwest. With over 1.2 million square feet of warehouse, storage, and processing space, CT&I houses over 30,000 line items of inventory.
Eclipse created an application for CT&I’s bending and fabrication plants as their all-encompassing system for estimation, design, production, and project management.
Estimating
 The estimation and manufacture of utility boiler up-fits can be a complicated and time-consuming process. Until now, CT&I’s estimators had to manually count and calculate thousands of pieces of material and production operations. Quotations in this industry require quick turn around and what would seem a miniscule inaccuracy on one labor function or component is greatly magnified when carried through the entire project scope.
The estimating module has increased the speed, accuracy, and level of detail of this process. Definition of the project scope is done through a CAD or menu-driven user-interface where every component CT&I requires to define the design is specified. Both methods use common forms, therefore specialized training is not necessary. Labor and material is updated real-time as the scope is defined, and scheduling data is automatically transferred to Microsoft® Project™ for resource leveling.
Engineering
 Fabrication drawings are created using the CAD interface (identical to estimating) providing for consistency and automatic adherence to company standards. The functionality is extensive and to name just a few of the features; quick tube routing and property specification, data sources that hold default and allowable ranges to enforce best practice and minimize errors, hardware placement, interference checking, automatic bend generation with checks on company standards, and tooling availability.
Production
One of CT&I’s goals was to replace all paper in the company, where practical. Production is an area where significant improvement was realized by replacing manually-generated lists such as bend sheets, weld log for pressure welds, material-summary sheets, cut-and-bevel sheets, etc.
Quality Control
 To be successful in the utility industry requires impeccable quality. The application provides the means for CT&I to deliver the best possible product by incorporating all their Q.C. documentation, including the Traveler and Inspection Plan.
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