Processing Steel Building Orders

STEELBUILDING.COM will process your order in a sequence that ends with the delivery of your steel building in as few as four weeks. As soon as we have your engineering deposit, we assign your order a "job number" and open a file to hold all the related data and documents. We email you an order confirmation that lists your job number, the deposit received, and the balance due on the building.

Your own job record will now appear in your online account, which you may access by clicking the "My Account" tab on any page of our web site and selecting "Existing Jobs." Your job record will contain a copy of your purchase order, and it will list all the important dates as soon as they are available -- the date your drawings are mailed, the ship week and delivery date for the building, and the delivery dates for insulation and overhead doors if applicable.

Whether you created a quote with our online system or we produced a special quote for you, your file is assigned to an experienced detailer who re-engineers your steel building from scratch. When the work is completed, one of our expert checkers goes over every element carefully. The checker notes any mistakes and returns the file to the detailer who makes the corrections. The checker makes a final inspection before signing off on the job. At that point, we are ready to send the bill of materials and shop details to the fabrication plant and the drawings and "shipper" (parts list) to you.

It normally takes us between 7 and 14 working days to process a job and send the drawings. We ship drawings via regular ground service with signature required (optional overnight delivery available). If you have requested stamped drawings, we must first send them to the engineer we retain who is licensed in your state, which will probably delay them another week or so. However, we will ship you an identical set marked not for construction as soon as we have processed your job. Once processed, your "make-and-ship" order will be sent to the plant for scheduling and fabrication. We will not check with you beforehand. Normally, we can post delivery dates for your building in about two weeks of receiving your deposit. Your job could go into fabrication in as few as three weeks from the time you place your order, and after that changes become extremely expensive if not impossible.

We will ship you a set of drawings marked not for construction within 7 to 14 working days of receiving your deposit. Do not submit these to your permit office. Your stamped permit drawings should follow one to two weeks after the first set. We ship drawings via regular ground service with signature required (optional overnight delivery available). We will wait for your written release before sending your job to the plant for scheduling and fabrication (for more information, see the ordering section).

As soon as plant personnel schedule the fabrication of your steel building, they will post its delivery date in your online account. If you have ordered only standard accessories that ship with the building, our system will also notify you of the date by email. If you have added insulation and/or overhead doors to your order, these items will ship separately, but their manufacturers will try to coordinate the schedule with the building delivery. They will post their delivery dates in your account as soon as they assign them. However, our system will wait for all pending dates to be entered before notifying you by email. About a week before delivery, our shipping department will call you to confirm the details.

Once an order is placed and a contract formed, any change in the price or materials requires that the contract be amended with a change order. These are to be avoided whenever possible. Although some companies deliberately build delay into their order process to encourage buyers to make costly changes after committing to a purchase, STEELBUILDING.COM is just the opposite. Our highly-automated fast-track system does not respond well to interruptions. They slow progress, raise costs, and increase the likelihood of errors. Even the simplest change must pass through at least four departments: engineering and drafting, information technology, accounting, and management. Any change to the steel building itself will also involve manufacturing and require that the entire engineering and drafting process be redone. If you cannot avoid a change, you should request it as soon as possible. Every step further along in the process increases the expense, and once fabrication has started changes may become extremely costly.