Archive: Oct 2020

Why Use a Service Center?

Structural steel is bulky, heavy, and difficult to transport. Rather than paying exorbitant transportation costs to move it from a centralized facility, a strategically located regional service center mitigates long-term shipping costs and provide structural steel solutions faster and more efficiently. Beyond simple cost reduction, however, a service center acts a resource for builders in the region.

At Infra-Metals Co., we operate service centers in New England, the Mid-Atlantic, Mid-West, South-West and Florida to provide customers with regionalized market trend information, sales, and service. This helps our clients to control project costs and make informed decisions.

Our Service Centers

As one of the largest structural steel service center networks in the United States, Infra-Metals offers a wide variety of carbon structural steel products. Our product catalog includes:

  • Structural beams and tubing
  • Angles
  • Channel and miscellaneous
  • Flats
  • Rounds
  • Squares
  • Plate and sheet products
  • Pipe
  • Expanded metal

As a full-scale service center, we also provide the following processing capabilities:

  • Blast and prime
  • Cambering
  • Drilling
  • Milling
  • Plate burning and Forming
  • Saw cutting
  • T-splitting

Using a service center offers an expansive range of benefits, including:

  • Specific order volumes. Purchasing direct from a steel mill typically requires buying in pre-set bulk amounts rather than ordering exactly what is needed. This can significantly drive up the cost of a project and result in leftover structural steel materials after completion.
  • Our service centers monitor local trends and regional producers, so we know exactly what is available at any given time. We also stock popular items to ensure they are available when needed, not to mention the often hard to find sizes.
  • One-stop shopping. A service center acts as a centralized source for all structural steel needs, simplifying vendor management by eliminating the need to identify and maintain relationships with multiple steel producers.
  • Our service centers only work with reliable and reputable suppliers, ensuring that builders, contractors, and fabricators get only the best quality products.
  • Short lead times. Orders from a service center are not as dependent on mill production schedules, which means deliveries arrive more quickly. This enables projects to stay on schedule.
  • Simplified logistics. The service center handles all logistics and delivery arrangements, simplifying expedited orders, Just-in-Time delivery, and other logistical challenges.
  • Cost transparency. The service center prices are based on what they paid the mill for the inventory, so all costs are fixed up front rather than being faced on future production variables.
  • Lower storage costs. By purchasing product in exact quantities for delivery in sequence or as needed, buyers don’t need to secure extra storage space for structural steel materials.
  • Reduced scrap. When the service center cuts pieces to prescribed sizes and lengths, the end customer has significantly less responsibility in terms of scrap and waste disposal.

Convenient Structural Steel Procurement With Infra-Metals

At Infra-Metals, we have been in business for more than 30 years and we employ some of the most experienced sales staff in the industry. We offer an expansive and diverse inventory of shapes and sizes, and we can handle all pre-processing to minimize the work fabricators need to do on their own site. We sell the solutions you need in exact quantities, removing the need for extra storage space or bulk purchases. As regional suppliers, we can easily support Just-in-Time methodologies and other Lean inventory strategies.

To see how our structural steel service centers can support your operation, please contact us today.