How to Automate Tekla PowerFab

Every piece mark in the shop belongs to a building

Tekla PowerFab is Trimble's management software for structural steel fabricators, and it carries a naming history worth knowing. It began as FabSuite, became Tekla EPM after Trimble bought it, and took its current name with the 2023 release, along with the mobile app now called Tekla PowerFab Go.

A fabricator is not really in the steel business. It is in the business of turning a set of engineering drawings into several thousand numbered pieces, each with a mark, a weight, a coating and a place in a sequence, and then getting them onto a truck in the order a crane will want them.

PowerFab is where that is written down: the bid that won the job, the material nested out of stock, the orders to the mill and the service centre, what is racked in the yard, what has been fitted, welded and painted, and which load each piece leaves on.

The approval that releases the shop sits in somebody else's portal

Almost none of the dates that matter are set by the shop.

Shop drawings go to the engineer of record for approval, routed through the general contractor's project system. Nothing gets cut until they come back stamped, and they come back approved, approved as noted, or revise and resubmit, which is a different job entirely. Meanwhile an RFI sits unanswered, a change order is issued against one connection, and the erection sequence is republished because the tower crane moved.

So somebody in the office spends the morning logged into other companies' software. The contractor's project system for submittal status and RFI responses. The mill or the service centre for a rolling date. The galvaniser, to ask when the load that went out Tuesday comes back.

Then PowerFab, to move the shop schedule to match.

Tekla PowerFab

Approvals that arrive on a list Submittal status and RFI responses read off the general contractor's project system each morning, matched to the piece marks that are waiting on them.

Mill and coater dates worth planning around Rolling schedules, service centre ship dates and galvanising turnarounds checked on each supplier's own site, so the shop schedule moves while there is still time.

Bids that do not close unseen Invitations and addenda watched on the boards you bid from, so a project worth estimating is not missed because nobody logged in that week.

Nesting and Production Control reason from the drawings you already have

The fabricator's own half is covered thoroughly, and a shop that has not turned all of it on should do that first.

Estimate prices a bid from the take-off. Nesting runs a material optimisation engine over the list to cut waste and produce cut lists, so only what is needed gets bought. Purchasing turns requisitions into orders and Inventory control keeps the yard honest about what is really racked. Production control plans and tracks the fabrication, Shop floor records progress as it happens with traceability through every workshop step, Shipping plans the loads, and Dashboards report productivity in real time. The Tekla PowerFab Open API and the open interface move data to and from detailing software and shop machinery.

Every one of those runs on marks, quantities and dates that arrived from your own people.

Whether the submittal came back stamped this afternoon, whether the mill rolled the beam, whether the sequence the schedule was built around is still current: those facts belong to the engineer, the mill and the contractor, and they are published on their systems.

Approved as noted can arrive as a worklist, not a surprise

The engineer, the mill, the coater and the contractor set most of the dates on a steel job between them, and each of them posts its decisions where your project manager can already sign in. Once something opens those systems on a schedule, the shop can be planned on what is actually approved.

Submittal logs read on the contractor's project system each morning, so a drawing that came back approved as noted is on a list at seven rather than found on Thursday. RFI responses collected the day they are posted and matched to the piece marks waiting on them.

Mill and service centre orders tracked on the supplier's own site, with a rolling date that slipped flagged against the sequence it feeds. Galvanising and paint vendors watched the same way, because a load out at coating is an operation whether or not the shop treats it as one.

Bid invitations and addenda checked on the boards you actually bid from, so a job worth estimating does not close while nobody was looking. Freight followed to the site gate, so the erector hears about a late load from you first.

An hour of portal-checking buys back a day of shop time

None of that needs a fabricator. It needs somebody to open the same six sites in the same order every morning and note what changed, which is the first thing to slide in a busy month.

WebRun is an AI agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in as you. It opens the contractor's project system, the mill's order page or the galvaniser's account, reads the statuses and dates there and gives them back against the job and the piece marks they belong to.

Because it works the browser rather than an integration, a project system that will never connect to yours is simply another page. Anything going out to a contractor or an erector is drafted and left for a person, since a date you give in this trade is a date you are held to.

The workflows below are already built, and each one names what it opens.