Q&A with Sandia National Labs’ Facilities Team

By Scott Blair

Southwest Contractor sat down with Sandia’s facility team, including Mike Quinlan, senior manager of facilities, design and construction projects; Bill Jenkins, senior manager of MESA project management; and Isreal Martinez, manager of infrastructure engineering.

MESA has been one of Sandia’s most successful projects, coming in under budget and being competed three years ahead of schedule. The MESA MicroFab building, pictured here, was recently LEED certified. Photo courtesy Sandia National Labs

Southwest Contractor: How will the complex transformation initiative and national budget struggles (mentioned in the adjacent story) affect Sandia’s facility development?

Mike Quinlan: If you had asked five years ago, we probably would have been able to list six or seven projects on the horizon. There’s a lot more uncertainty in what the future will bring in the current planning horizon. With the national security mission of the laboratories and the advantage it gives this country in science technology leadership, there will be a place for these laboratories. It’s safe to say there will be work, but what the specific projects are is a lot hazier.

SWC: Several projects have been built at Sandia using LEED principles. Will this continue?

MQ: Yes. Fundamentally it’s not only important for all Sandians and anyone at the DOE to be on the leading edge of this, but there are some very aggressive goals that Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman set out for reduction of energy usage. We’ve done a lot of energy reduction projects over the years [40% reduction from 1985 baseline] but some of the new goals are very hard to achieve - 30% reduction over 10 years. It’s possible, but it requires some really innovative approaches.

Isreal Martinez: We are trying to achieve that goal by retro-commissioning our older building systems. We are seeing a lot of efficiencies in that.

SWC: Are you exploring Building Information Modeling and alternative delivery methods?

MQ: We are very excited by BIM technology. We believe that it will significantly improve not only the quality and cost of the buildings we produce, but significantly reduce the number of change orders and the potential for win-lose relationships on construction projects. We do not want to be on the bleeding edge but at the same time we are evaluating it to see where it can be utilized on specific buildings.

We’ve been pretty successful with design-build on low-complexity office-like buildings. We’ve had less success on lab/office buildings. When you are making a commitment to design-build you really need to back away and leave more of the job up to the designer and the builder to get the maximum benefit.

Bill Jenkins: Most of our projects out here are one of a kind, whether we are putting in a particle beam accelerator or building a special centrifuge testing facility. So with that kind of learning curve, traditional design-bid-build seems to work better for us right now in the industry.

MQ: We learned the hard way that any kind of win-lose contracting strategy ends up as lose-lose in the end, so we try to create longer term five-year partnership contracts with a pool of firms that are selected based upon best value and try to create an ongoing working relationship.

SWC: The MESA project has won several awards, including a DOE award for project excellence. How was this achieved?

BJ: The overall completion is forecasted to be this summer, about 3 years ahead of what the baseline was. The overall cost savings were about $45 million, so we are very proud of that. It was achieved with strong executive support through our management system, strong project management fundamentals and an outstanding team made up of experts in their fields.

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